EV Stuff: V2X What Is It?

Evs had some strange starts.

Musk didn’t invent the first electric vehicle (EV) or create Tesla Motors from scratch, but instead, he joined the already-existing Tesla company in its early days and somewhat shaped its direction and success, and in this way made Tesla one of the key drivers to the uptake of EVs by the public.

Here’s a timeline of key electric and hybrid vehicle milestones:

The credit for the first EV goes far back in history: electric vehicles were invented in the 19th century, with notable examples like Robert Anderson’s crude electric carriage in the 1830s and Thomas Davenport’s practical electric motor in the 1830s-1840s.

Toyota Prius (First Generation – 1997)

• The Prius was the world’s first mass-produced hybrid electric vehicle, launched in Japan in 1997 and globally in 2000.
• It set the stage for mainstream hybrid adoption and influenced how automakers thought about electrified drivetrains.

Tesla Roadster (Original Tesla Vehicle – 2008)

• Tesla Motors, founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, launched its first vehicle, the Roadster, in 2008.
• The Roadster was the first highway-legal EV with a lithium-ion battery pack, achieving over 200 miles of range per charge.
• Elon Musk joined Tesla as an investor and chairman in 2004, before becoming CEO in 2008.

Nissan LEAF (2010)

• The Nissan LEAF debuted in December 2010, becoming the first mass-produced all-electric car aimed at a global market.
• It offered a relatively affordable EV option compared to Tesla’s luxury-focused models and had a range of about 73 miles on a single charge (EPA estimate).
• The LEAF played a critical role in popularizing EVs for everyday drivers and made Nissan a leader in early EV adoption.

Tesla Model S (2012)

• Tesla introduced the Model S in 2012, a luxury sedan with significantly greater range (up to 265 miles) and advanced technology, cementing Tesla’s position as a leader in the EV market.

So there were the quite successful early EVs in the 19th Century, which most notably (to me) included – surprise! – milk floats, those little electric carts that used to silently deliver milk to the doorstep every morning, and collected the empties for refilling back at the dairy, thus making the early 20th century dairy industry one of the most eco-friendly recycling-aware operations of the time.

The other early players in rough order of appearance were Toyota with the first Prius cars in the late 1990s, the Tesla Roadster in 2008 which sold for solid chunks of cash that helped finance the future of Tesla, the Nissan LEAF which was the first all-electric vehicle, that you could charge at home thus making it even more accessible and driving its popularity, and then the Model S Teslas that are now one of the EVs that define the concept of EV in many people’s minds.

But there was one famous war that changed how car manufacturers thought of EVs and how they’d fit into their product lines:

The Great Prius Plugin War –
EV Owners As Gamechangers.

One of the first “car plus power outlet vs manufacturer” stoushes in the world took place with the Toyota Prius hybrid fuel/EV. (you know, the vehicle that made sanctimonious bastards out of early adopters . . .) There was no way to charge the battery, the vehicle just stored up energy from braking and coasting that would otherwise have ended up as heat and worn brake linings and stored that in a small battery to be used when, for example, the car was stopped at lights and this way the engine could be switched off, the car could initially move under electric power when the lights changed and the engine pick up slack when it finally started to be needed for more speed and/or power.

For some reason Toyota has been implacably against fully electric vehicles, and their first hill that they died on was the famous “plug in Prius” battles. Owners loved the extra kick the battery could provide – without an equivalent big “gulp” of petrol – and the fact that they could even drive for several kilometres on battery alone. Many owners requested this feature, and Toyota dug in their heels and said some rude words.

So the vehicle owners went to a few wizards such as the companies like Plug-In Supply and Hymotion which took advantage of the huge demand for range extension and plug-in charging. There must have been quite a lot of “news ret-conning” over this because it took me several prompts before Chat-GPT finally grudgingly admitted that it wasn’t “Toyota innovation” that brought about the Prius Plug-In Hybrid and finally the Prius Prime, but instead that:

“The growing popularity of these modifications and consumer demand for plug-in options influenced Toyota to introduce factory-designed plug-in hybrids. By 2012, Toyota released the Prius Plug-in Hybrid (later evolving into the Prius Prime), which integrated a professionally engineered plug-in charging system and extended EV range, addressing the challenges and risks posed by aftermarket modifications”

Some twelve years after the original Prius, Toyota began making plug-in rechargeable hybrids.

Car owners won that one, leaving a hill scattered with the ashes of the Toyota engineers and upper management who were convinced that a future without fossil fuels would be a disaster. . . People power won and those pioneering Prius owners KEPT THE BASTARDS HONEST and won a fairly decisive battle. We need more wins like that . . .

