> 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.
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...
It has other downsides, obviously. But the notion of "emergency power for your house" isn't really anything special.
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.
And are regularly rotating that stockpile, because gasoline has a shelf life measured in months
There are practical issues with it, but it's possible. The question is EROI or Energy Return on Investment. Do you get more energy from it than it took to make it, which unfortunately is not there yet. Shrinking it down to fit into your backyard is an exercise left for the reader.
And that's assuming they are sunny days.
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.
You would need to add an accessory generator (which probably won't fit under the hood) and possibly upgrade the cooling system.
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.
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.
$10,000 to install a socket, a breaker, and a transfer switch?
Surely not.
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.
10% to pay for their costs - materials and labour
90% to pay for their new Cybertruck financing
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.
You can stockpile diesel for a generator (unlike electrons). That's what actual prepping looks like.
Take it from a Ukrainian.
Much easier to just buy some solar panels to recharge the electric truck.
And if the needle is so far towards apocalypse, then the horse beats your diesel. Repairs itself, refuels itself, and replaces itself.
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.
Source: I've mucked up multiple small engines with bad stored gas.
Propane, sure, but now you're talking about something fairly exotic, at least in terms of vehicles you can buy "off the shelf."
In any case, you can't produce propane yourself. You can "produce" electrons with a solar panel.
Edit: My bias is toward North America, but I know of only one model of "normal person car" (city buses don't count) produced in the last 50 years that you could just walk into a dealership and purchase new: The Honda Civic NX. And that was sold for only a few years and only available in California.
Ford has also marketed their hybrid F150 as being able to power home appliances for several years.
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.
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.
In what universe is backup power a niche use case?
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)
No. It's like a generator except way more power and mobile. Rechargable via solar. So basically just a much better generator.
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.
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).
Doesn't make sense for what they are charging for it. But still!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I think this is why these EV trucks don’t do well (ford also cancelled the F150 lightning). For truck things, they aren’t particularly capable (you’d get less than 100 miles towing). For daily driving duty, a car or small suv is much more efficient. You can power your home during a storm from most EVs these days, you’d just have to top it up more often
Yes, but the energy density of the energy storage mechanism in the cybertruck is substantially lower than a gas pickup truck
Not a Cybertruck fan myself, but unless you are going to tow or take many long road trips, an EV truck will work great for anyone who can charge at home. And most people don't tow, or take long road trips, with their trucks.
I am not a fan of the truck, but let’s make some sense here
Of course the Prius Prime on electricity is way more efficient than both, but it still uses a lot more energy than a house.
Yes, driving, compared to living, uses ridiculous amounts of energy.
Little's law is another related phenomenon that is super critical. Measuring things when the units don't match has bitten me more than once.
Actually newtons are just a constant factor (3.6) compared to Wh per km, since there are 3600 seconds in a hour while there are 1000 watts in a kilowatt. For example 144 Wh/km (or 14.4 kWh/100 km) would simply be 518 N. This also means that pushing along a Tesla on the highway at constant speed is roughly as hard as holding a 50 kg weight, giving you an intuitive sense of how "hard" it is to keep things moving.
Of course, in everyday life, since we buy electricity from our utilities in kWh rather than joules, it's more convenient to talk about kWh per km (or per mile).
- the Cybertruck uses almost twice as much energy as your Niro EV
- the 40% efficient Prius uses about 2.5x as much energy as your 95% efficient Niro EV.
what seems off?
I thought you were autocorrected badly but I guess this is a term people use?
I have a lightning and it averages 0.5kwh/mile and my electricity price is $0.15/kwh, so it costs me $0.075/mile to drive. At current gas prices that's pretty much the same as a very efficient hybrid compact car (55mpg @ ~$4/gallon). If I had solar I could probably offset almost all of the lightning fuel cost based on where I live (sunny) but it's so cheap it's not worth it.
Do you mean "much more efficient" in places where electricity rates are significantly higher than the national average? Or only much more efficient when compared to when you're charging at charging stations?
Driving in general uses a lot of energy. It’s the physically moving a 1,000 kg or more object that takes a lot of energy. Orders of magnitude more than a few lights or a phone. Same with flying of course; also moving a heavy object.
ICE trucks are equally inefficient for towing. People just don't seem to be able to factor it in.
Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.
The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.
The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.
So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.
Not so sure about that one, boss. I can fully-load up a Ford Ranger to its 7500lb rated towing capacity and lose ~10% in fuel economy/range while you just dropped something like 30% (from the base power package range of ~240 miles, platinum package at 300 miles you're losing half if you only get 150 miles out.)
