None of this is surprising until you reflect that Giuli and Evans are not toiling on the next great social media site - but the next iteration of products made of glass and steel by an old-school manufacturing company founded 110 years ago.

Giuli, research lab leader at Ford’s Silicon Valley Lab, wants Ford cars to become open-source crowd-enabled modular products. “We don’t judge our success on the ideas we come up with,” said Giuli. “But the ideas from people outside of Ford. If somebody comes up with an idea I never would have thought of, then it’s a success.”

In fact, the core mission of Ford’s Palo Alto research lab is to enable innovators - even those with limited resources and technical chops - to see the automobile as a platform for creativity. Giuli points to a disembodied car dashboard and steering wheel, out of place in this office setting.

“Let’s say you don’t like these steering wheel buttons. Maybe you could slap in a capacitive touch controller,” he said. “Using this platform, people would, by themselves, be able to design things.” The lab also maintains two vehicles in its parking lot for testing.

In the next few months, Ford expects to release the beta version of its car app developer kit. There are already more than 1,000 developers waiting to be notified when it’s ready. At that point, this lab’s work will shift to supporting and growing a community of car hackers. “We’re interested in spurring the creation of an ecosystem,” Giuli said.

Trading Grease For Code

Ford’s OpenXC API runs on a combination of Arduino and Android platforms - technology chosen to make modding your car as easy as programming a smartphone. The system can potentially access the 1,000 or more data points, generated by sensors on Ford vehicles and served up via the 16-pin onboard diagnostics port (a standard feature of all cars since 1996). The Ford toolkit encourages development of software as well as add-on hardware.

Evans, a mechanical engineer with expertise in rapid prototyping and digital manufacturing technology, comes naturally to the automotive industry. His father is Andy Evans, a profession race car driver, who drove for Ferrari in the 1990s in the World Sports Car series. “I have cars in my blood,” said Evans.

“When you think back to the days of the 1960s Mustangs, you’d pop open the hood. If you knew what you’re doing, you could change all kinds of mechanical things,” said Evans. “But now, if you open up the hood of your car, what do you see? Plastic. It’s intimidating.” The answer: Ford wants to transform 20th century grease monkeys into 21st century DIY car geeks.

Ford first announced its OpenXC platform a year ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 Hackathon. Since then, the Ford Silicon Valley Lab has vetted its process, sometimes working with partners, by evaluating a number of hacks:

• Using the rate and duration of windshield wiper activity, cars become roaming weather stations capable of reporting rain and other conditions on a microclimate level.
• Got an overbearing mother who insists on knowing when you arrive at a destination? With a hack, the car texts, “Oy vay, I’m here already.”
• Looking at steering wheel angle, accelerator pedal position, speeds, RPM, and GPS location, an app determines that you just completed a fun drive on a twisty road. It does a GPS trace and tweets the deets, including a link to a Google map.
• An obvious application is traffic detection, which is not such a big deal in U.S. where traffic reports are everyday radio fare, but could be huge in the developing world. If multiple drivers repeatedly slam their brakes on the same stretch of road, traffic planners could learn there’s a safety problem in the road design.

From there, who knows what innovation could emerge from an online community of car hackers? Ford’s lab is not currently constrained by a need to commercialize any of the ideas but sees its work instead as research regarding the feasibility of a car-based open source strategy. Giuli will grow the lab’s staff from three employees currently, to about 10 to 15 people in the next three years.

Ford might seem forward thinking in establishing such a lab, but Giuli doesn’t see it that way. He believes it’s more a matter of keeping up with where innovative geeks are already going. “Tons of people are already making car apps that work with OBD2 readers, or replacing the center stack with their own car computer.

That’s happening today, and there’s nothing that anybody can do to stop it,” he said. “So, it’s a good idea for OEMs like Ford to make this really easy. Hopefully, we can benefit customers with a lot of awesome new features.”

Tech entrepreneur Jim Disanto sees the automobile as the next great platform for connectivity. “There are a more than a billion cars in the world,” he said. “Every automotive OEM and Tier 1 supplier will tell you that within three years, every car will need connected systems, or you’re not going to be able to sell it.” That, Disanto believes, will spawn a new generation of app developers offering Internet-enabled enhancements to the driving experience.

However, as large as that opportunity is, the obstacles facing entrepreneurs wanting to develop apps for cars are bigger still.

It’s the chasm between the opportunity and its realization that led Disanto to start what he believes is the first Silicon Valley incubator to specifically focus on connected car technology. Disanto first caught a glimpse of the opportunity for web-enabled cars soon after selling a previous company, KonaWare to a China’s Yamei Electronics in 2008. KonaWare provided remote logistics to transportation companies, but the wave of smart phone applications had not yet reached critical mass.

