Comment by rurp
1 day ago
This seems like an awfully niche case, no? How often does someone lose power at home for days, while also having a nearby and accessible charging station that stays functional the whole time? Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap, or things are bad and widespread enough that they aren't driving down the street to recharge their vehicle.
Also very important: the cybertruck is not the only vehicle capable of doing that (the keywords are V2H and V2L, V2H is the more convenient — the car just plugs into the mains and acts as a house battery — while V2L means you have to go and plug your stuff to the car's mains outputs directly)
> Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap
TBF an EV car has an absolutely massive battery relative to the electric consumption of a house, unless you're using resistive heating all around. Especially if you ration use.
Here's Alex from Technology Connections testing powering things in his house from his Hyundai Ioniq 5.
https://youtu.be/yO5fJ8z66Z8
I live in an area prone to high winds and we occasionally have pre-planned power shutdowns (I think PSPS is the term).
My Ioniq 5 has been a godsend. No, it can't power the house without dorking around with my electrical panel. But we can run the fridge, dishwasher, a few standing lights and keep phones and computers full charged.
I used a similar setup to Alex's but with the outlet in the rear seat instead of the V2X connector. I will probably by the V2X connector since it supposedly hanldles higher power draw.
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TIL about his extra's channel, thanks!
We have a heat pump with SOCP 5, but are still using 30kWh per day now.
That's 2-3 days worth without changing your use pattern, which surely you would do if you expected a long blackout period?
On most modern EVs, that's at least 3 days worth of power if the vehicle is not being driven. Larger vehicles naturally have far larger batteries.
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Is that 30 kW each hour of the day or 30 kW per day?
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As soon as the Rivian has v2h I will buy
The value of a used 24 KWh battery used in, say, an old EV non-tesla car - $2000 (note this still has plenty of life left). Example: a 2013 Nissan Leaf
The value of the same, repurposed to a "powerwall" - $10k per 10 KWh
The value of it once attached to a "movable powerwall" - :) add a few more zeros
Clearly, I am in the wrong business...
You can get good batteries for a lot cheaper than a power wall. Just like when the Tesla family of companies tried to do home solar - big premium for the name.
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Batteries are cheap, an unsafe installation burning your house down, extremely expensive.
Best practice would be to build a separate structure and physically separate the battery from your house.
Most people (like me) don't have generators. But when I hear "oh, BTW this car can be a used as a generator for 48-72 hours in a power outage", that's a nice little selling point that might put me over the edge if i'm otherwise considering the car. No, this doesn't solve for Hurricane Katrina. But it does solve for a nor'easter.
My car is basically one big gas-powered generator that has the benefit of also not requiring a functional power station to refill itself.
It has other downsides, obviously. But the notion of "emergency power for your house" isn't really anything special.
It probably does though, unless you have stockpiled gas. If the power is down to the gas station, the pumps don't work.
My experience with power outages (after big summer storms, not a hurricane thank goodness) has been that my neighborhood is impacted, but that places nearby have power. They tend to restore commercial first, so the supercharger near me is up and running before my house.
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The Ford F150 Powerboost has an optional 7.2 kVA inverter, which I am not sure if there are any other vehicles that can do the same off a gas tank.
I am guessing that one of the use cases is a support unit to charge an EV just enough to get it to a charging station.
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Solar panels can refill it during the day, and the car can keep your fridge and heat pump running through the night.
Can you actually run home appliances from a regular ICE car? My furnace blower uses ~1800 watts when it kicks in.
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Mine, too. It's pretty great as a car. Gas goes in one hole, exhaust comes out of another, and the wheels go 'round and round. It's awesome.
As an electrical generator, it's really not very good. The alternator is rated at 120 Amps (bigger than many, smaller than others).
At 13.8v, that's only 1,656 Watts -- on a good day, with the engine wound up. But the engine won't be wound up. It will instead be idling. The output will be less than 1656 Watts.
It burns right around 0.6 gallons of gasoline per hour (ie 22kW!) while idling and doing ~nothing else. It holds 21 gallons of gas.
So the unachievable best-case of idling-and-doing-no-real-work means that if it starts with a full tank of fuel, it will run out in 35 hours.
And in the real world, it will be doing work since that's the whole point of the exercise. It will therefore use somewhat more than its do-nothing 0.6 gallons per hour idle consumption.
