A couple months after that, boy megastar Justin Bieber got one for his 18th birthday as a present from his manager. The car even had its television debut driven by Ashton Kutcher, playing an internet mogul, on Two and a Half Men.

Fisker’s Project Nina, later called the Atlantic, which was never manufactured.

That summer gas prices were predicted to rise about 40 percent, leading to a boost in sales of fuel-efficient cars. A year earlier, electric-car company Tesla held a blockbuster IPO, and Nissan’s low-cost electric car the LEAF had gone on sale. The country seemed like it might finally be ready for electric cars, and perhaps ready for the first car enthusiast’s plug-in hybrid, as the Fisker Karma was being called.

But the limelight was short-lived for Fisker. In the months and years that followed, the company spiraled downward, burning its dreams and reputation to the ground — just like faulty parts did to a couple of its cars. Fisker has been reported to be on the brink of bankruptcy, lawsuits are piling up, and a government hearing is reportedly in the works.

There are a lot of crash-and-burn stories in Silicon Valley. It’s in the nature of entrepreneurs, startups and investors to take risks and sometimes fail. But it’s not often that you see such a dramatic downfall.

Those that have been tarnished by Fisker’s demise include venture-capital grandaddy Kleiner Perkins; Fisker’s executives, many of whom had long distinguished careers in Detroit; and Fisker’s broker, Advanced Equities, which helped the company raise hundreds of millions of dollars and has now disbanded entirely. Fisker raised and spent more than a billion dollars over its lifetime.

A handful of celebrities and politicians that championed the company have also been caught up in its wreckage, as has the Department of Energy, which ended up loaning the company close to $200 million. The entire electric-vehicle industry could take a hit because of Fisker.

How did this do-gooder dream that was supposed to combine Silicon Valley-backed tech innovation, gorgeous design, and eco-friendly hot-rod cars turn out so horribly wrong for so many people? That’s what I’ve tried to find out in a dozen interviews in recent weeks with people at the center of the Fisker story.

Summer of 2011

It was in that summer of 2011 — even as the company outwardly was showing some signs of hitting its stride —  that I first started to wonder if something wasn’t going awfully wrong at Fisker. Mitt Romney had just announced his presidential run, a federal grand jury had indicted John Edwards, and we were enduring the second hottest summer in the U.S. on record.

I had been following Fisker since its founding four years earlier, and the company was on the cusp of delivering its first electric hybrid sports car, the Karma, to customers. Though the delivery was running 18 months behind schedule, there was a sense of anticipation among the media, investors and car enthusiasts.

Then two things happened that gave me pause. An auto industry executive that I trusted made me an offhand bet that included the idea that Fisker’s second car — then called Project Nina and partly funded by a Department of Energy-approved $529 million loan — might never see the light of day. Fisker had deep pockets, such high-profile investors and so much media hype — I really hadn’t considered something so shocking. Clearly I lost that bet.

The second unsettling event of the ’11 summer was when Fisker invited the media to watch “the delivery” (re-enacted reality TV- show style) of one of the first Karmas to Kleiner Perkins partner Ray Lane. Outside Kleiner’s offices, in the hot parking lot, Lane held up the keys in celebration of the delivery and talked about the joys of driving his Karma as a large group of photographers, reporters and TV crews captured the moment.

Afterwards, I did a long interview with Lane back in the air-conditioned comfort of the Kleiner offices, where he explained to me his counterintuitive thesis for backing Fisker: Either get the valuation high enough so they don’t get crushed on dilution or get low-cost loans that are high leverage for equity investors. “My partners thought I was out of my mind. But I had a thesis,” said Lane.

Kleiner Partner Ray Lane receives the keys for his Fisker Karma, Summer 2011.

The media learned a couple weeks later that the Karma hadn’t received any of the needed regulatory approvals — so the car wasn’t legally driveable on public roads. It wouldn’t get full certification from the EPA until three months later.

