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.
I can’t imagine using a dishwasher with limited power?
I barely use mine with unlimited power. Unless I’m hosting dinner for 20.
It’s only me and my partner and we run it every single day. To be fair we both work from home so we generate more dishes than two people that go to work I suppose but I just hate doing them by hand
You don’t have to make excuses, modern dishwashers are really water and power efficient.
I think a really in-depth look at how people use dishwashers would be pretty interesting. There are a lot of surprisingly strong opinions about right ways to do it. Of course knowing the right way is also interesting, but how people came to be so convinced that their way was the right way would be even more interesting to me-- I suspect there are a lot of hidden generational and socioeconomic attitudes hidden in there.
Is that the new PlayStation?
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.
Mmmh no? 90kWh battery packs are not that common. An M3 or MY LR AWD have an 82kWh. Some Mercedes and some Chinese model have a 100+kWh battery but the most common setup is between 60 and 70.
Anyway I agree that in emergency conditions it can go a looong way for a house.
My bmw has 108
Is that 30 kW each hour of the day or 30 kW per day?
30 kWh per day, while a clunky unit, is what most people would understand when talking about home consumption. It’ll be what their utility typically reports, how you’d want to size a battery, etc.
Sort of neither?
It's 30kW for one hour.
(Or 1.25kW for 24 hours, or however you prefer).
[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour]
It's like you had a faucet with cross section of 2 square inches, and 15 seconds with that faucet wide open would fill a jug. That jug holds 30 squareinches-seconds of water.
You may then use that water over the course of a day. That's 30 sqin-sec per day. That is not 30 square inches for a whole day. It's second per day.
Or watt hour per week or whatever.
Yes, it can be described like 0.00034722 sqin/day, and that corresponds to no physical object and that would be largely useless.
Why not Joules or Liters? Because that's complicated for anything electrical.
Pretty sure GP understands that, their point being you can't just wave away 'per unit time' when talking about it relative to generation, it matters.
"30kW per day" makes no sense. It's like saying "100km/h per day". W is a unit of power, Wh is a unit of energy.
It's unintuitive because a guy named Watt decided "Joule per second" is Watt, so the intuitive units Joule and Joule per second got turned on their head to W times hour and Watt. This is opposite to usual intuition of distance and speed for example, km and km/h. If I redefined the km/h to a "tick", then a km would become "tick times hour".
If you want a "better than nothing" but imperfect analogy, Wh is how much water you have in a bottle, and W is how quickly you can get the water out.
The naming of the unit is posthumous
And yet all utilities of the world decided to use kWh as the thing to measure. Also basically all smart measurement devices settled on this being the default to show. Exactly in the way he used it here, kw per day, kw per week, kw per month, kw per year.
This discussion seems super silly, considering he's just using the measurement that the industry adopted decades ago...
Are y'all just coming out of a time travel device from the 70s or something?
"30kWh per day" isn't waving away anything.
30kW is a rate.
30kWh is a measure of energy, about 100MJ.
30kWh/day is a rate again, 100MJ/day.
It seems clunky, but it's a way energy usage in a house is typically measured.
Wh is a unit of energy. They're saying how much energy they consume per day.
No, their point is wrong either way and there is no way to steel man it without saying the comment is extremely poorly articulated.
30kWh is 1.25kW for 24 hours or 30kW for one hour.
30kW every hour means 720kWh per day. 30kW all day is also 720kWh per day.
The comment is nonsense.
The only way you can steel man it is by saying he isn't concerned about the 1.25kW, he is concerned about the swings, but he said 30kW twice for two different time spans so that can't be it either.
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.
This puzzles me.
When we got solar we asked for quotes, but ‘No Tesla’. The sales rep said ‘We get that a lot’.
Haha, I’m actually in process of installing a home solar setup. That’s exactly what I told the installers too.
I wasn’t interested in hearing any advantages of a Tesla Powerwall, that brand is toxic to me now.
There’s plenty of good alternatives that don’t fund criminals like Tommy Robinson and Russell Brand.
What did you go with?
We have Sigenergy. Are they better than Teslas? Unsure, but at least I have no idea what the owner(s) think.
I knew a guy with a Tesla solar system and his advice was also “no Tesla”
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.
You're looking backwards in time. Look forwards and it makes more sense.
With climate change causing more extreme weather events and an aging and increasingly more and more difficult to update power grid facing unprecedented strains, I think power disruptions like this are more likely than less. So it makes sense when you look forward rather than backwards in time.
