alt Hacker NewsAfter Helene knocked out power in parts of my area for a little over 14 days, I found out that a friend of ours used his cybertruck to power his house through the entire mess. He'd run the house on it for a couple of days, then drive the cybertruck over to a super charger station, recharge, then come home and plug the house back in.
The battery capacity on those things is equivalent to 9 Tesla Powerwall units or something close to it.
They may be ugly, but the emergency prepper in me always wanted one after hearing that story. Before, I always wanted to install powerwalls...but I never considered in an extended event being able to drive my powerwalls somewhere to recharge them.
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A real pepper would want a car that runs on gas with a carburated engine and is also a common car. Not a niche one off that requires fussy infrastructure just to refuel.
A generator would work better in this situation right?
The Hyundai/Kia E-GMP platform cars also support this (V2L), as do quite a few others.
This is becoming a standard called V2H (Vehicle-to-Home) and doesn't require a Cybertruck.
I would like to see more vehicle-to-grid capability out of cars, EVs, Hybrids, and Gas Cars alike.
My F150 Lightning has an even bigger battery pack in it... and a simple 240V outlet.
A gas generator is a lot more flexible in this situation, and under $500.
Generally a propane generator is a wiser, more reliable backup option. Propane doesn't go bad, and in disaster scenarios often the sun isn't shining or your solar panels could be damaged. Solar + battery is a good system when the weather is good and everything is going well, but for a fallback system a propane generator can't be beat.
Very cool story! Love hearing neat use cases like this.
Just buy a generator and you don’t have to support a fascist? Some of you guys are sooooo fucking weird
sounds like you'll get a deal on a used one shortly...
If you need to worry about such extended outages, why not just do the normal thing and install propane tanks, a stationary generator, and a transfer switch?
I powered the house off a much less fancier 4XE Jeep, which has a generator, and so, arguably more versatile as you don't need spend time charging.
Other EVs can do this. You don't need one that ended up being twice the price and half the range and not an actual steel exoskeleton as promised.
Almost every Chinese car does Vehicle to Home but of course Muricans have outlawed what competes successfully with them
Just buy a diesel generator. Much simpler tech and more reliable in emergencies.
why put in powerwalls without local solar panels?
Get a Tesla semi when it comes out
hybrid ford f150 can do this too
You can buy the batteries installed at your home, charged during the day with solar or night with a small ICE generator. That plus a real same-class truck still costs considerably less than a CT.
You can get a lot of backup power for less than 100k.
my jelly neighbor story is that when our neighbors replaced their ice truck with a cybertruck, a calm descended on our block. iso of getting woken up by the rumble of that damn thing when they started it, they just zoomed off, silently. its the first time i internalized that electric vehicles are inherently better than ice. more human.
Or you know you could buy a $8k natural gas generator, seems like a really poor justification to buy such an expensive car.
>The battery capacity on those things is equivalent to 9 Tesla Powerwall units or something close to it.
What the fuck
what about balcony solar power or a turbine? Chances are if your power is knocked out by a storm the closest supercharger also would be.
Yes, drain your car to power your house, so in an extended outage your house will be out of power and you will be stranded. Risk management, people. You don’t know if power will go out in even more places, or stay off for an extended period of time.
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A cyber truck as a prepper rig is laughable. EV's do a lot of things well, but if it's a prepper rig, you'd need to have a generator and the fuel set aside to charge it. You can't assume that there will be power near by. If there is power, you can't assume that you will have access to one of the relatively few chargers available.
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.