I went all this way around in the introduction because I wanted to lead into the latest I’ve been able to find about where EV technology is currently (no pun intended) heading. And no – I don’t mean bigger batteries or stronger motors or adding buttons rather than touchscreens – I mean changes to the function of the vehicle. They’re slowly becoming more than just transportation

But here’s where it gets hard – technological convergence or what you can also call exponential growth in innovation. It aligns with Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, which suggests that technological progress speeds up over time because each new advancement builds on the previous ones more effectively, and also across seemingly unrelated fields.

Any new EV technology could become as outdated as those early milk floats if someone invents a new alternative to the existing mass transit systems, for example. You never know, press a button, a square appears on the floor, step on it, say “Fremantle Maritime Museum” and step off again but now you’re in Western Australia at the Museum. It’s way not possible yet, but then 20 years ago it was going to take scientists one or two decades to decode the human genome, then advances in the ancient computing science available back then made it possible and it was decoded in under a year.

What I’m saying is that while the jargon about V2(x) I’m about to lay down describes standards and technologies for Electric Vehicles for now and the near future, it just takes one little advance in genetics to trigger a revolution in biological engineering that makes possible inexpensive efficient biological batteries that you feed your household scraps into instead of charging on an outlet and you can see where that’s heading, suddenly “garbage truck” becomes a whole new technology . . .

That Whole V2(whatever) Thing

It’s being called “Vehicle To Everything” and that link gives you a good Wikipedia overview. V2X are a set of standards either already developed or being developed to turn the EV from a block of rare metals and some plastic sitting in your garage or driveway for 80% of its life and in work or shopping car parking for another 15%, and only ever actually being used as a vehicle for maybe 5 – 10% of the time into a much more useful and innovative piece of equipment. (I’m talking about the average here, not covering everyone’s use of their vehicle.)

EV V2X At Home

One of the immediately obvious uses of the EV is that if you park it at home, it should charge itself during the low-cost off-peak tariff times. So you come home during peak energy use when electricity prices are insane, and instead of immediately sucking down electricity at 50c/unit the car just sits and waits for the 2AM off-peak to start and then starts charging itself at 25c/unit. This relieves the otherwise even larger power draw at the times most people come home by quite a lot.

And while we’re at it – suppose your EV could actually power your home during that time of peak tariffs? You wouldn’t need to pay for ANY electricity during that time, and your car would faithfully (and economically) top itself up at the cheapest rates off-peak.

Those are the kinds of scenarios V2B and V2G (vehicle to building and vehicle to grid) are perfect for. Your car can “earn” you money just by “trading” in electricity tariff rates just like that. It’s also perhaps going to come as a shock to many people with solar power and batteries at home that their EV battery is between two and five times LARGER than their solar battery. All it needs is the capabilities in the home charger and the EV. Here’s a list of the V2B/G stuff in Australia already or planned in 2025.

I know a person that installed two solar installations at their house of around 10-12kW each so that they could basically power their climate control (air conditioning) from solar energy, and still keep essential power consuming devices like the fridge, freezer, and kitchen cookers and appliances, able to be used mostly from the other battery, and to cover short power outages. They’d be shocked to know that their latest model Tesla S still had a battery OVER FOUR TIMES as large a capacity as their home solar power system.

By using V2G and/or V2B in combination with the solar panels and batteries, you can see, I hope, that this is a totally useful and valuable protocol. Some clever home and EV owners have already designed programs/schedules that allow the solar panels to charge the home batteries in such a way that power outages will be covered, everything to be topped up at the lowest possible costs, and have maximum availability.

I don’t know about you, but I find that mind-blowing. If I had an EV and a set of solar panels and batteries, I could pretty much see myself able to run the whole house on self-generated energy, charge the EV almost entirely on that same free energy, and sometimes even be able to support the local grid during peak power use times instead of being one of the people chewing through that peak power. (There’s also a disaster relief angle I’ll cover a few paragraphs down.)

Benefits To The Grid

As well as benefitting your home, you can also provide some surge capacity to the local grid. Instead of having to build ever-larger peak levelling batteries into their grids, electricity suppliers could allow feed-in power from solar and EVs to provide some of the needed capacity during peak use periods, or in solar and wind droughts.

If fewer upgrades need to be made to the grids then that means renewable electrification can proceed faster, speeding the switch to renewables. These seem like GREAT ideas for governments to offer incentives to solar / battery systems and V2G capable EVs. They should also require the electricity providers to subsidise V2G-capable chargers at every home in future, and at every kerbside EV charger / parking lot charger. In the end it will only benefit them.