We can ignore the longevity issues of treating a gas-fired vehicle as a stationary generator (these are expensive parts that are getting abnormally heat-soaked) because this is a temporary solution to a temporary problem, but as a practical matter: I'll still need to fill it up with gas, however I do that[1], about every day.
And, sure: That can be a way to solve some problems. With a decent inverter stashed out of the weather, connected with appropriately-big cables, I can probably use it to run the gas-fired furnace, the fridge and freezer, some lights, and some digital entertainment. Maybe it can't run all of that at the same time, but I'm smart and I'll manage.
The gas-fired car probably is useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and fill it back up.
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Or: I could just plug stuff into an appropriate EV. It can sit there quietly being the giant battery that it is, and I can drive it out every couple/three days, or maybe just once per week as some suggest, to fill it back up.
It won't have an idle baseload of anywhere near the equivalent of 0.6 gallons of gasoline and it will therefore respond well to intermittent, dynamic loads like heat and refrigeration.
The EV is probably more-useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and charge it back up.
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[1]: Sure, sure. I can carry a large quantity of gasoline to make the trips more-worthwhile. I can even store some locally (it's a pain to keep it fresh, but do-able).
If I were into that kind of prepping then what would be my practical limit? An extra 40 gallons, for ~60 overall? Great! Now I can run the car/house combo for 3 days before heading back out, and the EV still probably wins on this metric.
Genuinely curious what you mean by this.
This is exactly what I do. My cabin is in a rural area that gets a lot of power outages, and it also happens to be < 10 min away from a supercharger. When I was getting quotes for a home battery backup system, every other option was astronomically more expensive than the cybertruck. I don’t know why adding wheels to the battery pack makes it a lot less expensive but I’m not complaining. It’s good to have an extra vehicle I can use in the event of an emergency as well.
First, 'nearby' can be a 1 hr drive and still be worth it to commute every few days. Second, tornadoes, storms, and floods have exactly that pattern where damage can be block by block.
But it is still cheaper to stockpile some generators and gas than stockpile a cybertruck. If there's an EV charging station up within a 1 hr drive, gas stations are also going to be up.
Even if you can’t easily recharge, it’s a great way to power your home for a few days. It’s arguably a very cost-efficient home backup solution, assuming you were already in the market for an EV.
A Cybertruck has nearly 10x the battery capacity of a single Powerwall, and to buy that much Powerwall capacity would cost at least as much as a Cybertruck. Even a Tesla Model 3 (which now supports home backup) is over 5x Powerwalls.
You still have to pay to install home backup support on your home’s breaker (at least $10k), but you don’t need anywhere near the amount of very expensive supplemental home batteries.
Also, even an EV with a 120V outlet and no home backup support could be very useful for recharging a portable battery bank.
> You still have to pay to install home backup support on your home’s breaker (at least $10k),
$10,000 to install a socket, a breaker, and a transfer switch?
Surely not.
We priced this out when we bought our Ford F150 generator on wheels. It was maybe 3k including parts and labor. We opted to go without the fancy socket and breaker, and it cost us about 600 USD.
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Sorry, that’s for a full Tesla Powerwall (which includes its own 13.5 kWh battery) which is required to use the recently-announced Model 3 and Y home backup feature. The Cybertruck only needs the gateway and wall connector, which is still $2k plus labor.
Sadly in CA…
Some one mentioned something similar about their Ford Lightning in a previous thread. If a whole truck with batteries cost less than the same bare batteries then people buying powerwalls are getting absolutely screwed.
I’m not that familiar with the Powerwall ecosystem, but the equipment and installation that connects to your breaker is non-trivial. But I’ve seen people who add bulk OEM batteries to other home backup systems and those are fairly cheap.
Regardless, the thing that’s really great for cost effectiveness is that the same large battery can be used everyday for driving and also used rarely for emergency home backup systems.
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You want at least one actual PowerWall so that your house doesn't go down when you take your truck on an errand. But yeah, if you're buying 4+ PowerWalls you're probably better off getting an EV with V2H capabilities instead.
More like the people buying electric trucks got incredibly good deals, which is why the trucks are all going out of production.
During a “power cut” there is usually reduced capacity on the grid, not zero capacity. They typically cut power to homes while keeping power on for business. The homes get power on a rolling blackout, so they have power for a few hours per day.
I expect that the charging station will be in an industrial park with an industrial power supply.
The opposite usually happens. Homes are protected by cutting power to industrial customers who bulk purchase power at a discounted rate.