The early days

But to understand Fisker’s missteps you have to go back to at least 2006. Fisker’s founder Henrik Fisker was a well-known car designer formerly with BMW and Ford who had his name on hot cars like the Aston Martin DB9 and the BMW Z8 Roadster. In 2004 he started a luxury-car company called Fisker Coachbuild with his long-time buddy Bernhard Koehler, who was later his co-founder at Fisker. In late 2006, Henrik Fisker started working on a contract basis with Tesla, creating designs for Tesla’s second car, a sedan, later called the Model S.

This was also the year that Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth debuted, and some in the Hollywood elite were starting to embrace hybrid cars and eco causes. Henrik Fisker has told reporters that he was inspired to build Fisker Automotive after seeing DiCaprio drive a Prius to the Oscars and thinking he should have something more high-end. DiCaprio later became an investor and marketing partner to the company.

In 2006 and 2007, cleantech investing was the all the rage among VCs. Research firm the Cleantech Group called 2006 a “watershed period” for cleantech venture investing. VCs put $3.9 billion into global cleantech startups that year, an increase of about 50 percent over 2005. The annual investment numbers grew even more in the following years, but 2006 was a turning point.

Around that time Kleiner Perkins had a plan to bet a third of its fund on cleantech investing. More than a decade ago, Kleiner made a fortune from investments like Google and Amazon, and in the early 2000′s was trying to find the next big thing. Some of the Valley’s most well-known investors like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and VantagePoint Capital Partners were also excited about cleantech back then, and had decided to put millions into Tesla, led by charismatic PayPal co-founder Elon Musk.

At some point at the very end of 2007, Kleiner became Fisker’s early flagship venture backer. Musk told PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy last year that Kleiner actually tried to invest in Tesla before Fisker, during Tesla’s Series C round, but Musk said that Kleiner wouldn’t let him choose the Kleiner Partner for the board seat. Musk wanted John Doerr, but Kleiner’s transportation guy at the time was Lane, who later joined the board of Fisker. Musk ended up going with VantagePoint, and Kleiner ended up funding Fisker. Clearly Tesla’s VC funding, followed by its IPO in the summer of 2010, were significant motivators for Fisker’s investors.

Tesla’s Roadster, with VC-backing, was first delivered to customers in Feb 2008.

In early 2007, after a chance encounter with the girlfriend of then-Quantum Technologies CEO Alan Niedzwiecki, Henrik Fisker and Niedzwiecki decided to meet for lunch to discuss the possibility of launching an electric car based on the Quantum drivetrain. In late Summer of that year, Fisker Automotive was officially born as a joint venture between Fisker Coachbuild and Quantum.

The idea at the time was ambitious, exciting, and perhaps even a little threatening to potential competitors. A little over a year after Henrik Fisker did design work for Musk’s company, Tesla sued Fisker (Jalopnik called it the world’s most expensive girl fight) for breach of contract and allegedly using the design work to raise funds from venture capitalists and launch a company. The suit went to arbitration, and the arbitrator sided with Fisker.

The heart of Fisker’s business model was in that early deal with Quantum. The idea was to design a gorgeous car, and have suppliers like Quantum provide the technology because off-the-shelf parts from suppliers would help keep costs down.

But there were problems with this strategy: Sometimes, those parts had to be custom-made to fit the design vision, which resulted in higher prices for Fisker. Other times, parts were delivered late or, worse, faulty, but Fisker was locked in to those supplier relationships. Sources close to Fisker have also said that many of the parts were owned by the suppliers themselves, so Fisker didn’t own a lot of the internal technology.

Compare that approach with Tesla‘s strategy: Tesla has invested millions of dollars to amass electric car intellectual property. It can make money selling its core technology to other large auto makers like Toyota and Daimler, and a decent amount of Tesla’s value is in its tech IP.

Toyota’s electric RAV-4 has Tesla tech inside.

Indeed, Fisker’s business model wasn’t the type that funders in the Valley typically like — it’s the polar opposite of the ‘Intel inside’ approach. That so many investors were so eager to back the company has left many in the electric car and tech industries scratching their heads over the years. “It would have only taken a couple a phone calls to industry veterans to have prevented all of this,” says electric car advocate Chelsea Sexton, adding “there’s no excuse for not doing homework. It appears none was done.”

