The Connected Car

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Yet for all these innovations, the electric car's hardware will not really be where the action is. The Volt's most important new component will be a huge, evolving chunk of software, built up from federated sources, governing what Weber calls the car's "dialogue with the driver." Managing the cloud of information running in the car's digital circuits -- balancing the power for acceleration against the duration of charge, say, or locating traffic-free routes to inexpensive charging stations -- will be the Holy Grail. Posawatz anticipates the "connected car," beginning with an overarching operating system that monitors and communicates the car's charging needs, component faults, position, etc., to various service providers while simultaneously networking drivers to the Web. "Our car -- but I'm sure all electric cars -- will aim to create a seamless experience for the driver as he or she moves from the office or home to the road," says Posawatz. "We want charging, music, phone, GPS, and so forth to all appear in a kind of dynamic cockpit. The driver shouldn't have to fuss with the telecommunications platforms that provide the integration."

Seamlessness will require new communications standards. One, provisionally called SAE J2847, will shape communication between cars and the grid. Another, Smart Energy Profile, or SEP 2.0, will guide an application layer managing the efficiency, usage, and price of power. "We are focusing on the car and building in the capacity to roll up charging data, which can be placed at the door of the power company," Posawatz says. But GM is not committing to any communications standard just yet -- and for good reason. Volts are being designed to nest in GM's proprietary, satellite-based telecommunications platform, OnStar, which may prove GM's most underleveraged asset -- indeed, the company's chance to create a bundled operating and telecommunications system. OnStar already handles onboard monitoring of critical diagnostic codes and sends out 3.5 million e-mails a month to customers about the performance of their components. It responds to 2,000 collisions a month.

"We have 5.5 million subscribers already," OnStar's president, Walt Dorfstatter, tells me, "and we are about to establish a lab dedicated to vehicle connectivity, anticipating the Volt's rollout. Working with other OEMs to put some of our technology on their vehicles is still a definite possibility for us. OnStar is a proprietary technology, but when proprietary becomes prevalent enough, it becomes the de facto standard."

THE KILLER APP FOR THE SMART GRID

All of which portends the biggest, most contentious business space on the horizon, and for the widest array of start-ups: load distribution on the grid. Most important will be companies helping electric utilities digest what OnStar-like platforms place "at the door" and also help them route electricity from renewable sources back into individual cars. Think of the switching infrastructure that enables us to download a program from an "available" server. Something like this capability will have to be built in to the electric grid.

The most conspicuous start-up by far in this expanding space is GridPoint of Arlington, Virginia. The company has raised more than $220 million, with major investments from Goldman Sachs, among others. (GridPoint has just named Posawatz to its advisory board, which already includes networking guru Esther Dyson and energy expert Daniel Yergin.) GridPoint is working with a number of partners to build the nation's first smart grid, in Boulder, Colorado, a $100 million project. Its near-term ambition, according to its CEO, Peter L. Corsell, is to give utilities the means to aggregate and manage a network of distributed energy resources: controlling load, storing energy, and producing power. "There are perhaps 100 million electrical meters in this country," Corsell says. "We are working with companies that account for 40 million."

At the same time, GridPoint is in discussions with virtually all automotive companies with an electric car in the pipeline. When he dreams out loud, Corsell sees a GridPoint component loaded onto every electric car, the way every laptop contains a signal processor. "In order to balance the load of an electric utility -- predict load, shift the load out of peak periods, shape the load by integrating renewable energy, and so forth -- it would be ideal to have our software baked into the electric cars themselves, so that what gets reported from aggregations of cars will come to utilities in a format that integrates with how the grid is managed. The savings for consumers are not at all trivial when the software allows for real-time, dynamic balancing on the grid. The benchmark equivalent to a gallon of gas during peak hours is somewhere between 60 cents and a dollar. The cost from renewable in the middle of the night is more like 20 cents." Posawatz, for his part, sees a natural division of labor: "We see companies like GridPoint managing what utilities do with data behind the door, providing back to our drivers the charging, billing, and other services that will maximize the cost effectiveness and environment benefit of owning an electric vehicle."

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