That $30k car could be an EV, too, and be part of the backup power system.
In Australia, $10k would buy not only a ton of solar panels but also batteries. The US has decided to make solar and batteries at the home super expensive, unnecessarily.
What you've shown is that there is a crossover where a gas car + generator beats an electric car.
That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".
I have a champion tri-fuel that cost < $1k which runs essentially my whole house. It's plumbed into my natural gas so as long as that is up (it has never gone out), I don't even have to refill it.
See, your problem is assuming that the EV is 80-100K. Or that the ICE car is 30K. This is a contrived comparison. An average new car is well over 30K. And I bought a brand new Lightning for 50K. Being able to use 131kWh of battery for things other than driving is a pleasant bonus, and I prefer it to having a gas generator I have to keep maintained and store fuel for.
You an drive almost every EV that has that feature too.
Or rather, you can take half of the difference in price and install some proper PV + battery system in your house that can be used when there's isn't a catastrophe too.
Sounds like you're desperately searching for a problem where a specific make and model of a car can fit as a solution. That doesn't make the car any better than it is.
It is an emergency. I'll compromise in an emergency. My fridge can sit unpowered for a couple hours while I'm driving, and that is all I need to drive anyway.
If there is a major outage most bosses understand that you won't be working normally because you need to deal with the emergency.
The power being delivered on wheels that go with you is the whole point. A permanently affixed generator doesn't help get power out into the middle of the field when I need to do things like weld farm equipment. There are plenty of solutions out there, but the power source and truck carrying the tools being one and the same would be quite attractive if the aforementioned problems were solved.
This is obviously not the primary reason to get a Telsa. But a full home generator will run you $15k to buy and install where i live, and a whole bunch of hassle to install with permits. I don't have one because my power doesn't go out that much. But if i'm otherwise on the fence about a vehicle, I would absolutely want this as a feature.
Maybe a generator sized to run a regular home in perpetuity, but I bet it's much, much less than that to have an electrician install a GenerLink and to buy a regular portable generator just powerful enough to run your fridge and freezer.
In our area, when a storm hit, the roads washed out, so the generators ran out of propane. Then the local propane companies ran out of delivery truck capacity because of the demand surge. Finally, the regional distributors ran out of propane.
Our solar panels kept the fridge running, but we were heating the house with a wood stove (it was very cloudy, so we were getting maybe an hour of sun a day). If we had bidirectional house charging, we could have had warm showers + used the heat pump: We would have been able to fast-charge the car at 100-200kw in town. The house can limp through 20-30 hours on ~ 25kwh, so the charger would charge the house at a few days per hour, including losses from driving to and from town + round tripping through the battery, and also running the house heat pump.
None of the other people around here stayed online. Some propane-dependent people had no electricity for > 2 weeks (with rationing, they managed to keep their generators online for about a week, and PG&E took three weeks to fix their lines).
This was in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, so better-than-puerto-rico infrastructure, but only just.
This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. An electric company that does not have the capacity to respond quickly to natural disasters and propane delivery infrastructure that doesn't have the reserves to weather such an event. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society. How do we tolerate 2 weeks? I bet the CEOs of these companies are not going without electricity for 2 weeks.
We are far away from, but slowly approaching, Mad Max levels of institutional failure, and everyone seems to treat it as normal and unavoidable.
> This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society.
Like the storm surge walls at Fukushima, all infrastructure is designed with a certain size of storm or event in mind based on historical averages and outliers.
Climate change is throwing all that to shit.
Your comment says plain and clear you’ve never lived through a “once in 100 years” level event more than once in a decade, and you don’t realize how much it would cost to upgrade what we’ve spent ~100 years building.
It’s trillions, just to get started.
I also wonder if you’d be fine with increasing taxes to pay for all that, or if you already complain about “high taxes”
You forgot "higher maintenance" that goes along with seldom-used things that run on gas. That gas doesn't drain itself, and if you don't do that, well, Amazon has carbs for Honda generators for $30. For something I might use once a year. No, thanks.
But can they also be driven?
You can drive a $30K car and have a $10K backup power system.
An $80K-100K car that replaces the two isn't some genius purchase.
Sure you can spend all the money you want on a luxury toy, nothing wrong with it, but it's weird trying to justify it as anything but that.
That $30k car could be an EV, too, and be part of the backup power system.
In Australia, $10k would buy not only a ton of solar panels but also batteries. The US has decided to make solar and batteries at the home super expensive, unnecessarily.