Fast forward to the end of 2012, when Fisker was desperately searching for a lifeline to help it survive, and was bidding itself to Chinese auto giants. Media reports have said, and I’ve heard as well, that the Chinese firms were partly scared off after they took a look under the hood and found that Fisker didn’t own much of its own technology.

Funding an electric car startup from scratch

One of the things Fisker will be most remembered for is the huge amount of capital it tapped into — the at least $1.2 billion it raised and the close to $200 million loan it received from the government.

When Fisker first showed off the Karma at the Detroit Auto Show in January 2008, Kleiner Perkins investors were front and center. Lane told the Wall Street Journal that their early investment in Fisker was more than $10 million and was one of the firm’s bigger investments at the time. Lane also said that the Fisker deal was one of the first in which former Vice President and Kleiner advisor Al Gore provided advice.

But those funds were just the initial drop in the bucket for what Fisker would ask for to grow and produce its cars. In the following years, Fisker raised venture rounds of around $65 million and $86 million. But venture firms couldn’t supply all of the funds for building an electric car, which can cost a billion dollars.

Part of the answer came from the U.S. government. When President Obama took office in 2009, he pledged to support electric cars and low-emission vehicles. His administration used the massive stimulus package to create green jobs and build a so-called clean energy economy. But even before that, a program called the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing, or ATVM, was created in 2007 and funded by Congress in 2008 and offered loans for companies making vehicles in the U.S. that had better mileage or reduced dependency on foreign oil.

In the summer of 2009, the first wave of ATVM conditional loans were announced, and went to Nissan, Ford and Tesla. Soon after, Fisker itself got approval for a conditional loan of $529 million. Fisker’s goal at that time was to produce 11,000 to 15,000 Karmas per year by September 2011, and 75,000 to 100,000 Project Ninas (later called the Atlantic) in 2012. The DOE ended up only delivering about $200 million of that loan after Fisker didn’t meet milestones for its Karma. Fisker delivered none of its Ninas, later called the Atlantic.

Much of the political reporting that will come out on Fisker, as well as a planned upcoming hearing on April 24, will likely focus on how Fisker got approval from the DOE. Was there cronysim, and did Gore play a role? In the past I’ve looked into rumors suggesting Fisker got the loan because it agreed to build a factory in Vice President Joe Biden’s home state and deliver Delaware green jobs. I’ve never found a direct connection there.

But I would imagine that, as with Solyndra, the DOE and the administration trusted the company’s backers and liked the idea of a beautifully designed, American-made electric car. Fisker fit into their thesis of using public funds to stimulate the clean-energy economy and create green jobs.

Joe Biden speaking at Solyndra’s ground breaking in August 2010

The broker

Getting the conditional loan was a key turning point for Fisker. It gave the company clout and the ability to raise additional funds. Soon after Fisker received the loan agreement, it started working more closely with a broker in Chicago called Advanced Equities.

Over the course of three years, according to my sources, brokers at Advanced Equities raised somewhere between $600 million and $800 million of Fisker’s over $1 billion in funding. The sources say Advanced Equities sold Fisker shares to over a thousand wealthy individuals. These aren’t professional investors that are used to taking on startup risk; they are people who did well in life and wanted to invest in the tech-driven dream of a sleek electric car.

One of those investors was DiCaprio, and numerous sources close to the company have told me that Kleiner Perkins partners Doerr and Lane put millions of dollars of their own money into Fisker. Another person that Fisker listed as a Director on a funding filing in late 2011 was Timothy Shriver. In a recorded internal sales call with Advanced Equity brokers from early 2010 that we’ve obtained, Advanced Equities co-founders tell their brokers that the Fisker opportunity is such a good one that they should bring the deal to their best customers.

Of course, many of the investors through Advanced Equities weren’t household names in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Chicago’s prepaid college saving’s fund, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, invested $10 million. An investor named Daniel Wray invested $210,000, and later sued the company and its broker.

Fisker’s venture backers commonly pitched in to help Advanced Equities. Sources tell me that it wasn’t unusual for investment calls with Advanced Equities and potential investors to feature Kleiner’s Lane, as well as NEA’s Scott Sandell, sharing Fisker’s vision.

