Home of the Future: The Smart Garage

Forget the dirty, oily garage of the past -- soon it will be one of the most technologically-connected rooms in your home.

While oil — and gas — prices have been steadily falling over the past months, there’s no doubt that today’s consumers are demanding high-efficiency vehicles, such as gas-electric mix, fuel cell or even pure electric. Some are even calling hybrid sales a recession-defying phenomena, though recent sales have started to fall flat.

Nevertheless, the home of the future will certainly feature changes in one room that barely anyone could have foreseen even a couple of years ago. Soon, garages will become “smart.”

According to Michael Brylawski, cofounder and leader of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Mobility + Vehicle Efficiency (MOVE) Team, “”This is where your car, the house, and the electricity system meet.”

Not too soon in the future, your electric-hyrbid car will plug into power and data stations at home, near the office and even parking garages for recharging. While the initial push of energy will be from the grid to the car’s batteries, it is expected that those same batteries will serve another purpose — to store energy for the overall grid and serve as a way for power companies to smooth out the naturally fluctuating supply of energy.

In addition, that same connection could interface with computers that monitor the “health” of your car and its systems, serve as a way to monitor diagnostics and driving history and even be a way to sync inhome and onboard systems like media libraries (music and video), an integrated phone’s address book and downloads to GPS-driven services like restaurant guides.