V2L Technology

V2L technology allows the direct use of the EV’s battery as in 5V USB chargers, small 240V inverters built-in or plug-in to power tools or other devices in situations where conventional grid electricity isn’t available or – due to natural disaster and the like – is out for a period until the suppliers can repair damage to their grid in a disaster area.

So V2L EVs have an instant role in disaster relief, and once you realise the potential of that alone, you’d be quite unwise to leave it off your shopping list for an EV. Note that MyCar Chargers are apparently already operating around the country. Also of course having V2B/V2G available could produce emergency power for smaller micro-grid islands in the main grid.

But I’m considering just going camping with an E2L vehicle and powering up a decent light or two, maybe an electric frypan, and keeping a small vehicle boot fridge/freezer such as an Engel running handioly close to the deckchairs . . . Or going out to a little plot of land I leased on a farm and powering a few tools to allow me to finish a set of fences and garden beds to kickstart my off-grid camping weekender.

The Other V2(x) Protocols

As you could see from the the Wikipedia article (same one as linked above to save you the trouble of scrolling back up) there are still a few (x)s to mention. They may not have the same visceral satisfaction as knowing that you EV can power tools and microwaves in the bush but they are still a very useful set of features to include.

V2D is vehicle to device so it’s like Car Play and so forth, usually implemented over Bluetooth. Do you remember the first time in your old petrol wagon connecting your phone to the entertainment system and having Maps read you clear and timely directions over the entertainment speakers? THAT to me was power, driving along at night to a place I’d never been before, keeping eyes peeled for signs and listening to “in 400m, turn left onto Main street and your destination will be on the left.” Yeah! Suck it Gregory’s and UBD! (Although to be honest I still have a few car map books around. Just in case…)

Most communications in EVs takes place over the internal network and consists of mundane things like “is there someone on the passenger seat but the belt isn’t done up? Should I beep now to warn the driver that a vehicle is overtaking? Am I a GOOD car?” but also there’s some stuff takes place over WiFi or Bluetooth or cellular data, and that’s important to us too.

V2C lets the vehicle access the cloud for updates and for traffic information and the like, while V2I lets the car communicate with parking meters, chargers, traffic lights, and any other smart stuff.

V2V lets vehicles communicate with another V2V EV and stay informed of where the other vehicle is etc, and V2P seems to be some up-and-coming ways to interact with mobility devices, bicycles, etc. (And perhaps also pedestrian crossings – although they may be covered in the V2I standard above, I haven’t found much info on all that yet, not interested so much in the nuts and bolts as I am in the fact that these are only the bare beginnings of things people will find to manage/connect/operate from their EV.)

There are also going to be a few people in various of the let’s call them the less salubrious fields out there that will make life difficult. I notice that V2E for Evil hasn’t been defined yet, nor V2M for Malware… Let me stake those two – I hereby claim the acronyms V2E and V2M for nefarious purposes . . . Seriously though – what a fantastic way to distribute brickware to a car and render it into a useless pile of junk? Or to use any passing EV as a mobile hotspot distributing malware or attacking networks or other vehicles in real “drive-by” attacks?

And the worst thing is that you just KNOW in your heart of hearts that the porn peddlers and scammers and advertisers are going to launch assaults on car internal systems. Also, wouldn’t the internal electronics be a great place to hide pirated video and music, (or secret government documents acquired via nefarious means?) various versions of malware, and distribute it without the owner of the EV even being aware of it?

“My car’s been slow to respond to other traffic – it’s almost like its processing is lagging…”
“Well, we’ve found two bitcoin mining programs and a porn torrenting program installed on it so that would explain it . . . “

The Wrap-Up

Electric Vehicles are one of the best answers to personal and mass transportation we have. Also some hydrogen / electric vehicles – either system will allow us to use the vehicle as a multifunctional tool to reduce fossil fuel use.

One possible other future might be the pod cars I wrote about. You design car “pods” that are one of a series of standard dimensions, and chassis with running gear separately. The chassis all roll to a centre within a few minutes of any parking spot in their coverage area, the pods stay at your chosen location and you own them. When you need to go out you click a call button on an app, by the time you get to your pod it’s a full-on, fully-charged, vehicle, by the simple expedient of the skateboard (the chassis and running gear) driving under the pod, locking itself together, and – that’s about it actually.

Want to go to a secluded beach? Tell the app where you want to go, and it will pick a skateboard than can drive over rough ground as well as sealed roads, has at least twice the range you’ll require (for contingencies) and that’s that, your pod becomes a 4WD sedan for the day. Want to go camping at that beach? Get the relevant skateboard with more V2L capability for the fridge and cooker and lights . . .

