Communication with and for Electric Vehicles

While electric vehicles (EV) are already widespread in particular applications, e.g. fork lifts or baggage carrying (cf. Rand et al., 1998), their use as individual motor cars is still limited. E.g., only 2,300 EV were registered in Germany on 1st of January 2011 (Federal Motor Transport Authority, 2011). However, many drivers lead towards an electrification of individual motor car traffic all over the world: advancing battery technology, high oil prices in 2008 and 2011, the recent automobile crisis in 2009 and the hope for ecological advantages of EV usage. Moreover, the combination of two major energy conversion systems, namely the electric utility system and the light vehicle fleet (e.g. individual motor cars), could create considerable synergies (Kempton & Letendre, 1997; Kempton & Tomic, 2005a; Tomic & Kempton, 2007). One proposed concept is Vehicle-to-Grid realized through “... vehicles with an electric drive motor powered by batteries, a fuel cell or a hybrid drive train, [that] can generate or store electricity when parked, and with appropriate connections can feed power to the grid ...” (Kempton & Tomic, 2005b). EV can be subdivided into hybrid EV (HEV) and battery EV (BEV). The subset of HEV combines the (parallel or serial) electric drive motor with a combustion engine, a fuel cell or human power (e.g. Pedelec). The BEV rely only on a – mainly electro-chemical – energy storage. Although the energy to fulfill an HEV’s mobility function could be provided alternatively (e.g. by fuel or a battery exchange), all EV are assumed to be plug-in vehicles in this article. This means they charge from and possibly discharge into the power grid. All in all, the term EV refers from now on to (at least partly) electrically propelled cars used for individual motor traffic which can be conductively or inductively connected to the power grid. A lot of research questions have been raised with respect to EV. Most of them approach the subject from a technical (e.g. battery performance), economic (e.g. total cost of ownership) or a user (e.g. driving behaviour) perspective, others investigate social, political and cultural barriers for broader EV usage (Sovacool & Hirsh, 2009). Information and communication technology (ICT) (definition cf. Krcmar 2006), is affected in all of these perspectives, since it has to ...  be mastered technically,  be used economically, and  increase usability. Moreover, research questions can be categorized with respect to an EV’s life cycle which on a top view corresponds to the serial phases of production, usage and recycling. While questions about production aim at producing EV efficiently for the market demand, the