Abstract: The present invention includes a system for controlling a motor vehicle. A combination of hardware and software that is modular, redundant and upgradeable communicates with a plurality of vehicle components. The hardware and software combination also communicates with remote computing resources. The system includes a display in the vehicle. The invention also includes an electronic communications and control module that has hardware and software cooperating to facilitate operation of a motor vehicle by using the protocol layer to translate between the device drivers and other software. The hardware includes several identical, hot-swappable circuit boards and one or more communication devices. Both the software and the hardware of the module are upgradeable. And the module may use communication devices to off load computation or storage for one or more vehicle components onto remote computing resources.

Abstract: The present invention includes, among other embodiments, a system embedded in a vehicle including several inputs. The inputs may include one hard coded data, data from sensors on the vehicle, data from external sensors, user coded data, data received from remote databases, data received from broadcast data steams or data that has been accumulated during use of the vehicle. The inputs provide information regarding vehicle speed, motor rpm, motor torque, battery voltage, battery current, and battery charge level, etc. The embedded system also includes a processor unit that receives information from the plurality of inputs and calculates at least an expected vehicle range. The results of any calculations completed by the processing unit is supplied as an output to a display unit, which then displays the information to the user.