What sounds like an odd-couple fit - Microsoft? manage off-hours home electrical usage? - actually makes sense because of Microsoft Hohm, a year-old Internet service helping consumers monitor all kinds of home energy usage. In the case of electric cars, time-shifting the recharge to late at night is important because recharging effectively a home's daytime energy usage. The alliance also makes sense because the ongoing Ford-Microsoft Sync alliance gave Ford the industry's best affordable Bluetooth-and-iPod solution with more than 2 million Sync cars shipped to date. Ford CEO Alan Mulally announced the partnership Wednesday at the opening day of the New York International Auto Show. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took part in the press conference via a remote video feed from Redmond. "For Ford," Mulally said, "this is a needed step in the development of the infrastructure that will make electric vehicles viable."Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
When Ford's first all-electric car, the Ford Focus Electric, ships in 2011, the recharging system will be remotely managed by Microsoft.
What sounds like an odd-couple fit - Microsoft? manage off-hours home electrical usage? - actually makes sense because of Microsoft Hohm, a year-old Internet service helping consumers monitor all kinds of home energy usage. In the case of electric cars, time-shifting the recharge to late at night is important because recharging effectively a home's daytime energy usage.
The alliance also makes sense because the ongoing Ford-Microsoft Sync alliance gave Ford the industry's best affordable Bluetooth-and-iPod solution with more than 2 million Sync cars shipped to date.
Ford CEO Alan Mulally announced the partnership Wednesday at the opening day of the New York International Auto Show. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took part in the press conference via a remote video feed from Redmond. "For Ford," Mulally said, "this is a needed step in the development of the infrastructure that will make electric vehicles viable."
The Ford Focus Electric is an all-electric vehicle, unlike the Chevrolet Volt that uses a small gasoline engine to keep the car chugging along for several hundred miles. With Microsoft Hohm, Focus Electric owners can monitor their car's charge and recharge status from four locations: a PC, a web-connected TV, a fixed-function device such as a (very) smart home thermostat with a Web connection, or a mobile device.
Microsoft's Troy Batterberry, product unit manager for Microsoft Hohm, enlightened the several hundred most car-centric editors and analysts this way: "Microsoft Hohm is a cloud-based service that provides actionable information for consumers." English-to-English translation: If you've got an Internet connection, you can monitor your car's state of charge, and if the car is plugged in to the 120-volt (overnight charging) or 240-volt (3 hour charging) station, you can start the charge cycle now or later when the rates are lower and you won't bring down the power grid.
Mulally talked about the charging system being controlled remotely by a smartphone but didn't specifically mention whether it would run on Microsoft's mobile phone nemesis, the Apple iPhone. Batterberry said afterward that Hohm would work on any web-connected device and, yes, that could include an iPhone.
As electric cars become popular, they need a way to charge off-peak to avoid taxing the electric grid. Both Mulally and Ballmer noted that the drain of charging an electric car (on the order of 15 kilowatts) is about equal to the entire drain from the rest of the house, meaning you double power demand. That means utilities need to offer time-of-day pricing to make people want to charge the car overnight and electric vehicle owners need a way to defer the charge until the wee hours of the morning. At its most flexible, the owner would specify that he or she needs the car fully charged by 6 a.m. and Microsoft Hohm negotiates a charge-start time that uses the cheapest rates.
To charge a car for 50 miles of driving might cost $1.50 at typical rates (10 cents a kilowatt hour). Driving that far on a 25 mpg gas-engine car would cost about $6.
Ford is on a fast track with electric vehicles: the all-electric Transit Connect later this year, the Focus Electric in 2011, and a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (similar to Chevrolet Volt) and two next-generation hybrids in 2012.
Ford is starting EV trials in Germany.
For more details, follow the link ...
We've been waiting for several months to hear this good news. Three EV pioneers, Tesla, Nissan and Ford, are receiving loans from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. Totaling $8 billion, the funds will be used to manufacture efficient vehicles and electric drive components.
given its superb styling, performance and efficiency. The price point of $57K makes it affordable for a large segment of the population. Part of the money will be used to set up a production line for their battery packs and electric drive trains to be sold to other manufacturers such as their new partner, Daimler.
the drive train for their new EV, I am very pleased that this will enable them to ramp up quickly to 150,000 EVs annually. This car will appeal to a larger segment of the population given its price of around $30K. 
Comments
much cheaper to maintain than EV cars.
rest of the house, meaning you double power demand