The option to cut power are negotiated into the service contracts.
For instance an aluminum smelter may need a certain amount of notice to shut down their machinery, so they may negotiate an hour of notice or whatever they need. The power company may have to briefly load shed residential while still in the notice period, but then they take the smelter offline and restore service.
I find it highly likely that high consumption electric car fast charging site would negotiate to be the first in line to have their power cut given they don't have any equipment that could be damaged and they'd be most interested in discounted power.
Genuinely surprised that you’re right.
I was remembering how critical infrastructure stays on. Most critical infrastructure is commercial.
However, a business park or an office block gets cut off with the homes.
Power outages at least where the live are a fairly common occurrence (overhead local power lines get taken out by trees if there is a big blow), power is usually restored in 1-48hrs. A lot of people have backups (generators or batteries) but those are fairly expensive when you amortize them against cost / hour of outage. Having that backup up power available at no incremental cost is pretty nice to have.
This is one of those things that happens in rural areas, "the city" (which is not actually a city in any sense but the legal one) gets power on in a day or so but your neighborhood 10 miles away doesn't get power for another week because the population density is something like 50/sq mile at most. And that's just for the people in actual neighborhoods, if you're on a farm or something where the nearest neighbor is a mile down the highway I don't even know how long it takes them to fix your power lines.
I grew up in the country, just not far from a town of 2000, but had friends who were more remote, and my power is, well not exactly less reliable now that I’m in the city, but not necessarily better. They would have power to my house or my friends house back pretty quick. Longest I remember was maybe 4 hours. We’ve had 36 hour outages in the city (more than half a million people). I do think we had more outages in the country, but never very long. Structure of the distribution network? Ease of accessing the lines?
>Structure of the distribution network? Ease of accessing the lines?
Ice storms/blizzards in the upper midwest can last days and make roads impassible to the point where they can't/don't fix the very many downed lines until the storm passes enough that they don't have to deprioritize rural roads and outages.
It's just not safe/possible to fix a line downed by ice when it's -30 out in blizzard conditions even if the trucks could navigate the roads.
This turns into the occasional several day outage for some folks.
I've also lived in parts of cities that essentially were impossible to have power failures absent very local equipment failures (like the power equipment attaching my building to the grid failing once) because the lines were underground and there was a power plant very close by.
It depends on a lot of things and lots of people assume everywhere else is just like where they are.
In about 25 years, I've twice been out twice for multiple days and one of those was in summer which was a nuisance rather than a potential really serious problem. (Worst case, I buy ice for coolers and maybe need to toss some food.) But I live just off a (major) country road so I'm probably pretty high on the power restoration schedule.
The whole point of prepping is to prepare for the unlikely events though.
If you can choose between a truck that can’t power your house and a truck that can, prepper mentality is to choose the one that can.
With unlimited money, sure, but your typical prepper would be able to fund a decent portable gas generator and jerry cans (or even a natural gas line) without a need for financing.
Never understood that line of reasoning. In a really bad situation, you just won't have any fuel. And solar is the way to go.
Why does the prepper assume there will be electricity to charge his car?
In case of living somewhere sunny, because he has solar installed?
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There are a whole bunch of "Prepping" scenarios to prepare for.
Because the "prepper" never had to deal with an actual disaster.
You can stockpile diesel for a generator (unlike electrons). That's what actual prepping looks like.
Take it from a Ukrainian.
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The supercharger stations will obviously keep working during the apocalypse.
If you can choose between a truck that becomes a dead weight when the nearby power plant comes offline, and a truck that won't, the prepper mentality is to choose the latter.
Take it from a Ukrainian.
PS: my dual-fuel gasoline/LPG Renault Twingo in Poland will outrun any Cybertruck on the continent.
And, unlike electricity, you can stockpile gasoline.
You can't stockpile gasoline for a long time without stabilizer.
Source: I've mucked up multiple small engines with bad stored gas.
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God how I wish I had a dual fuel vehicle. In my fever dream my natural gas service entrance would double as a gas station and I could just gas up my car in a few minutes at home with a compressor.
Yeah but the Chinese minerals and the exotic infrastructure needed to manufacture cans and hoses...
That sort of thing happens all the time. All it takes is, say, a big fallen tree in the wrong spot. Its entirely possible for just your road to be SOL for days, if the local utility is otherwise completely swamped by bigger issues from whatever disaster is going on.