The advantages of such a system are mainly the precious metals consumed. Instead of 50,000 full EVs in the suburbs, there’ll be maybe 5,000 full-time monolithic EVs (i.e. EVs that are one piece – what a LEAF or Tesla currently is) and 30,000 pods parked in driveways, and 10,000 skateboards.

You’ll notice that I’ve also seemingly lost 15,000 people’s transport needs, but I’m also imagining that in that same future there’ll be a significant increase in the number of public transport options, to the point that a small bus will pass by your place every five minutes and be far more flexible in choice of destination than what we currently see when we look at public transport. Why even have a pod if all you want is to go to the mall, shop, and come home?

Two or three other things are factoring into that vision above – we currently have a significant chunk of the population that do not have a license to drive at all and have never needed one. They’ve never seen the need for one. If public transport becomes more granular and varied, there will be even fewer people seeing a need to actually drive a vehicle themselves.

I’ll say this though – popular opinions can be changed in the space of a few years. The same people (myself included in this group I’m ashamed to say) who can’t imagine life without the “freedom” implied by owning one’s own vehicle and the choice one can thus exercise over the reactions to what other drivers do, can instead be shown a vision where they can hop into a vehicle that does the driving for them, and where all vehicles are in lock-step so no accidents are likely.

You’d no longer have to worry about 200km/h car chases putting your life at risk because no vehicles are under unpredictable human control. There’ll still be areas where human drivers are able to drive, but again their vehicle will communicate V2V with other vehicles around the area and maintain safe traffic flows, and the places for self-drive to take place will be those where the roads are uncongested and not worth the hassle of running V2I-capable infrastructure.

I commuted for years when I was working, I tried all the methods available to me. I used buses and trains, but because sometimes connections might take 30 minutes, they weren’t really an ideal choice. I used a car pool but while they’re slightly more efficient on fuel and road use than everyone taking their own vehicle, both of those are worse for pollution and road wear than the public transport option. I drove a vehicle to work, for a time I had a work vehicle to carry the tools and equipment so I could go directly to a job from home, then to work and then home after re-equipping for the next job.

And the simplest and easiest thing I found was a 50cc motor scooter and a backpack. Where I was buying 60 – 120 litres of fuel per fortnight to get to work and the shops and so forth with a car, or wasting two to three hours a day on public transport and connection delays, all I had to worry about was to put about 25 litres of fuel into the scooter per fortnight, and remember that it had a top speed of about 60km/h so certain routes were unavailable to me.

The downside was that I was very vulnerable to other larger vehicles – but in a scenario where ALL the vehicles are communicating V2V and driving autonomously I’d have been as safe as if I’d been in an armored personnel carrier.

The other downsides – weather, small carrying capacity – are just something that would remain. But if there’d been the kind of system back then in the 1990s that I envisage for the near future, I could have stepped into a public transport vehicle to work, picked up a Company-owned pod filled with the equipment I needed on a job and on tomorrow’s job, gone to the day’s job, then home, then to tomorrow’s job and either to work and then public transport home or take the company vehicle home that afternoon and to work the following day – all without having to actually drive a vehicle or own one.

Basically, I’m seeing a future where fossil fuels will become increasingly expensive and shunned, and that’ll happen relatively quickly because – look around at the weather. It WILL penetrate the public consciousness as a concrete threat in very rapid order as the weather events keep piling up and becoming more extreme. It will also become a well-known that while vehicles aren’t the #1 cause of it, the energy being generated by use of fossil fuels is.

It’ll also come to the pubic attention that EVs are attractive propositions right around the time that the increasing cost of fossil fuels will make driving to work and back a proposition bearable only for the very rich – who aren’t going to need to drive to work and back anyway. Because public transport infrastructure hasn’t been planned for the scale needed to absorb that, WFH might become once more a desirable option.

At some point though, it’ll become obvious that owning a fossil fuel engined vehicle is a crime against the planetary ecosystem. And again – don’t think “oh that’s ten to fifty years down the track” because I predict right now that weather event of the next two years will make it the prevailing attitude by 2027.

Yep – I’ve put a date on it. IF we’re still alive in 2027 and still have a communication system and Internet by that year, I’ll hopefully also still be available to accept the accolades. Unless we start changing things – radically – right now – and with extreme prejudice.

So what started out as a feelgood howcleverarewe pat on the back for making EVs into a tool for creating some relief from global climate change has turned into a wake-up call, one that I really REALLY hope you’ll share around widely.

Because I think this message is so important I’ll not make my usual call to donation action and instead just ask you to share this – REALLY share it. Copy the URL and bookmark it, send it to newspapers and magazines, drop it into the inboxes of government ministers and senators, give the URL to others and ask them to do the same. It really IS that important for those last few paragraphs to get out.