I think in general, a country trying to become industrious and eco-friendly by saving energy is like a person trying to become a millionaire by pinching pennies. Once you have optimized an economic system to eliminate the major cost centers, you're going to have extremely hard time improving it through further cost savings.
For example, If my expenditure roughly matches my income, I would need to eliminate 100% of my expenses just to make enough surplus to match doubling my income. Once I have managed the major cost centers (rent, insurance, etc.) it's not going to be worth my time to further optimize my expendature, the time would be better spent improving my income
For EVs, the fuel cost is already low. The next cost centers are like maintainance, tires, battery life. It would be better to attack these other cost centers or somehow pursue functionality that increases utility of the car.
All cars just use a ton of power moving a lot of mass. It is actually impressive, it's like 100KW at full tilt. I think i saw someone do the math for how much power transfer you would need to get EV charging as fast as gasoline refuelling: It's in the megawatts.
The only way you could signifigantly reduce power usage of vehicles is to reduce mass dramaticially with a motorcyle or autocycle. The Aptera is an interesting autocycle design based on this line of reasoning, but we are also seeing the emergence of a lot of electric motorcycles.
Also regarding filling up an EV as fast as gasoline, there’s a company in China that has demonstrated charging from 20-80% in 5 minutes. They’re using 3MW charging.
It makes you realize why gasoline has been so popular for so long, you can stop for 5 minutes and dump 500 kWh of energy into your tank. Unfortunately most of that is wasted as heat during the combustion process.
Yeah that's the exact post I saw. I didn't believe the video at the time but I suppose it's possible with enough battery paralellism and cooling.
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/new-ev-technology-cha...
That said if you have a Mall Crawler who's heaviest loads are your monthly Costco run, an electric truck would probably be great for you. I still wouldn't recommend a Cybertruck though.
https://www.tesla.com/powershare/#vehicles
> Powershare allows you to draw power directly from your compatible Tesla vehicle to power your devices, your home or the grid.
> Powershare is currently available for all Cybertruck vehicles, and all new Model 3 and Model Y2 vehicles ordered on October 1, 2026 or later.
> To verify if your vehicle has Powershare, navigate to ‘Software’ > ‘Additional Vehicle Info’ > ‘Powershare Support: Enabled’ on your vehicle touchscreen.
To power a house directly from an EV, the main options now are the EV trucks -- Lightning, Silverado, Cybertruck all can have this ability, 240V 30A typically
I don't think the residential power generator is needed anymore if you have an electric car.
Completely missed opportunity. I won't be buying an electric vehicle that doesn't allow powering my house, ever again.
As you probably know, there's a 12 volt battery in these cars. That battery is automatically recharged by the big 100kWh main battery.
Some years back, I bought a 12 volt, 2000W inverter and connected it to this 12 volt battery in the Tesla, ran a couple of extension cords, and powered our refrigerator, extra freezer, and a number of other things with it for many hours. The main battery percentage in the car showed an appropriate drop. This actually wasn't during an outage, it was contingency testing. We already have a natural gas, 3600 watt generator that connects to one of our panels and use that during (unfortunately frequent) outages.
In my 2017, it's a bit of work to get to that battery, but it's quite doable and seemingly quite safe. The obvious, very rough/estimated/simplistic math is the 100kWh main battery divided by 2kW is about 50 hours. Different factors would push that number up and down of course.
Only available on Tesla models ordered after October 1, 2026
Tesla models older than 6 weeks are SOL (for now? Maybe it just needs some backwards compatibility testing)
It sounds like it will require a hardware retrofit, that isn't being offered to consumers yet: https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/4585/tesla-publishes-vehic...
We have a 12v port that we can get ~200W out of, so that could power our internet.
But I agree, a real joke to have 150KwH (two EVs) in my garage and no way to even plug in a fridge.
V2H/V2L is a must have in my next EV.
Don't give the USB consortium any ideas...
As soon as we got the adapter for our Ioniq 5, I sold generator to a neighbor. The car will run what we need for four days, which is longer than the generator and five gallon can of gas is going to last.
1) if you're permanently modifying your home or electric panel you're over $1k. (General Motors "Vehicle2House" is ~$10-20k for hardware + installation... an EXTREME investment unless you plan on regular "emergency" usage of it)
2) if you're buying some portable solar panel "battery boom box" you'll likely run out and the folding solar panel it comes with is more gimmick than reliable
3) if you're buying a "real" gas/diesel generator, you have to run it + change the oil every 6 months otherwise it might not start in your emergency situation
...just buy a thing that clips to your car battery and dangles out the front hood of your car!