Also you can get that charging station fitted to your house aka solar panels. I've been "off grid" I.e. no import for weeks
We've got the batteries attached to our house instead of our car, but I have to admit that having it in my car instead of paying to have more attached to my house (we want more) is a really, really tempting option.
In places like Florida its absolutely something that would not be considered niche.
Greetings from Northern California! Multi-day power outages are not at all uncommon (though I've never seen 14 days). We had one about a month ago. Most people just have generators, but if you wanted to use a Cybertruck instead, the nearest superchargers are one hour away and do not go offline when we lose power.
I suspect an hour's drive is getting close to the point where the supercharger solution gets frustratingly annoying. You have to budget 1/3 of your energy just to the round trip, which will take you at least 4 hours for a complete fill, and may only get you 2 days of power.
But it's not bad to ride out the first couple of days if you've got 120kWh just sitting in your garage.
Not niche at all. Loss of power for days is common in areas of strong storms with above ground power lines. States frequented by hurricanes and strong storms can experience days to weeks without power.
Ford has also marketed their hybrid F150 as being able to power home appliances for several years.
I live off grid in Sweden all year round with solar and an EV as battery to power everything except heating which I do with wood from my own property.
I'd have animals too but society is still stable enough to provide me with food.
Living in Ukraine, I can tell you it's not niche here. Most homeowners without power walls already consider buying an EV because you also get to drive it to an area that has electricity at the time.
Preppers are just about as niche as you can get; they're still a valid customer prototype! I'm sure more than a few solar home owners chose it as a PowerWall.
At 6000lbs+ it's a section 179 write off; if you combine that with some of the previous incentives the car was not that expensive to the right population.
> This seems like an awfully niche case, no?
Not really. Some areas in California have multiple PSPS outages during fire season. Many people have gotten gas generators or powerwalls to deal with it, but using your EV would be ideal.
Why would that be ideal? I would be worried constantly about if I'm trading electricity in my house for the ability to go somewhere in an emergency. If it's such a real concern you even think about it when buying a car you should have a dedicated device.
Generators have solved this problem. My family used to lose electricity anytime there was a semi serious snow storm. We got a gasoline generator after the second time and it was always sufficient. We never needed to siphon gas from the car either. We later transitioned to a natural gas generator. The lines are all underground and tie into the existing system for the stove and dryer. No car involved.
First thing I thought of was if I had a gasoline generator, I'd probably invest the $5 or so into a hand siphon. You can even keep it running as you go to refill up your vehicle!
Because it's clean (no carbon monoxide dangers, no fuel storage concerns, no oil changes) and quiet (can sleep).
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If you're already committed to owning a bigass $100K electric truck this is an inarguably awesome side benefit. It's a truck, so... you have a few hundred miles of range. Slightly better than "down the street."
But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways. A portable power station and solar panels are probably the better move unless you have some really massive power needs.
(Admittedly, a nuclear winter reduces the effectiveness of those solar panels somewhat)
> But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways.
Are you telling us that you are not planning to buy Tesla Roadster? But what about the situation when there will be huge snow storm and humongous tree will fall across the road, and you will be like really hungry and you could just to fly over it and not starve to death?
Actually, if my car worked as a whole-house UPS and base smart battery (charging at night when power is cheap, drawing during day when it's expensive), that's a pretty nice value-add for a vehicle purchase.
Doesn't make sense for what they are charging for it. But still!
Yeah... even powerwalls and equivalent don't seem to be a good just-in-case solution. A gas generator costs 5% for the same capacity, and you can just go get some extra gas when the storm comes. I'm all for electrification, but after doing the math, it doesn't work for this particular corner case.
I think a powerwall or similar only makes sense with solar, but an EV can be a nice emergency supply for little extra cost as long as you don’t need it often.
Other commenters are pointing out places where it isn’t that niche, but I just want to call out that there’s a whole cottage industry for preppers that would eat this up. I would consider a 30-pound bucket full of shelf-stable Mac and cheese “pretty niche,” but it flew off the shelves at Costco.
I'm not sure it is. I've considered getting home batteries for power outages (due to fires), and frankly given the install cost, using a car is compelling. Not only do they have enormous batteries (a model 3 has a 57.5 kwh battery and can be acquired for 20k), but they can be driven to recharge every few days if need be.
Where I'm located, in most cases when there is an outage, neighboring areas do have power.
Specifically for my model 3, I've been considering tapping into the HV system manually to keep my Ecoflow battery topped up, but I wish there was a way to directly connect it.
