Location-based services, at last, are beginning to hit their stride after years of promise. Last year, the number of applications using geolocation to enhance their functionality skyrocketed as Apple rolled out its iPhone, and the research firm RNCOS recently forecast that the global LBS market would reach $75 billion by 2013. Mobile applications increasingly play to users’ environmental concerns — but can location-based services also play a significant role in the transition to plug-in vehicles?

A growing number of companies with very different visions of that transition, some of them using software to build new business models around vehicles and mobility, are betting it can, due to the technology’s capacity to help them leverage real-time data about charging needs, infrastructure availability, and driver behavior and preferences.

Electric Fleet Transitions

“The EV transition is right in our wheelhouse,” says Zipcar’s CTO, Luke Schneider. That’s because the car-sharing company has a few things electric automakers, utilities and charging infrastructure companies need: data about driving patterns and vehicle status, and a large consumer fleet.

In every Zipcar vehicle, there’s a “black box” device (a custom circuit board, processor, and modem) installed on the windshield that allows users to unlock the car they’ve reserved. The devices receive data over AT&T’s wireless network. When a user reserves a car (online or over the phone), Zipcar authorizes their card for a particular vehicle. The devices also allow Zipcar (and now fleet managers) to remotely monitor vehicles, including the number of miles driven, the time the car was used, how well the engine is running, how much gas is in the tank, and in the case of plug-in cars (which have a growing presence in public fleets), battery voltage levels.

“Every automaker is struggling to find the same data,” Schneider said. “We have one of the best test beds.”

Whether electric car makers choose Zipcar or some other fleet for pilot testing, fleet managers will have a new variable to factor into scheduling: charge cycles. Today, charging infrastructure (and EVs themselves, which number in the tens or hundreds of thousands) are far from ubiquitous, a situation Ford Sustainability Strategy Director John Viera said he expects to last at least six years and possibly more than a decade. LBS could help drivers and fleet managers find available chargepoints — especially during this transition period. That’s part of the vision of startup Coulomb Technologies, which has designed its chargepoints to show up in GPS-enabled devices once they’re operational.

Apps for Early EV Adopters

The opportunity for LBS as fleets bring in more electric models isn’t just about keeping track of cars, however. While Zipcar has held discussions with automakers and electric vehicle infrastructure startups Better Place, Coulomb Technologies and Gridpoint, as well as “dozens” of other EV infrastructure companies about partnerships, Schneider said the company is at this point working most closely with web developers and will finalize partnerships with some of them within the next six months. With its regional networks and storehouse of data about drivers’ travel patterns and preferences, Zipcar’s appeal to location-aware app developers is easy to see.

Already, the company has partnered with Zimride, a web-based service that connects users with potential carpoolers, often through their Facebook networks. In the mobile version (developed by Ecorio), Zimride uses Google Android’s location-aware GPS to help connect nearby drivers and passengers, and also to track transit-related carbon emissions and suggest public transit options. Combine Zimride, Zipcar and LBS, and you could have a powerful tool for reducing the overall number of vehicle miles traveled. All of these services could become more valuable to early adopters of all-electric vehicles that are well suited to in-town driving but not ideal for longer trips because of range limitations.

Mass Market EVs, Enabled by LBS

For the same reasons Zipcar’s fleet might appeal to the nascent electric vehicle industry for testing — user and vehicle data — electric vehicles operating on a smart grid present an opportunity for new geodata tools. While many automakers remain skeptical of Better Place’s plan to deploy massive networks of battery-exchange stations and charge points, the startup has sketched out a scenario that, in a less ambitious form, would still rely heavily on LBS.

Sidney Goodman, the company’s VP of Automotive Alliances, said recently that Better Place wants to route subscribers to different charging stations based on factors incuding location, batteries’ state of charge and how crowded a given station is. Long term, the company also aims to work with utilities to manage charging, so just because you’re plugged in wouldn’t mean you’re pulling power from the grid. In the Better Place model, charging would be prioritized based on a user profile, and whether you’re at your own workplace, for example, or plugging in for a charge at another office building and likely to hit the road again in an hour.

If millions of electric vehicles eventually make it to mass market, as many automakers now anticipate (even if they disagree on when and how), that kind of energy management will be necessary to keep from overburdening the electric grid at times of peak demand, and geodata could be an essential tool in the kit. Companies that know how to leverage it could find a growing number of opportunities to partner with automakers, utilities, fleet managers and charging infrastructure providers — the changing cast of players in the mobility market.

Josie Garthwaite is a Staff Writer for Earth2Tech.