If you asked venture capitalists in the Valley around that time what they thought about Advanced Equities, a common response was that it didn’t have a very good reputation — “snake oil salesmen” was the term often used. I’ve long wondered why Kleiner and NEA would actively work with a broker that had a weak reputation. Advanced Equities brokers, for their part, made millions of dollars in sales commissions from these deals.

It wasn’t until December 2011 and into 2012 that the more dubious efforts of Advanced Equities became clearer to Fisker’s hundreds of investors. The last few hundred million dollars of Advanced Equities’ fund raising for Fisker, starting with the D-1 round, was what brokers call “pay to play.” As Fisker was running into technical, delivery and political problems, its valuation was quickly declining. But the company still needed more money, so the brokers went back to its current investors and said: Unless you give this more, your current shares will be diluted and your preferred stock will be converted to common stock.

It was essentially a gun to their heads. This is why investor Wray sued Fisker in February 2012, alleging he was on the receiving end of this tactic. In his lawsuit, he says Advanced Equities sent him a letter dated Jan. 18, 2012, stating that he needed to decide if he wanted to invest in Fisker’s next round, and pay around $84,000 by Jan. 27, 2012 — a little over a week from receiving the letter. He also says that Advanced Equities assured him that he would have anti-dilution protection. According to the audio clip from Advanced Equities’ internal sales call in early 2010, Advanced Equity leaders say that the Fisker deal will “suffer no dilution,” and was “a dream scenario.”

That dream would soon end. In September 2012 after Fisker closed on $1.2 billion in funding, the bulk of it organized by Advanced Equities, the SEC charged the broker with misleading investors when it raised money for another company back in 2009 and 2010 (Bloom Energy). Advanced settled, agreeing to pay $1 million, and its co-founders were personally fined. Two months later Advanced Equities closed up shop.

The public problems start

In the summer of 2011, Fisker cars finally start rolling off the production line — Lane got one of the first, and so did DiCaprio, Gore and other luminaries. By October, Fisker said about 40 Karmas had been shipped to the U.S. from the factory in Finland, and before the year was out, at least 200 people had Karmas.

But this was still a lower number than expected — delayed regulatory approval was part of the problem. As a result of the delays, Fisker’s battery supplier, A123 Systems, had to lower its yearly revenue guidance.

Ray Lane’s Fisker Karma, Summer 2011

At the end of the year, a dark cloud appeared over Fisker’s celebrity parade. In December, 239 Fiskers were recalled because of a faulty battery hose clamp. The news was alarming, but Tesla had faced the same type of recalls in its early days, and so customers and the media were somewhat forgiving.

Then another red flag: As the ball dropped on 2011, I noticed that Fisker was quietly raising more money using Advanced Equities. That seemed unusual because the company was now delivering its cars, meaning it could bring in revenue, and it had already raised so much. It would take another month for me to figure out why.

Fisker in February 2012 confirmed media reports that its DOE loan had been frozen after $192 million because it hadn’t hit the milestones with its Karma. The last payment Fisker had received was all the way back in May 2011. Many of Fisker’s investors are now wondering why the DOE wasn’t more vocal about the frozen loan when it happened back then, as they had continued to fund the company based on the assumption that the DOE loan was still moving forward.

Regardless, the confirmation of the frozen loan kicked off one of the worst years — both self-inflicted and just plain bad luck — for a startup I have ever seen.

Founder Henrik Fisker stepped down as CEO, and he was replaced by an auto executive from Chrysler. Six months later that executive was replaced by a third CEO, who previously worked on the Volt at GM. Fisker stopped work on its second car and laid off all the workers in its Delaware factory. (When this story was published, the DOE still has a note on its ATVM page saying Fisker created 2,000 permanent jobs in Wilmington, Del.)

In the spring of 2012, Consumer Reports bought a Karma, and when it broke down after less than 200 miles, the magazine understandably gave it one of the worst reviews in automotive history. One of the problems with the Consumer Reports’ test car involved the battery. But the battery issue turned out to be much more widespread that just the review car, and Fisker’s battery supplier decided to replace faulty battery cells to the tune of $55 million.