You already maintain your car every 3-9 months, you already (should) have at least 1/2 tank of gas at all times (especially in a weather / outage situation), you can generally idle your car for at least 2 days off a tank of gas in an emergency, and if this thing can charge your phone/battery packs, keep your fridge running (kindof?), and run a small space heater overnight...
It makes soooo much more sense to buy a $500-$1000 emergency accessory that piggybacks off the car you already maintain than trying to stand up a whole extra distribution mechanism for "survival-ish power, maybe 1-2 times over 3-4 years".
Despite the dealer saying the used one I bought supported it, it turned out to not be available in the trim I got. My fault obviously for believing something a car dealer said.
It sounds amazing. Only thing I wonder if it can even be set up so that it will be like an Uninterruptible Power Supply. So that when there is a blackout, the V2H supplies all the power without any interruption.
I have several computers but no UPS yet. Imagine if I could buy an electric car and when I am not using it, my car is UPS for my whole house including my computers! :D
That's the point of V2H (or a residential battery, which it emulates). Although you still want a UPS for computers: I doubt "without any interruption" is at the scale of a UPS, and possibly not at the scale a desktop computer will require. Notably it depends how the grids cuts off, if it cuts off in one shot (like throwing the breaker) the failover should be almost instantaneous, but if it fluctuates before failing the battery might need a lot longer to engage.
If power loss is a regular event you probably want V2H, but if it's just a remote fear or something that happens once every 5~10 then V2L and a few extension cords will do.
Of course there are two issues that are completely solveable if we had reasonable governance:
1. Adopting an Australia-style solar installation regulation and permitting scheme, which is literally 1/5th tho cost of the US method, and pays their tradespeolpe higher salaries than US workers get
2. Allowing EVs to feed back into the grid. This is something that naysayers would never be useful because nobody would ever want to waste battery cycles on their home. Which of course has always been nonsense. Don't buy EVs without this basic capability, IMHO.
This combines to ensure that any solar installer will do lots of very expensive things: 1) have a large sales force to close the sale, which last I looked accounted for 30%-40% of the overall cost of solar in the US, 2) roll out trucks many different times during the planning and install, each costing lots of money, 3) never have to compete with a bunch of other hyper-competitive installers and find efficiencies like batching installs together in the same general area.
There are also massively high solar PV tariffs in the US, more than tripling the cost of the panels, but that's not even that big compared to the rest of the needless inefficiency in the system.
Went looking for the campground host and bumped into another camper, who was pissed the power went out. "Don't worry though - if you need to charge something, you can put it in my truck."
Ended up on a phone charging expedition that landed me in a local library for the first time since I was a child.
Came back and met the host: "Sorry about the power last night - some dumbass tried to charge his truck and tripped the breaker to the whole campground."
(I'm sure there's more to the story, and the details aren't important, but if charging a vehicle is tripping breakers for the whole campground there's something wrong.)
This is a pretty common feature in High capacity cars.
Even my mid-range BYD came with power strip attachment so you run basic electrical appliance with it.
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 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".
From redundancy perspective, a genset + car is hands down a better combo. A functional ICE car is cheaper and goes everywhere without any trip planning around charging stations, which is another plus.
I never said EV is not great and it is nice that it is working out for you, but facts are facts. Also, while EV footprint is growing around the globe, there is wide vast world beyond USA where charging issue is still true (and the repair shops).
If you're looking at two $55,000 cars, and one has power interconnect and one does not, it's not like adding a $1000-$10,000 generator on top is somehow immediately better unless you're adding in factors that make it better (like buying a cheaper car). There's 3 or 4 superchargers within a few miles of my house, and every time I've lost power I could easily go charge my car so I never worried about that.
Not everyone lives in that situation or has the same "one or two days without local power but chargers still work" threat model. It just so happens that's been the biggest actual, real, problem that my car could have fixed for me.
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.
Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
In my case I’m currently driving a ~10 year old conventional gasoline vehicle that I purchased new, and I plan to keep driving it for roughly another 7-10 years. Given the current automotive product lineups out there I can’t think of a scenario where my next car will involve gasoline regardless of my desire for a backup power source at home.