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.
> If the power is down to the gas station, the pumps don't work.
In places where long power outages are common (hurricane areas), many gas stations have their own generators (they also have a convenient source of fuel to run them!)
If the power is down to the charging station the chargers don't work, this is just as likely as the power being down at the gas station
Let me know when you figure out how to refill your gas car from solar panels.
I know you're being snarky, but the chemical process for that exists! It's called the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. You take air, CO2 specifically, and then run the process, which needs electricity, possibly from solar panels, and get diesel/gasoline/jet fuel out the other end! Isn't science amazing?
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.
Hyperspace Pirate tried this at home, and it's horribly inefficient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRKbjT8AoJw
Fischer-Tropsch uses CO, not CO2. You also need hydrogen. The input is not air but other hydrocarbons. Coal being the most common.
it is more than possible - this is exactly what casey handmer and his startup terraform industries is doing in a pilot plant in the desert: https://blog.terraformindustries.com/2026/10/21/terraform-20...
If you've got solar panels sufficent to charge a cybertruck then you don't need the cybertruck to power your home. Regular battery systems will work
Charging an EV from regular household solar panels would take days....
And that's assuming they are sunny days.
I think your math is off some how. I have a Model 3 and two Leafs and we charge them from our 39 400 Watt panels without trouble. They are always ready to go fully charged unless one of the boys has been doing more than normal of driving to the beach with a girlfriend and then borrowing the Model 3 for a concert, or whatever fun involves using all the stored energy at the same time (e.g. not commutes to school or work).
My 12 kw solar system charges my 32kwh battery in a few hours on sunny days. But to be fair, your system is even larger, and both of our solar systems are larger than average for home solar. A 5 kw system would indeed take days to charge a typical ev battery from zero to full.
It takes about a 6-8 hours to charge my Leaf on a small solar install.
But yes, it needs to be sunny if that’s going to be pure solar.
I realize the person you're replying to wasn't specific and said just "EV" but a leaf and a cybertruck are pretty much the polar ends of a spectrum.
Ok but the problem with this argument is that you could come up with a hypothetical EV that can store enough energy to last a year and then take a year to charge.
And yet nothing prevents you from driving daily.
What matters is how much range you drive and recharge, not how big your battery is.
There are many hours in a day and EVs are pretty efficient. You might struggle if your goal is to drive 200km per day but if all you want is to drive to work or go shopping, you'll be fine.
What? My BIL’s installation is small, roughly 8kWp, on sunny days he easily gets 40-50kWh, if not more.
The Cybertruck has a 123kW battery, so charging it would take days, assuming they are sunny days.
because solar panels only exist on houses?
Because EVs are only powered by solar?
Who said they were?
Let me know when you invent solar panels that aren’t vulnerable to damaging winds.
Where I live solar panels have been smashed by hail ice balls, 3 inches diameter.
Probably when they invent a genset that can sustain its surrounding structure being immolated in a wildfire?
I'm 100% off grid on solar in the middle of nowhere. My panels could burn up, get hit by hail, get searched by law enforcement, flooded out, eaten by mice, stolen by miscreants, abducted by aliens or buried in snow. And of course in the event of a volcano they are probably not gonna function well.
So they are of course totally unworkable in events when the power grid is down.
But I like using them and they've been reliable so far...
> unless you have stockpiled gas
And are regularly rotating that stockpile, because gasoline has a shelf life measured in months
edit: Apparently this leans more technically-true factoid than fact, thank you replies
You're not wrong but this is commonly exaggerated: half a year with a stabilizer is entirely doable under reasonable conditions.
Amuses me hear this - I ran a moped from a large tank of multi-year old petrol, and it got by fine. But maybe a modern car might be more picky?
Last year, I let a fairly new portable generator with low hours on sit with gas in it for 6 months and it would not fire up. It wouldn't even sputter.
That was surprising to me because it was working quite well when parked, and I'm used to doing things like leaving lawnmowers outside continuously (including over the winter) without much trouble, but that's what happened anyway.
I drained the old fuel out and replaced with fresh, and it fired up on the first subsequent half-assed pull of the starter rope.
(Which reminds me: It's been six months again already. Time to see if it still works.)
Fuel stabilizer is cheap insurance for anything that overwinters with fuel in it -- motorcycles, boat engines, etc.