Later that year, A123 Systems itself went bankrupt, causing more problems for Fisker. Fisker claimed that A123 Systems owed it $140 million, but a bankruptcy settlement reduced that to a paltry $15 million. Chinese giant Wanxiang wound up buying A123 Systems; adding insult to injury for Fisker, sources have told me that Wanxiang also looked at, but seems to have passed on investing in or buying the electric car company.

That summer, Fisker also recalled a cooling fan after it caused a slow-burning fire in a Karma in Woodside, Calif. Watch the disturbing video of a fireman putting out the flames. In hindsight, Fisker is lucky no one was killed while driving its vehicles.

Then there was the just plain terrible luck for the ironically named Karma: Super Storm Sandy wiped out 338 of its Karmas in storage in New Jersey. The cars first drowned, and then caught on fire — salt water damage caused a short circuit that was spread to other cars by high winds, Fisker said at the time.

With all of this happening in public — and in a presidential election year — Fisker’s struggles became highly politicized. The company was mentioned numerous times in presidential debates and speeches leading up to the election. Republican nominee Romney called Fisker and other DOE-supported companies losers.

Where did all the money go?

Fisker had a phenomenal amount of funding in its coffers — so where did all the money go? It’s no doubt expensive to launch a car company, but the way Fisker spent the money didn’t seem to create much lasting value.

The company didn’t seem to invest substantially in technology innovation or tech IP, and seemed to spend a disproportionate amount on suppliers. For example, numerous sources have told me that the company paid upfront for 15,000 of some of the parts for its planned 15,000 Karmas. It ended up only selling around 2,000 of the cars. I’ve also heard that Fisker paid some funds upfront to have BMW make engines for the 100,000 Nina cars it hoped to produce — in the end, Fisker didn’t deliver a single Nina.

Costs to build each Karma also creeped up because the company missed its volume targets, and because engineering had to change designs around supplier constraints. No wonder the company ended up adding $20,000 to its initial sale price.

Expensive hires may also have sucked away chunks of Fisker’s funding: Sources I’ve talked to say that Fisker filled the upper levels of the company with seasoned auto executives from Detroit. At the high point of Fisker, the company had around 300 employees, plus dozens of contract staff. Bringing in a certain amount of the old guard could help a car startup ramp up quickly, and also impress potential investors with “industry names.” But those people are also used to big auto-industry budgets that included extensive travel and salaries — that’s the opposite life of a tech startup.

The end

The bottom line for Fisker: It sucked down over a billion dollars and delivered around 2,000 cars to customers that now have few places to turn if those cars have mechanical problems.

At Kleiner Perkins, the dust is still settling. Reuters reported earlier this year that Kleiner partner Doerr apologized to his limited partners (groups that put money into VC funds) for a weak fund performance and promised to do better in the future. Lane has transitioned away from bringing in new investments for Kleiner’s future fund. Spooked by bad deals, venture firms across the board pulled back on cleantech investing by a third in 2012.

There are political repercussions, too. The DOE was on the hot seat when Solyndra went bankrupt, and now will be equally under scrutiny over Fisker. The ATVM program has essentially been frozen, and the DOE says that despite the fact that it has $16.6 billion remaining in the fund and seven applications pending, it will not award any more loans.

The worst part of the Fisker story could be the fallout for electric cars. Helping reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and lowering the carbon emissions of personal transportation is necessary. Introducing more electric cars is one way to do that. But with the industry in such a fragile, nascent stage, Fisker could wind up delivering the knock-out blow.

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Here’s the Ford video showing an employee talking about using 3D printers for prototype designs of a gearshift.

A Ford spokesman told me that while it’s tough to give an exact count on the number of employees who have the 3-D printers, the company has multiple locations at the company’s Dearborn, Mich. headquarters where hundreds of engineers have access. And at the carmaker’s Silicon Valley Lab in Palo Alto all employees have Makerbots. The most popular areas they are in use today at Ford are in the Vehicle Design and Infotronics group.

