Last week at San Francisco’s City hall, Shai Agassi, the CEO electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place bombastically claimed that we’re close to the era of Car 2.0. Beyond using Silicon Valley buzzwords, Agassi is actually doing something about it. Better Place is building a $1 billion electric vehicle charging network in the Bay Area, working with supportive state and city policies.

What is Car 2.0 though? Next generation cars are going to be networked, to the power grid as well as to communication networks, and will be as easy to use as consumer electronics. For this reason, Silicon Valley is a fitting birthplace, as while its numerous vehicle startups build the machines themselves, its blooming IT industry is working on ways to bring innovation to the vehicles. As part of this effort companies like Tesla Motors and Better Place are putting some of the top minds in the industry to work on the project. In the case of the latter that includes CEO Agassi himself, who comes from SAP AG, Europe’s largest software enterprise.

Better Place is designing charging stations, battery swap stations and vehicle plug interfaces with the help of SF-based NewDealDesign, which will give a streamlined, easy demeanor to the stations.

The cars themselves will look similar to gas cars, save that they will plug not into a gas-pump, but into the stations which are about half the size of a parking meter, and will charge two cars at a time. They also sport software and a network link, and will calculate and distribute the load on the power grid. Better Place is one of several companies to work on similar technology. V2Green for instance is making them as well and will use cellular networks to pass info between the vehicle and utility. As cars have been getting more digital and computer-reliant of late, this direction only seems logical.

Better place is ultimately trying to build a ubiquitous, low-priced, efficient charging grid for “mass deployment,” and “not just for the rich and famous.” Until then, Silicon Valley is the prime testing ground for the fundamental concepts of Car 2.0.