Four years later, everybody and their mother have a smart phone. We all step into our cars, and wonder why we can’t bring those apps along for the ride. “A new generation of car buyers aren’t interested in the mechanics of the car. They are much more interested in the electronic stuff onboard,” Disanto said. “Before, the car was a transportation system. Now, it’s an extension of your digital life.”

Disanto’s incubator, Transportation Technology Ventures, consists of two partners, six advisors, and an office in Palo Alto. The group, which serves as an angel investor fund, is now “circling up entrepreneurs in the space,” said Disanto.

But those fledgling entrepreneurs face the following serious obstacles.

Nobody Knows Which Apps Make The Most Sense

Sure, you want dashboard navigation integrated with things like Yelp or Open Table. Or you want to listen to Internet radio, like Pandora and Spotify. But beyond that, it’s a mystery as to which apps will become popular, and what will even make sense while driving.

The grand vision is to eventually have hundreds or even thousands of downloadable car-related apps. But at this stage, the only ones out there are carried over from the mobile phone, rather than specifically created for an automotive environment.

No Centralized App Store

There are about 20 major automotive companies selling vehicles in the United States, and around 70 around the world, according to Disanto. Because each car company has to worry about potential lawsuits from a rogue app, or one that distracts too much. So each OEM will want to test and bless every app, and control its own app store where drivers will download right to the car.

Apple or Google app stores probably don’t make sense, unless you can easily elevate the car-related apps above the clutter. Expect confusion when there are as many app stores as there are models on the road.

Lack Of Standards And Qualified Developers

The automotive industry has not yet established app standards for hardware, software, interfaces, and communications protocols. Who wants to spend countless hours and dollars developing a car-based app, when you don’t know if it will meet a standard that hasn’t been finalized yet—or even discussed?

The Department of Transportation will throw out its own roadblocks. A game app for a smart phone is child’s play, compared to developing functionality that has to interact with a car’s computer network, widely divergent dashboard configurations, touch screen interaction, steering wheel controls, and potential voice recognition and heads-up displays projected on to the windshield.

And we’re not even talking about vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-road communications that’s right around the corner. These technologies are not taught in most computer science classes.

All of these complications add up to time, money, and headaches. And it creates a scenario where innovation is stifled because the best ideas never get off the ground. But this won’t stop enterprising tech innovators from coming up with ideas, and seeking money and logistics to support them.

“There’s a massive gap between the seed stage of a new company focusing on transportation, and the institutional financing route,” said Disanto. “A lot of things need to get done in the gap.” Disanto intends to fill that gap.

A not-so-futuristic world in which drivers, cars and roads operate in a highly connected network of instantaneous data got one step closer to reality today.

The scale of the project, managed by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), is unprecedented. For the next 12 months, nearly 3,000 cars — operated by drivers specifically recruited because they frequently drive in the same quadrant of Ann Arbor, Mich. — will be integrated via Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), a technology similar to the wi-fi network you use at home or the local cafe.

But instead of your laptop or smart phone connecting to the web—so you can check your latest Facebook messages—these thousands of cars will beam safety messages and warnings to their drivers, each other and to a dedicated cloud of computers. Each vehicle will transmit about 10 messages per second.

“The participants are parents driving kids to school, picking them up after school, or driving them to ballet or football,” said Peter Sweatman, UMTRI’s director. “We have a platform, with five or six applications on that platform intended to avoid certain major classes of crash, whether at an intersection, a lane departure, a rear-end or whatever it might be.” When dangerous conditions occur, drivers will be warned via some combination of visual signals, sounds and vibrations.

Big Data on Wheels

All of the data will be recorded, so researchers can determine the accuracy of the warnings, and which types of alerts are most effective at helping drivers avert danger. At this point, there is no automated vehicle control, but given the number of sensors on today’s vehicles, that’s a logical subsequent step, according to Sweatman.

Most of the vehicles are owned by the participants and fitted with after-market safety equipment and one-way communications devices. In addition, 64 cars supplied by participating automobile companies will be loaned for a year to drivers. These vehicles have been outfitted with embedded communications equipment—connected to the car’s onboard computer network—and fitted with the carmaker’s customized warning interfaces and multiple video cameras.

This project is the culmination of about 10 years of work by the U.S. Department of Transportation, as well as a long list of partner organizations, automotive companies, and educational institutions such as UMTRI.

This latest phase, which launched today, represents the deployment of technology into the real world with everyday drivers. As part of this phase, the connected vehicles can also “talk” to dozens of traffic signals, and sections of roads deemed to be particularly dangerous.