3D printing will change the distribution chain for manufactured goods

As devotees of the computer and broadband revolution may recall, both of these technologies were first deployed in the workplace and then trickled down into users’ homes. Remember the concept of Cyber Monday? That was a thing because people used to have to go into work to use their office broadband in order to buy stuff online. Now, despite the fact that 19 million Americans lack access to broadband, we still have embraced the consumer web.

The PC was a similar revolution that started with mainframes, then went to minicomputers and finally to desktops. With 3D printers I wonder if we’ll see similar adoption trends that we saw with the PC. PCs were very work-specific with software for productivity dominating, so when people purchased them they tended to do so for word processing, spreadsheets and other productivity related tasks. Those initial machines were also expensive, so you bought one because you needed it. Later, it became a hub for games and fun activities as well.

What’s killer app for 3D printing?

With 3D printers, which can cost less than $1,000, the common consumer may not see much need for one, yet. But all we need is the right killer app to intersect with the right price point and then the machines will become widespread. Some might argue that printing LEGO bricks are the killer app, but I kind of doubt it. My hunch is it may be more mundane, like someone building an open source library of common household parts that break, or a line of products whose parts could be replaced by parts created in a 3D printer. The printing technology and materials would also have to improve, although I’m certain with wider adoption this would happen.

And once we have common 3D printers in the home and office, that could signal a fundamental change in the distribution of physical goods, much like the development of the web was a fundamental change in the delivery of digital content. Instead of buying new furniture, we buy new replication materials and download the designs over the Internet. If the replication materials are recyclable, you might be able to change your home’s decor in a few weeks and consume ever more products at a lower price point.

We’re not there yet, but imagining how the widespread adoption of capable 3D printers could change the world doesn’t just stop with industrial designers or hobbyists. One day you might print out your flatware, your trash cans or even your next computer. If you think this is nuts, just ponder the line from the minicomputer to your smartphone. Or just go watch one of my favorite videos showing how quickly technology advances.

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Newer models are also more tied into other cars or to outside infrastructure and to the ubiquitous cloud than you might think, according to speakers at GigaOM’s Roadmap Conference on Monday. In that scenario, cars are just one more set of “things” that are part of the “internet of things” scenario. The only issue with that is that cars — the ultimate mobile devices — can go 90 mph and there are obvious concerns about how connectivity effects that. Distractions flowing in from the outside world, or a cloud, are just not a good idea.

In short: Infotainment is one thing. Safety, efficiency and traffic management are another, Paul Mascarenas, CTO and VP of research and innovation for Ford said on a Roadmap panel about the connected-car-as-computing-platform.

“From the Ford perspective, there are different levels of security in the vehicle — there’s partitioning around the power train and safety systems because it does concern our customers,” he said.

It’s great to think of the ability to stream down real-time traffic information or send up car diagnostics to the car maker, but that stream, obviously, has to be segregated from the music and podcasts that the driver or passengers are streaming or downloading to entertain themselves.

“Streaming content is cordoned off from the other systems — Ford has to control the apps and make sure it knows what’s doing on,” said Kevin Dallas, GM of Microsoft’s Windows Embedded effort. The two panelists said this is the fifth anniversary of the Ford/Microsoft collaboration on Sync which brings voice control to some automotive control functions. More on Sync here.

Over time, there might be ways to rationalize all that connectivity. “Right now, the connectivity with Sync is through your mobile device, so you’re using your regular data plan for that but I like the idea of the car being another device on a shared data plan. That might give us flexibility to provide a user experience where your car is like your second home or second office where you seamlessly share content,” Mascarenas said. That scenario would involve a single data account tied to a person rather than to a device or a vehicle.

The key to all of this is simplicity and safety.