>This seems like an awfully niche case, no?
No. It's like a generator except way more power and mobile. Rechargable via solar. So basically just a much better generator.
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Also an american only case. But anyway trucks are not popular elsewhere, little sense to buy it
Well, with climate change and weather getting more extreme, it might happen more often...
pretty standard in honolulu actually. i lose power for 1-3 days on the regular, have to drive to town to do anything
I've got a friend who does it simply to fuck PG&E and avoid an electric bill. He has workplace charging, a Cybertruck, and a powerwall + Tesla solar setup at home. He drives his truck to work, fills up on electricity, drives it home at the end of the day, and uses it to power his house. Repeat the next day. The Cybertruck was cheaper than the 13 PowerWalls or whatever that's the equivalent battery capacity.
PG&E is still getting paid, he's just stealing from his employer to do it instead of paying directly
Technically not stealing, it's a legal workplace benefit. Possibly abuses the spirit of the policy and may get the policy changed if enough people do it, but he's only doing what he's entitled to.
And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.
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Yes, but PG&E is getting paid much less.
PG&E has special tariffs for meters that are used only for powering commercial EV chargers ("BEV1" and "BEV2"). They're about half of what a residential consumer would pay for an EV-only meter (the "EV-B" tariff).
Actually no, and in fact almost all EVs are capable of powering a house for quite a while. It would be excellent if this was not just a Cybertruck-exclusive feature since here in the bay area we have shitty infrastructure too and power outages happen several times per winter.
I saw it happen during Katrina. Neighborhoods within an easy drive of each other where one had power, and the other not. Not to mention the fact that vehicle charging stations may well be prioritized to restore power.
It’s niche just because natural disasters are thankfully relatively rare, but I still think having good contingencies is worth it.
Fuck being seen in a cybertruck though.
> Not to mention the fact that vehicle charging stations may well be prioritized to restore power
Electric vehicles won't, ever, be prioritized over bringing up residential, commercial and emergency services. The fact that even on a super charger it's 20+ minutes to charge a Cybertruck means the two or three at the local gas station will just end up with 12+ hour lines. Even now generators are fueled before private vehicles.
Bringing up power after disasters is super dangerous as is. A lot of systems that hadn't been turned off in years do a cold start, and sparks fly. It's why the power company and fire departments coordinate very very closely on grid work.
You know someone's going to try and bypass any safeties and circuit breakers and end up taking down their house when they try to restore power after a flood or something. People already regularly die from running their generator in the garage and most of these aren't wired directly into house mains.
Can you find one supercharger with only three plugs?
My silicon valley neighborhood lost power for two days in 2025 starting on Christmas day.
In what universe is backup power a niche use case?
Ice storms in the Midwest can knock power out for several days in rural areas. Urban areas usually get brought back online sooner than the rural areas. A few years ago a bad one knocked out power at a friend’s house for three weeks.
Niche until it’s life/death unfortunately.
Not uncommon in parts of California where certain legs of the grid are shut down for high wind events. If you live in Pacifica, you might have your power out for 3 to 5 days, but there will be reliable power in San Francisco 20 minutes away.
An awful lot Elon’s products seem uniquely capable in extreme niche cases primarily caused by America‘s horrendous track record of maintaining, upgrading, and filling in traditional infrastructure.
Two observations with complaining about America's infrastructure:
1. America is huge. Comparing it to places in Europe is like comparing it to New Hampshire.
2. American has imported tons of people who are incapable of sustaining a high standard of living on their own. It only takes a few percent shift in GDP/person to change how much infrastructure you can build and maintain unless you are truly willing to let all the folks with less than a high school education and no special job skills live in favelas.
I really should not engage with the bigotry you demonstrated in your point two, but I will still offer you a rebuttal.
Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.
I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).
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these are such classic american thought-terminating cliches. "we have more land and more people than anywhere else" "our population contains too many migrants who aren't as smart as americans used to be" etc etc. the different states and territories that make up the USA all have analogous counterpart countries whether you're comparing climate, population in the absolute, population density, GDP, or any other metric you care to name. many of the comparable countries will have a worse standard of infrastructure than that US state, but there will always be several which perform better, usually utilising fewer resources.
the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader
Even outside of natural disasters, it's a very useful feature for people in the construction business and similar fields where mains power might not be always available.
Thin line between gimmick and very useful considering powerful worksite gas generators exist for less than $5k
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