Hyundai Motor Group announced on August 20 that it has picked Kaluza as its global smart charging partner. The software goes inside the Kia App and the myHyundai App, launching in the UK first, then Australia, with vehicle-to-grid services planned from 2027.
What the driver gets is a readiness time and a preference: be full by seven, charge when it is cheap, charge when it is clean. Kaluza's platform works out the rest.
One detail from the corporate record matters for reading this. Kaluza is owned by OVO, and its ultimate parent is E.ON. OVO Charge, the third app named in the announcement, is therefore the same house. This is an energy supplier's software arm being adopted by a car maker, not a neutral vendor winning a bake-off.
Where this sits relative to the charge point
The charge point is not in the story. That is the point of the story.
Smart charging can live in three places. It can sit in the charger, which is where most manufacturers first put it and where it stays stuck at one brand. It can sit in the backend that manages the charger over OCPP, which is where a site with mixed hardware has to put it. Or it can sit in the car and the car's app, which is where this deal puts it.
The third option is attractive to a car maker for obvious reasons. It works regardless of what is on the wall, it needs no relationship with whoever installed the charger, and it keeps the driver inside the brand's app. It is also why energy and EMS companies have been watching this shift for a while: if the vehicle decides when it charges, the layer that used to make that decision has less to do.
What it does not solve
A car-app layer optimises one car. It does not know what else is on the connection.
That distinction is not academic on any site with more than a couple of charge points. A depot, an office car park or an apartment building has a fixed grid connection and several vehicles arriving at once, and the constraint is the total, not any single session. Deciding that this car should charge at three in the morning because power is cheap does nothing about the fact that eleven cars want the same three in the morning. Something still has to hold the site limit, shed and restore across every charge point, and it has to do that for the cars that are not Hyundais and the chargers that are not in the deal.
There is also a coverage question. This launches in the UK and Australia. V2G is dated 2027, which in a market where bidirectional charging keeps slipping is a plan rather than a date, and the EU grid code that will govern V2G equipment has not been adopted yet.
The honest read for a site operator
Nothing about this changes what a car park needs this year. If anything it argues for keeping the site layer separate from any one brand's app: a vehicle-side optimiser is one more thing that will try to schedule your connection, and the site still has to arbitrate.
That arbitration is what load management on an OCPP backend does, across whatever mix of hardware and vehicles turns up. A driver optimising their own cost in the Kia app and a site holding its connection limit are not in conflict, but they are different jobs, and only one of them can be done from inside a car maker's app.
Sources: Kaluza, "Kaluza and Hyundai Motor Group announce global EV charging partnership", August 20, 2026. Ownership and company figures from our own account records, verified August 28, 2026.