If, you’re like many people these days, you’re putting a lot of your content into the cloud, where you can access it from your tablet, phone or PC. “There’s no reason your car should be any different,” said Dallas.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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At GigaOM we fundamentally think that intelligent and simple design is one of the key solutions to simplifying this complexity, and creating a meaningful experience out of the connected world. Picture the elegant designs of Apple’s new iPhone 5, the Nest learning thermostat, Instagram’s mobile app, or Pinterest’s visual web experience — the leading web sites, mobile apps and connected gadgets are putting design first and foremost. To highlight this thesis, we’re holding our second annual RoadMap event on November 5th in San Francisco (tickets here). Some of our speakers include the CEO of Instagram Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Tumblr, David Karp, designers Yves Behar and Tony Fadell, and web pioneers like Obvious CEO and former Twitter CEO Evan Williams. Full speaker list here and we’ll be announcing more speakers in the coming weeks.

Pinterest, and its visual-dominant design, and social sharing elements have created a new paradigm for how users want the web to look: beautiful and emotional. And it turns out this design is also delivering a new type of e-commerce ecosystem. Instagram created a $1 billion valued company by enabling its community to make every day photos look gorgeous, and share those photos with friends. Social networks, and social mobile networks were not new ideas before Instagram and Pinterest, but these companies used smart design to create undiscovered value.

All our devices, including our cars, are getting a wireless data connection, and our content and data will be streaming among our hardware. But more important than giving people access to all this data everywhere all the time, devices will have to be designed to deliver just the data we want, and when we want it. Designers like Yves Behar, Scott Wilson and Tony Fadell are creating such gadgets — including wearables and body sensors — that use smart algorithms that add value and meaning to our connected lives. Ford is creating a connected car experience using these principles. Hear from these three designers at RoadMap as well as the CTO of Ford, Paul Mascarenas.

Design and experience have turned into a strategic focus for tech companies. Apple is now the world’s most valuable company, and its influence is being felt across the tech sector. Startups like AirBnB and Nest are being founded by designers.

Even looking to the creative sectors can help startups create products and develop stories around those products. Oren Jacob, the former CTO of Pixar, and now the CEO of ToyTalk, and Bobby Podesta, the former head animator of Pixar and now Chief Creative at ToyTalk will kick off our morning at RoadMap with insights into how to use storyboards to create inspiration.

We’ll announce more speakers at RoadMap in the coming weeks. We’re also creating a physical book on this topic to give away to all of the attendees of RoadMap! We have a limited supply of tickets, so register today for RoadMap on November 5th in San Francisco.

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GE, Ford and the University of Michigan are working on developing a tiny sensor system for a battery that when combined with analytics can extend the range of a battery in an electric vehicle. There are already sensors on the market that are trying to do something similar, but current sensors are too big to be able to fit in certain areas of the battery, says GE. GE will develop the wee system and pair it with real-time modelling of a battery’s behavior.

Such a system, which the group recently won a $3.1 million grant from the Department of Energy to build, could provide a substantial boost to electric car batteries. The range of a car battery — which is also chiefly tied to its cost — is the biggest problem for electric cars today. One hundred miles is about the average of the current electric cars on the market. The team has three years to create the first working version.

Sophisticated battery management system technology — which uses software in a car or on the power grid or on a cell phone — can help use batteries efficiently. Electric car companies Coda and Tesla Motors tout their battery management systems as some of their more important intellectual property. Other startups like GELI want to create a sort of operating system for batteries for the power grid.

Then there’s a startup like Pellion, which is using computer modelling to test out 10,000 potential cathode materials to fit with its magnesium anode for its battery. Basically they’re using a computer as a really smart brain to figure out the battery chemistry problem.

Because battery chemistry is such a hard problem, it’s pretty natural that we’re turning to the power of analytics, big data, cloud computing and all those other fun IT buzz words to solve it.

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Primus Power’s flow battery

The Department of Energy’s program that gives grants to early-stage energy projects — called ARPA-E — has allocated another $43 million for 19 battery projects, including grants for futuristic batteries made of new chemical mixes, using brand new architectures and utilizing nanotechnology. The ARPA-E program has been aggressively funding next-generation battery technologies over the years, and though these are small grants, the amount of innovation happening is substantial.

The funds go to projects that are very early stage, and are supposed to help bring disruptive R&D closer to commercialization. While Japanese and Korean conglomerates dominate the industry of producing small format lithium ion batteries for laptops and cell phones, these next-gen batteries are mostly targeted for electric cars and the power grid. Some of these projects also aren’t strictly traditional batteries, and a couple are flow batteries, which are large tanks of chemicals that flow into a containerized system and provide energy storage for the power grid (see Primus Power’s flow battery pictured).