Incredible Platform

The combination of data and video gathered in Ann Arbor will make researchers practically omniscient. “We not only know what messages and warning are being sent to drivers. We know exactly what the driver is doing in great detail,” said Sweatman.

“We know how many occupants there are, what they are doing, the driver’s facial expression, and where they are looking. We can see if they’re texting, what they are doing with their hands, and with video outside the vehicle, we know what the traffic scene is.”

The model deployment is a $25-million pilot with approximately 80 percent of the funding provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation. When you consider that there are 34,000 fatalities, costing about $240 billion annually, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the cost seems more than justified.

Eight major automotive manufacturers — Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai-Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen — are providing support for the research through partnering agreements.

“In the longer term, I’m really interested to see what else gets built on this incredible platform,” said Sweatman. “It’s a sandbox, a starting point for entrepreneurs for all kinds of applications, not only to avoid crashes, but to make the traffic flow better and to save energy.” He said that all architectures, standards and specifications are publicly available.

You might see your car as a means of transportation or a reflection of your lifestyle. But Verizon views the automobile as a giant mobile data device on wheels. That’s why it recently announced a $612 million cash deal that will make it the first carrier to own one of the major companies that connect cars to wireless networks.

Atlanta-based Hughes Telematics is what’s known as a Telematics Service Provider or TSP. Much the way an ISP gets your home or business connected to the Internet, a TSP provides connectivity to a car. TSPs like Hughes, Agero and OnStar not only have the technology, platform and intellectual property to sync up an automobile to the same wireless network that your cell phone uses, they also provide services such as call centers with live human beings.

OnStar Corporation - a subsidiary of General Motors - uses Verizon simply as the network carrier for services such as crash response, roadside help, turn-by-turn navigation assistance, hands-free calling and remote vehicle diagnostics. Your car becomes a big phone with a single “call” button on the rearview mirror to put you directly in touch with the call center.

“Carriers like Verizon are trying to evolve from the dumb pipe to the valuable pipe,” said Thilo Koslowski, vice president and automotive practice leader at Gartner. “Verizon could continue providing wireless networks to car companies like they do with OnStar, or they could take a larger share by creating an end-to-end solution.”

Safety First

Verizon’s purchase of Hughes inspires Jetson-like visions of connected cars offering mobile video conferencing, streaming movies, remote health monitoring and vehicle-to-vehicle communications - but those flights of fancy should be kept in check. “Just because you have a telecom that buys a company that’s automotive-oriented doesn’t open the door to take mobile services you get on your smartphone and dump them into a car,” said Frank Weith, general manager for connected services of Volkswagen Group.

Volkswagen announced Hughes as its TSP in November 2011. Hughes has counted Mercedes-Benz as one of its customers since 2007.

“Our focus is safety, first and foremost,” said Weith. He believes that car infotainment, such as offering traffic and weather or enhancing navigation, should be put in the service of safety. “It has to be real information, because you get into a car for a purpose, to get somewhere.” So, using your dashboard to make a Facebook post doesn’t make much sense.

Nonetheless, Weith realizes that drivers and passengers are usually carrying smartphones in their car. “Our challenge as automakers is to find the balance between people reaching for their smartphones to get information, and the car being able to provide you the right information in the right dosage so you don’t get distracted,” said Weith.

Tethered vs. Embedded Phones

In fact, the auto industry is divided between two primary approaches. There are companies (like Ford and Toyota) using a tethered approach in which the smartphone - already a network-connected device - is paired up via Bluetooth to the car’s computer system. Then, there are automakers (like GM, Volkswagen and Mercedes) that embed the phone into the car, and support it with TSP services.

Weith believes the embedded TSP model provides the required extra layer of security, especially in an emergency situation. It creates a central point of contact that can triage between a driver and public safety agencies. “You know you’re going to get help,” said Weith. “They’ll send an ambulance to you if you need it.” With the tethered approach, it’s more like using your cell phone to call 911. The risk is that on some days, you might forget your phone or it might not be charged.

Gartner’s Koslowski believes that all automakers will eventually need to accommodate both tethered and embedded approaches. He said that Verizon is agnostic, as long as you connect using its network services.

Upcharges

Automakers might have the burden of ensuring safety, but Verizon’s connected vehicle activities are about providing what mobile consumers want, according to Koslowski. There are services like alternative routing to avoid traffic jams, Web-based info about when a movie starts (or a film review), or downloading contacts or a music file to your car. “These capabilities in combination with Hughes’s telematics call center services can create a holistic portfolio offering” said Koslowski.

Verizon is positioning itself to offer data plans that including connectivity to multiple devices, including your smartphone, your tablet computer and what it sees as the ultimate mobile device: your car. And of course, a healthy upcharge will come along with it.