Smartcar: Finding Your Raison d'être

Why does your company exist??Do you know??Does your management know??I know one company that knows better today why it exists than it might have just a few years ago: Smartcar.

Smartcar is here to save the world.

“How so?” you ask?

It’s all about distributed energy resource management systems (DERMs).?But let’s first look at what Smartcar does.

Smartcar provides a platform for accessing the telematics clouds of automakers.?What does that mean??That means that Smartcar enables a wide array of its B2B customers to build apps which integrate with all the major car brands.?This means that consumers can bring their vehicle data into the apps of their choice to use.

Right away I can sense the average readers’ eyes glazing over.?“Who cares about their vehicle data??Am I missing something?”?Yes.?You are.?And there lies the rub.

Founded eight years ago, Smartcar was long a solution looking for a problem. The company was in the vehicle data business, which all the experts were claiming was a multi-billion-dollar industry – but Smartcar seemed to be lurking in a revenue-free backwater, toiling away at accessing vehicle telematics clouds to create value for consumers by enabling them to tap into their own vehicle data.

The turning point for Smartcar arrived with the onset of electric vehicles.?Suddenly, consumers were buying, owning, driving, charging, and even selling electric vehicles and struggling to come to terms with the challenges of understanding vehicle range, battery performance, charging speeds, home charging, and the evolving value of their EVs.

Suddenly, owning a car became a value statement, a commitment to preserving the future of the planet. People weren't just buying EVs, they were adding home chargers and installing solar panels. But what if - away from home or even at home - you were charging your car with energy produced from a carbon-generating source? That might undermine the whole purpose.

The demand for data and consumer education was overwhelming and dozens of startups were spawned to help consumers buy and sell EVs, charge them, operate them, and understand them.?There was also the question of interacting with power companies.?

Utilities don’t understand cars or car companies and car companies don’t understand utilities.?The door swung wide open for application developers to create solutions for consumers to optimize their charging to save money and to tap into the greenest sources of energy.

Enter Smartcar.?Smartcar offered the platform to facilitate those value propositions from those developers, simultaneously educating consumers to the opportunity represented by owning an EV.?In essence, Smartcar empowered consumers, through its developer relationships, to tap into their own data in most cases for free.?The developers paid Smartcar for managing integrations into 36 car brands.

Best of all, from the beginning neither Smartcar nor its developer partners took possession of the data.?They merely provided access.?The developers create the apps and Web portals with interpretive dashboards or use the data access to trigger vehicle functions, such as unlocking doors or starting/stopping charging.

Enabling these interactions through a laser focus on offering developer tools is surely Smartcar’s “reason to be.”?But even more compelling is Smartcar’s newfound role as the gatekeeper to a world of apps and Websites designed to help EV owners save more money and extract more value out of their vehicles and, yes, save the planet.

Smartcar is at the nexus of an app-centric community that allows EV owners to view the status of their vehicle’s charge, compare its status and performance to other similar vehicles, and provide an up-to-date view of their vehicle’s resale value.?The maker of my EV has provided an app, but that app does not provide this kind of information – worse, it rates my driving and has given me a poor rating at that with no explanation.

I can now turn to a Smartcar partner, Recurrent, if I want to get a second opinion on my driving.

Of course, tapping into the value of my own vehicle’s data means that I need an active telematics subscription with my car company.?So, the app may be free, but I do need access to my vehicle data. (That's obviously good news for car makers.)

And this is where DERMs enter the picture.?Distributed energy resource management systems vendors help utilities achieve energy security and mitigate climate risks.?Utilities are investing in automating individual and aggregated DERs to increase clean energy supplies.

One Smartcar partner, Rolling Energy Resources, helped utilities in 16 states run 30 demand response events leveraging Smartcar’s API to communicate with EVs to detect when and where vehicles change and how much energy is consumed while charging.?They can automatically start or stop that charging.

DERMS can use Smartcar’s API to:

• Retrieve up-to-date information from EVs during home and away charging
• Remotely control EV charging to balance demand and supply on the grid
• Accommodate a majority of EVs in a service territory
• Provide easy opt-in for residents

DERMS providers include:

1. Rolling Energy Resources
2. FlexCharging
3. Amp X
4. AutoGrid
5. EnergyHub
6. Bidgley
7. KrakenFlex
8. EV Energy
9. Optiwatt
10. Virtual Peaker
11. Gexa Energy
12. BluWave

DERMS are but one example of how Smartcar is saving the world.?The company is also enabling mobility solutions by collaborating with Uber (don't offer me a fare that exceeds my battery range), Turo (enable remote door unlock), GoMore, Zeti, and Spring Free EV.

Smartcar is saving the world by liberating vehicle data from OEM clouds and into the hands of clever developers with money- and planet-saving applications for consumers.?Smartcar isn’t aggregating or taking possession of data – the company is setting data free.?And that’s a great reason to exist.

Smartcar energy and utilities white paper: https://smartcar.com/industries/energy-and-utilities/