The Connected Car

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Michael Sugrue

FILL'ER UP Richard Lowenthal of Coulomb Technologies with a device destined to become familiar: a public charging station. Business is doubling quarter to quarter.

Roy Ritchie

THE CELLULAR LEVEL Ann Marie Sastry of Sakti3, a Michigan battery maker. Her goal is to make a battery pack that is half the weight and half the cost of the Volt's.

Big power companies like Duke Energy and Southern California Edison are hardly complacent in the face of this danger. But Mike Rowand, Duke Energy's director of advanced customer technology, admits his company's answer is a work in progress. If every American home had a Volt, he says, total power usage in the country would increase only about 10 percent. But what's crucial is load distribution: where and in what order the cars' battery packs are recharged -- and from just where the power is taken. The maximum environmental benefits of these cars are realized only when they are charged with power taken during off-peak hours and from renewable sources -- for example, in the wee hours of the morning from hydroelectric plants in Quebec or the Tennessee Valley.

Cars can be made smart enough for this. Even first-generation electric vehicles will have the capacity to tell the grid to fill their batteries immediately or, say, after midnight; eventually, they will be able to sync to your schedule -- stay at home tonight, PTA meeting tomorrow. The question is, Can the power grid become smart enough in turn to syndicate demand from millions of electric cars and then transmit power back down to individual vehicles from available renewable sources? America has more than 3,200 electric utilities, relatively few of them with the resources of Duke.

Actually, here is where the dots connect and the news turns good. For the technical challenge of greening electric cars means entering a commercial landscape that mirrors the transformative industries of the 1980s and '90s: computers and software, switching and networking, consumer electronics converging with cellular technology. This landscape is full of start-ups and medium-size supplier businesses that play to American strengths: entrepreneurship, originality, comfort with the virtual. We ought to stop thinking about the auto industry as a handful of great manufacturing companies superintending large, dependent suppliers -- or, for that matter, cars as standalone objects. Rather, the electric car will be a kind of ultimate mobile device, produced in expanding networks for expanding networks; a piece of hardware manufactured by a burgeoning supplier grid and nested in an information grid interlacing the electrical grid. Building out these three networks will be more profitable, and a greater engine of economic growth, than building the cars themselves.

There's a lesson here for government, whose pedestrian duty, as Adam Smith wrote, is to "facilitate commerce in general." To facilitate the auto industry in particular, the federal government will need to anticipate a new division of labor among car companies, electric utilities, and, crucially, the layer of new companies that will tie the former two together. Smartening the grid will mean, collaterally, transforming energy infrastructure in virtually every neighborhood; as President Obama never tires of reminding us, green energy means businesses creating jobs here, not sending them overseas. So governments at all levels must get over what once seemed a clear distinction between manufacturing and information services, or automotive jobs and construction jobs. They must seek to expand employment less by helping original-equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, to grow and more by encouraging small software and components suppliers to launch.

Posawatz, who himself runs a kind of start-up within GM, puts the matter eagerly, if a little cryptically: "Our urgent challenge is to become the leading integrator of the sustainable transportation-energy ecosystem -- to control the intellectual property governing the integration of the battery to the car and the car to the grid." Translation: if GM plays its cards right, it could well incubate, and own, the new industry's crucial operating and telecommunications standards, the anchors for thousands of smaller technology companies supporting the electric car's components, information, and entertainment and charging needs. For his part, Duke's Rowand is sure that 10 years from now the dominant players in this new automotive ecosystem will be companies we have not yet heard of.

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