This article is part of ISEN's series highlighting alumni in sustainability and energy. MORE PROFILES
Paving the way for the future of transportation
When discussing the long-term vision for General Motors, CEO Mary Barra often talks about “three zeros”—zero emissions, zero congestion, and zero accidents. In his role as Chief Technology Officer for GM’s car sharing brand Maven, Paul Pebbles directly targets these first two objectives.
“We’ve done some things that an automaker wouldn’t typically be accustomed to doing. We’ve taken more risks,” says Pebbles, who graduated from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in 1999. “Over the years, we’ve been learning in the marketplace alongside our customers about what’s working and what’s not working and then pivoting. That entrepreneur mindset is something I learned at Northwestern.”
When Pebbles started as CTO for Maven, the company only had about 10 employees. Now, just more than two years later, Maven is comprised of several hundred employees and thousands of automobiles in 14 cities across the country.
The company offers several products including a mobile app that allows users to find, rent, and unlock a nearby car using their phone. Another service, Maven Gig, is geared towards drivers of rideshare companies like Uber, Lyft, Roadie, Instacart, and GrubHub. With Maven Gig, drivers can rent a car from one week to up to a full year. And a growing portion of its cars run without gasoline.
“A healthy portion of the cars on our Gig platform are electric vehicles, and we hope to get to an even larger percent by the end of the year,” he says. “Between the electric charging, the app, and the GM vehicle itself, we’ve been able to do something people didn’t think was possible—to use electric vehicles for ridesharing. In terms of the energy and the environmental impact in the transportation sector, we’re charting new territory.”
“We’ve done some things that an automaker wouldn’t typically be accustomed to doing. We’ve taken more risks... That entrepreneur mindset is something I learned at Northwestern.” — Paul Pebbles (KSM '99), Maven Chief Technology Officer at General Motors
Pebbles and his team are making so much headway with deployment of electric vehicles that they’re stretching existing charging infrastructure to its limit in some areas of the country. “It’s forcing us to think of new solutions,” says Pebbles. In an effort to address the issue, the company recently partnered with EVgo, the nation’s largest network of public electric vehicle fast charging stations. Together, they’re building additional fast charging networks across the country, which can put up to 75 miles of range into an electric vehicle battery in just 30 minutes.
Pebbles’ passion for electric vehicles started in the late 2000s with the introduction of the Chevy Volt he was responsible for developing a number of electric vehicle technologies including GM’s mobile app that’s now available on millions of its cars. For a number of years, Pebbles was also responsible for GM’s smart grid efforts—demonstrating how electric vehicles could interact with the modernized electric grid.
“The demonstrations we did with Google, Duke Power, and others showed how electric vehicles could provide reliability to the grid while simultaneously creating revenue for our customers who sold their energy back to the utility,” Pebbles says. “We showcased what was possible. It kicked off the standards and related activities that are still in play today.”
Pebbles has remained involved with the Northwestern community since graduating from Kellogg. He has given lectures on campus and was on the board of NUvention: Energy, a course offered jointly by the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Institute of Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN) where students form interdisciplinary teams to develop a product and business plan in the cleantech industry.
To Northwestern graduates looking to learn from his career trajectory, Pebbles shared some words of wisdom:
“Be open to trying new things and learning new capabilities and technologies. Over the years, I’ve worked in a lot of different areas—from billing systems, to IT, to engineering, to marketing, to operations. I would recommend getting that broad experience of different functions and different types of learning. At the time, I didn’t realize where all that would lead, but now as the CTO of Maven I can go back to a lot of those previous experiences to help me do my job today.”
* Editor's Note, November 2022: Paul Pebbles is now Line of Business Owner of Service Solutions at General Motors.
This article is part of ISEN's series highlighting alumni in sustainability and energy. MORE PROFILES