Depends on the vehicle of course. But for me at least, my 5-speed Civic for $2500 is way cheaper over its expected lifespan than a $7000 Nissan Leaf (and the Civic is way more flexible, since it can actually go more than 100km every 6 hours in the winter). At $1.50/L and 6L/100km, I can drive about 50,000km before I spend more on gasoline than the price difference between the two. The actual breakeven math (assuming 21kWh/100km) is closer to about 65,000km when factoring in electricity at ~$0.12/kWh. Oil changes are negligible (I do my own maintenance and oil changes), and a used Leaf is going to have just as many problems (if not more) with "the rest of the car" as a gas car (suspension, steering, brakes, tires, electrics, interior components, not to mention battery pack services).
If you buy a nicer EV than the break even point goes even further out. At least where I am, the EV equivalent of any gasoline car has a breakeven point of at least 50k km driven, usually more.
> Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
Entirely fair, but I'd still buy a generator and an EV. Because coupling your house power to your car just seems like a bad idea (to rely on it, at least; if you live somewhere that you never need to rely on off-grid power, then who really cares). For instance, my house has a sump pump that must run every ~hour or my basement will flood, and during storms that gets down to about 20 minutes. If my area doesn't have power, then I can't charge an EV anywhere nearby, and if I'm powering the house off the EV, how am I going to recharge it without my basement flooding?
If you live in an area where you can only get ethanol gas, then you definitely don't want it sitting more than 6 months, even with Sta-bil (in my experience). So that means yeah, you gotta cycle through the generator's tank twice a year, which if you live in an area with reliable power, means spending more money than you need to on gas and oil. Also, keep all containers (including fuel tanks) as full as possible, to minimize the amount of air in the container, to minimize the amount of moisture the ethanol can suck out of the air.
That puts the total setup price to about 10% of a CT-Energy station.
We could start comparing used EVs if we want to.
Personally I never really understood the value of a generator in the first place but that’s just my opinion.
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.
If there is a major outage most bosses understand that you won't be working normally because you need to deal with the emergency.
There is an entire genre of welding equipment designed for this scenario.
https://bakersgas.com/collections/miller-engine-driven-weldi...
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.
We are far away from, but slowly approaching, Mad Max levels of institutional failure, and everyone seems to treat it as normal and unavoidable.
Ford came in and bought up all of the parts from our suppliers and I had to qual random suppliers for weeks. Even at the time, I was thinking there is too much disparity and this will haunt us for years.
We were a bit more agile and I made a lot of kernel hacks to compensate.
Ford didn’t fare better for all their choices. Recalls galore. Honestly, they made my life hell so fuck em.
On to the truck, they had a proprietary charger and power wall solution but it could run the house for days.
Most people just plug an extension cord into the onboard inverter. You have to manually flip it on and plug it in, but 240V30A is plenty for an emergency. Doing it this way isn't any different from any other vehicle with an onboard inverter though.
On the other hand there are no tricky rules for an electric truck to have extra power outlets in it.
The whole comment comes across as an AI agent that is lacking severe human context by posting a complete non-sequitur, regardless if it is actually an agent or not.
First time I’ve been compared to an AI agent.
Cybertruck was announced first. Then Ford _released_ the F150 Lightning, including the ability to operate as a backup battery for a house. And a dozen or so months later, Cybertruck comes out at a much higher price than F150 Lightning ever was.
As has the F150 lightning. It lost so much money and demand was so low that Ford had to kill it to stop bleeding money.
Weird looking truck, glad they took the risk
If all you're after is the V2L feature, you can get it for much cheaper: for 16% of the price of a Cybertruck, you can get 86% of the battery capacity (about 8 powerwalls) by buying a used Fisker Ocean Extreme with a 107kWh battery, vs. the cybertruck's 123kWh
It’s unclear to me how a vehicle battery can be 9-10x the size of a house battery, be used as a house battery, include an highway safe cabin, motors and wheels and only cost 4x what a single home battery costs. Oh, and at least Kia rates their battery warranty based on miles driven, so using it as a home battery does not impact any 10-year capacity guarantees.
AI tells me they are completely different though, so I must be missing something.
5kWh of battery cells at the moment run around $500. The rest of the cost of production is in the power electronics (probably around another $500).
It's why you can buy 4kwh worth of battery backups from Amazon for about $2k right now. Yet the same thing sold as a home battery backup costs $5k.
Lack of competition and likely low amount of sells is what's causing the margins to be so high.
Propane generators here have the same problem.
That still doesn't explain the price gap. You can literally just get a V2H EV and use it instead of a home battery (or, you could if the ecosystem was more mature).
They want ~9k for a freaking 13.5kwh pack.
