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".
> 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.
If cost is your only factor yes. But the vast majority of people pick cars they like, and EV's are great. No need to dog on them needlessly. The trip planning thing is super overblown. Now 2 years into my first EV, going to a charger that's not my house _at all_ is quite rare - couple times a year; even when I travel Portland to Seattle, I don't have to stop on the way such that outside Olympia, I don't even know where the charge stations are. And that's the worst it'll ever be.
> and EV's are great. No need to dog on them needlessly. The trip planning thing is super overblown.
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).
There's a vast world in the US where charging is still an issue. I live in an apartment in a major city with no garage or parking lot, so owning an EV would be very difficult, since there's no way to charge residentially. Or if you're on call, in a rural area, where charging at home might not leave you with enough charge to drive across the county without notice.
ICE cars are barely cheaper, almost never over any span of time due to cost of ownership, and there's no trip planning around charging. It's clear you've never done a road trip in a Tesla. Almost all Tesla owners have had ICE cars first, not sure who you're trying to convince here with your lies.
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I mean presenting one set of tradeoffs just shows that there are tradeoffs.
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.
Yes, the crossover point is around $5-10k more than an ice vehicle, assuming the electric vehicle powers a house just as well as a gas generator does.
The cybertruck costs roughly $82k, which is about 40-50k more than other pickup trucks.
For the same price, you could install 2 1000-gallon propane tanks and enough gasoline to power your backup generator for a year nonstop.
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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.
Carmax has used 2025 SEL Ioniq 5's with 10-15k miles for 33k; that's practically new. Other than the ICCU issue, probably the best electric deal rn? 84kwh battery, I've can drive it Portland to Seattle on 2/3 of a charge.
My generator was $1000 and can power my entire house (including server rack). If I bought it used it would’ve been $500. I can trivially store 2 weeks worth of gasoline (and I do, constantly) and as long as somewhere within 700km of my house has gasoline I can get there, refill, and get home. I own 6 gas cars and they total less than $33k. My daily I paid $2500 for and average 6L/100km. (All CAD) If you start taking used cars into account the math goes waaaaaay towards gasoline car + generator.
I don't think there's a pure cost argument that favors EV's in this scenario. I think instead the argument is, EV's are relatively affordable now and have other benefits. For context, the Ioniq 5 is rated Edmund's _best_ EV SUV (afaik, most popular overall category). So e.g. this isn't an example of a crappy one to make na argument (I've owned it for 2 years, my first EV, its v. impressive).
So for someone who wants an EV (for the convenience, environment, or performance reasons), I think the statement is you can e.g. do so fairly affordably and also get free generator with it. Its a nice perk imo.
Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
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.
> Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
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?
I think you’re a huge outlier here. The median person is not doing their own maintenance and oil changes. $2,500 Civic that runs reliably is a meaningless data point. I might as well say I found 128GB of DDR5 RAM at an estate sale for $20.
50km-75km break-even is not a whole lot of kilometers.
You can compare a used first gen leaf’s poor range but in a short amount of time from now the bulk of the used EV market is going to be Teslas and Ioniq 5s that charge fast, are equipped with heat pumps, and get plenty of range.
Not everyone has a sump pump that needs to run every hour. Not everyone even has a basement. If we keep throwing out qualifiers we end up with a scenario that is not relevant to many people.
> 5-speed Civic for $2500
Good grief, what year is that Civic from? LOL. I just bought a 10 year old Corolla for my kid and it was 12 grand. Civics aren't much cheaper.
Out of curiosity, what do you normally do about the gasoline? I ask because I had a crappy little generator, and it seemed like my most common issue was old gas in the thing. Wasn’t a big deal or anything, just curious… stabil and run them regularly whether you need it or not?
Fortunately there's a couple (literally 2) gas stations near me that sell ethanol-free 91 octane gas, which has a shelf life of ~1 year. Sta-bil in theory extends that substantially longer. My solution is Sta-bil in the E0 gas, which gets used throughout the year for small engines (lawn mower, snowblower, pressure washer) and the generator if needed. I power up the generator once a month to make sure its battery stays charged and fuel keeps flowing (probably overkill). My power goes out 2-3 times a year, so that combined with the small engine stuff is enough to cycle through the gas in ~1 year, but if it isn't, I'll either burn it in the generator or just run it in one of my cars.
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.
The cost of my 2015 Subaru Forester is apparently around 7k. A gas powered generator is 2-3k (and can be refilled with quick trips to the nearest usable gas station) and you can also pair it with a solar-powered one with panels for 3k.
That puts the total setup price to about 10% of a CT-Energy station.
That’s a used car that’s more than halfway through the median lifespan of a vehicle.
We could start comparing used EVs if we want to.
And I could buy a hybrid that's only a few years old for 20k? I mean, it's still a magnitude less than the CT which is what I'm responding to. The idea that the CT miraculously saved a certain family from disaster and was thus worth the 100k investment is just silly.
I am confused why you think I’m defending the Cybertruck, I’m saying that a used ~$20k EV plus the equipment needed to hook it up to your house would probably satisfy most people’s desire for a generator.
Personally I never really understood the value of a generator in the first place but that’s just my opinion.
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.
I read somewhere that it's a big deal if a natural gas network runs out of gas because then air can get into the system. That can lead to explosions, so they have to systematically purge the entire network.
We have the same. $2K generator, while house transfer switch, natural gas hookup. Guess we'll never have a power failure again, since we just got a new generator.
> 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.