What you've shown is that there is a crossover where a gas car + generator beats an electric car.
That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".
9 replies →
An Ioniq 5 is not a $80-100k car, though. The difference in cost between it and an equivalent gas car is less than $10k.
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I have a champion tri-fuel that cost < $1k which runs essentially my whole house. It's plumbed into my natural gas so as long as that is up (it has never gone out), I don't even have to refill it.
2 replies →
> An $80K-100K car
See, your problem is assuming that the EV is 80-100K. Or that the ICE car is 30K. This is a contrived comparison. An average new car is well over 30K. And I bought a brand new Lightning for 50K. Being able to use 131kWh of battery for things other than driving is a pleasant bonus, and I prefer it to having a gas generator I have to keep maintained and store fuel for.
Yes. Many electric cars and trucks have this feature.
You an drive almost every EV that has that feature too.
Or rather, you can take half of the difference in price and install some proper PV + battery system in your house that can be used when there's isn't a catastrophe too.
No, but because they can't be driven, your house stays powered when someone goes for a drive.
you're inventing the alternator from first principles
> But can they also be driven?
Sounds like you're desperately searching for a problem where a specific make and model of a car can fit as a solution. That doesn't make the car any better than it is.
No, that's what my car is for. You can't drive your cybertruck when it's running your refrigerator. Wrong tool for the job.
It is an emergency. I'll compromise in an emergency. My fridge can sit unpowered for a couple hours while I'm driving, and that is all I need to drive anyway.
If there is a major outage most bosses understand that you won't be working normally because you need to deal with the emergency.
3 replies →
The power being delivered on wheels that go with you is the whole point. A permanently affixed generator doesn't help get power out into the middle of the field when I need to do things like weld farm equipment. There are plenty of solutions out there, but the power source and truck carrying the tools being one and the same would be quite attractive if the aforementioned problems were solved.
2 replies →
What if they also made the cybertruck capable of refrigeration.
1 reply →
This is obviously not the primary reason to get a Telsa. But a full home generator will run you $15k to buy and install where i live, and a whole bunch of hassle to install with permits. I don't have one because my power doesn't go out that much. But if i'm otherwise on the fence about a vehicle, I would absolutely want this as a feature.
Maybe a generator sized to run a regular home in perpetuity, but I bet it's much, much less than that to have an electrician install a GenerLink and to buy a regular portable generator just powerful enough to run your fridge and freezer.
In our area, when a storm hit, the roads washed out, so the generators ran out of propane. Then the local propane companies ran out of delivery truck capacity because of the demand surge. Finally, the regional distributors ran out of propane.
Our solar panels kept the fridge running, but we were heating the house with a wood stove (it was very cloudy, so we were getting maybe an hour of sun a day). If we had bidirectional house charging, we could have had warm showers + used the heat pump: We would have been able to fast-charge the car at 100-200kw in town. The house can limp through 20-30 hours on ~ 25kwh, so the charger would charge the house at a few days per hour, including losses from driving to and from town + round tripping through the battery, and also running the house heat pump.
None of the other people around here stayed online. Some propane-dependent people had no electricity for > 2 weeks (with rationing, they managed to keep their generators online for about a week, and PG&E took three weeks to fix their lines).
This was in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, so better-than-puerto-rico infrastructure, but only just.
This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. An electric company that does not have the capacity to respond quickly to natural disasters and propane delivery infrastructure that doesn't have the reserves to weather such an event. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society. How do we tolerate 2 weeks? I bet the CEOs of these companies are not going without electricity for 2 weeks.
We are far away from, but slowly approaching, Mad Max levels of institutional failure, and everyone seems to treat it as normal and unavoidable.
> This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society.
Like the storm surge walls at Fukushima, all infrastructure is designed with a certain size of storm or event in mind based on historical averages and outliers.
Climate change is throwing all that to shit.
Your comment says plain and clear you’ve never lived through a “once in 100 years” level event more than once in a decade, and you don’t realize how much it would cost to upgrade what we’ve spent ~100 years building.
It’s trillions, just to get started.
I also wonder if you’d be fine with increasing taxes to pay for all that, or if you already complain about “high taxes”
You forgot "higher maintenance" that goes along with seldom-used things that run on gas. That gas doesn't drain itself, and if you don't do that, well, Amazon has carbs for Honda generators for $30. For something I might use once a year. No, thanks.