I can buy a UL certified, 16kwh, outdoor rated pack for 3.5k (ex - EG4 allweather)
I can buy just the LFP batteries themselves for the new powerwall 3 LFP version (no BMS, no shell, no certification) for $1116... https://18650battery.com/products/byd-302ah-3-2v-lifepo4-pri...
Powerwall is a scammy product. WAY too expensive for the storage it provides.
---
So the summary is: Cybertruck is using a different battery chemistry, Powerwall is a scam.
(I mean - to be clear, the Cybertruck is also a scam, but it's a different kind of scam not directly related to the battery capacity, since it's hauling around a 123kWh NCMA battery pack)
The cybertruck is $70k, which in a 14-day power outage is $5000 a day.
There are cheaper options to weather such a storm. Like flying first class to New York, getting a limo to the Central Park Ritz-Carlton and spending 14 days being waited on hand and foot.
https://www.f150lightningforum.com/forum/threads/franklinwh-...
It's exhausting reading these kinds of articles from a tech publication none the less. It's just so negative. Here is a summary of paragraphs:
Cybertruck is ceasing production
Here's a mean tweet from some X account with 2,649 followers: "Fuck that shitbox"
The car rusts sometimes
Truck sold very few units
Even with low sales they're still going down
Wildly unpopular with design flaws
Mention embarrassing demo from 7 years ago
It just goes on, truly exhausting.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a36715409/why-does-...
You can get a generator that will get the job done for under 1000 bucks and you can store diesel or propane to get the job done.
That's before we factor in the likelyhood needing to travel quite a distance (and assume there is no access to grid power), and that you won't have any of the cybertruck defeating issues like heavy rains or standing water that might void it's warranty and fry it's electronics.
A prepper rig is a mechanical diesel that can be roll started or hand cranked without batteries, has no electronics to get fried except the radio, and can burn almost any combustible fuel source on hand. Slap a 200 Gallon transfer tank on the back and keep it full and you can drive across the country without fueling up. And if you also have that diesel generator to power your house, you've got a years worth of fuel for that generator.
You can get all that done for around 25k USD, so, not sure how a cyber truck even enters the conversation.
I just bought a kit to convert to natural gas though. Most people who've done it are happy to not change bottles all the time. It won't help after an earthquake but the regular PSPS outages I get make natural gas a better fit for the moment.
It’s possible to get larger propane tanks and refill them more cheaply (rather than exchanging expensive grill tanks at the store). Some hardware stores will refill tanks directly. You can even get very large tanks (refilled by a truck that comes to your house) if you want weeks of power on tap. But this is probably overkill for most, unless you’re very remote.
This is a common enough occurrence in rural Louisiana, at least. And I think almost everyone I know has a 200gal or larger propane tank in their yard, specifically for multiday outages. My father-in-law doesn't have a single propane appliance, but he does have a 250gal tank, for his generac.
We don't we have a single 100lb tank, but that will run the little AC for 3 or 4 days.
This is important enough to me that I researched slow start AC units ~8 years ago when replacing my AC. I learned that almost any heat pump will do, so that's what I have.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/heat-waves-and-annual-death-ra...
In a traditional house with thick brick/stone walls and large roof overhangs you'd be uncomfortable but a lot less likely to die
Also, I built it myself so the labor costs aren't included but I am about $8k into a system (4kw of panels, 6kw inverter, 15kwH battery).
I personally wouldn't be able to make vehicle cheaper than having no grid tie. I get that the costs are different once you include labor. Also I am on 40acres so the panel set could be ground mounted.
But to make something commensurable with a propane home-powering generator seems a lot more do-able.
The quiter part makes sense, but there are a lot more practical solutions to that too.
A propane generator is a temporary solution but likely is good enough for most folks who just need to keep the fridge cold and maybe charge cell phones. It's not going to be able to run your house AC or anything, though.
You also need to have the house setup to run off a generator. You don't want the truck power feeding back into the grid. IIRC, that's usually done with a big switch near the main panel.
There is a model of Ford Lightning that has power sharing and now that resale values are way down it just might be a cost effective home battery that you can drive around during non-emergencies....
You can also just plug into the 30A240V bed plug and use the onboard inverter on the lightning or powerboost hybrid f150 with less headache.
Car makers are reluctant to support this. In case of Tesla because of market segmentation.
If you are concerned about riding through a 14 day+ event you need a generator. Even a fully off-grid solar / wind setup could be compromised in these kinds of storms. I've seen entire roofs cleaned off by a <100mph storm. Anything not bolted down to a concrete slab cannot be depended on.
What the fuck