Notable winners of the funds include big companies like Ford, GE, and Eaton, small startups like Khosla Ventures-backed Pellion, and projects out of the labs of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Here’s some of the winners (for the full list of 19 go here):

• Ford: $3.13 million for a very precise battery testing device that can improve forecasting of battery-life.
• GE Global Research: $3.13 million for sensors thin-film sensors that can detect and monitor temperature and surface pressure for each cell within a battery pack.
• Eaton: $2.50 million for a system that optimizes the power and operation of hybrid electric vehicles.
• Pellion Technologies: $2.50 million for the startup’s long range battery for electric vehicles.
• Sila Nanotechnologies: $1.73 million for the startup’s lithium ion electric car battery that it says has double the capacity of current lithium ion batteries.
• Xilectric: $1.73 million to “reinvent Thomas Edison’s battery chemistries for today’s electric vehicles.”
• Energy Storage Systems: $1.73 million for a flow battery for the grid, with an electrolyte made of low cost iron, and using a next-gen cell design.
• Battelle Memorial Institute: $600K for a sensor to monitor the internal environment of a lithium-ion battery in real-time.

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Although both cars and smartphones are filled with sensors, the solution GM is testing doesn’t need any of them. Instead, GM is banking on wireless connectivity; specifically the Wi-Fi Direct standard. Conceptually, cars would be actively looking for Wi-Fi Direct smartphones — and the owners of those devices — and could signal an imminent collision in advance by comparing the two signals up to 656 feet apart.

The concept is similar to Ford’s own vehicle detection system that uses a different Wi-Fi standard, 802.11p, to help cars detect each other. These Wi-Fi implementations work without access points on a peer-to-peer basis, so they can be used anywhere. Pedestrians will of course need to keep their Wi-Fi radio active on their smartphones for GM’s solution to work but I don’t think that will be an issue.

Wi-Fi generally uses less battery life than mobile broadband radios, for one thing. And we’re clearly moving towards heterogeneous networks — or hetnets — with seamless Wi-Fi offload from traditional cellular networks.

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For now, the amount of natural gas trucks for commercial fleets will outpace sales of natural gas cars to consumers in most markets, as there just aren’t many natural gas consumer cars available, the infrastructure for fueling such cars isn’t widespread, and consumers haven’t shown all that much interest in these cars yet. A few countries in the world, however, do have significant amounts of natural gas cars on the roads already, particularly for taxi use, including Argentina, Brazil, Iran, and Egypt, says Pike Research. In addition, Pakistan will have 2.7 million natural gas vehicles on the roads by the end of 2012.

In the U.S., though, a renewed push from companies and the government could lead to more innovation to deliver natural gas cars to consumers. Last week, the Department of Energy’s high-risk, early stage program — ARPA-E — announced a new project that will give $30 million in grants to companies, university labs and startups building the next-generation of natural gas vehicle technology. Grant winners included GE, Ford, Eaton, SRI, Other Lab, Texas A&M, Pacific Northwest National Labs, and the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

GE is using the grant to build a natural gas refueling station for homes that will be cheaper and can refuel more quickly than what’s currently available. Other Lab is using the grant to work on a high-pressure natural gas tank that uses small diameter tubes tightly wound into a tank shape, like intestines.

As GigaOM Pro cleantech analyst Adam Lesser wrote earlier this year, all this innovation is all being spurred by super low cost, and abundant natural gas in the U.S. Natural gas dipped below $2 per thousand cubic feet in April, the first time in a decade, driven by the expansion in hydraulic fracking, a mild winter and the fact that the U.S. market is largely closed to outside demand because we cannot yet export natural gas at scale. That makes today’s natural gas prices of around $2.40, the same as about $14 per barrel of oil, or $1.50 less per gallon when compared to gasoline. And natural gas emits fewer emissions when burned compared to oil.

Image courtesy of GE, Gerry Dincher.

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