You have to put in in the tank and run it for a bit to make sure that the carbs don't have untreated fuel inside.
A fairly new snowblower of mine had gas left in it over the summer. Before the first snowfall of the following winter it would not start. A dissection of the carburetor revealed numerous places where small passages were completely filled with a sticky gummy substance that had to be mechanically removed. After cleaning and reassembly, it fired right up with fresh gas. Maybe the old gas would have worked just fine once it could flow. Clearly having the gas sit in there had adverse effects.
The carb on this generator has a drain for the bowl. It should've been dry in there when parked. I don't know what the insides looked like because replacing the gas was easy and it worked, so I stopped troubleshooting at that point. :)
I just did this as well. Fired up my moped on 2 year old stabilized gas. Runs fine.
We use the (inboard) engine so rarely on my sailboat I'm sure we've gone 2 years on a tank without issue before.
HN is full of maintenance purists, and I do know I should do better, but... A Corolla will work fine after sitting for a year or so and it’s once-or-twice-per-decade oil change seems to work ok.
Unless you are trying to race your car at the drag strip with charged air and hit your best times, that isn't true at all and I don't know why people keep saying it. You think everybody empties their lawn mowers, snow blowers, snowmobiles, generators, etc. every year of gas or before trying to start it up again the next year? No way.
Simpler gas equipment like mowers and generators don't have enough compression to really care about anything but ancient gas, and if you run any vehicle that is multi-fuel capable it can detect and adjust compression based on a fuel's capabilities.
Ive been repairing and fixing junkers of cars, mowers, ATVs, generators, and more for 30 years and not once has bad gas stopped something from running. I only remove it if it was clearly having water raining into the tank. In every other case where I couldn't start something after sitting around for 5+ years, it was from the gas gumming up in the carb or the shitty diaphragm pump, which generally means there is little to no gas left to start with.
I wouldn't even suspect gas of ever being bad unless it was atleast a few years old. If the tank was open it could have evaporated, if the tank was closed it probably ain't great gas but I bet it would still run in anything but a high compression application.
> detect and adjust compression based on a fuel's capabilities.
Spark, not compression.
The spark timing determines how much compression is in the cylinder at the moment the fuel/air mixture is ignited. So, while it's technically true that it's the spark timing that's being adjusted, the thing that is being controlled for is the compression.
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.
Ford has had options like this forever and it's usually targeted at farmers and ranchers, I think the first I've found was like a 77 or 78 f250 'rancher' that had a generator option on the main belt off the motor. The ads show a guy cutting boards with a skill saw to mend a fence or something.
edit: I think these also had a ford branded chainsaw over the wheel well on the other side of the engine bay.
Had to look this up, not great pics but very cool:
"The generator was called the Electric Power Pak. From 1969 to 1972, Ford offered a 2,500-watt underhood generator, mostly on the Contractor’s Special, though it could be special ordered on other trucks. It also wasn’t driven off the engine’s belt. It was a separate Onan generator with its own 5.5 hp air-cooled single-cylinder engine, feeding an outlet in the bed. It sat on the driver’s side splash pan. The package the commenter calls a “Rancher” is likely the Farm & Ranch Special, which is one of the trucks that came with it.
The chainsaw was real. Ford sold Ford-blue chainsaws from 1970 to about 1976. They were rebadged Ohlsson & Rice saws: the Eagle I/II and the smaller Hawk. A mount was also sold that held the saw on the F-250’s driver’s side inner fender"
https://www.fordification.com/tech/images/onan_brochure-phot... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5601f99be4b059... https://www.fordification.com/tech/onan.htm
Nice find. It's been a long time since I've seen these so I did get some details wrong =/
I was actually quite impressed by how well you described a 50+ year old product and ad, a commendable recollection in my view
I have one, and I have powered my house with it on a few occasions. I made the purchase after a friend of mine ran his for four days straight. I always fill up the tank if there are storms coming.
When I was shopping in 2025, this was the only truck with that kind of output.
I almost purchased that truck, but I needed a higher cargo capacity for my travel trailer, and the added batteries reduced it by 250lbs or so. The ability to plug a travel trailer directly into the truck and run it is really cool.
2024 and later Toyota Tacomas (and 4Runners and Landcriusers, I think) with the hybrid iForce Max power train have a 120V 2400W outlet. It will run briefly from the traction battery before starting the engine to recharge.
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.
> Can you actually run home appliances from a regular ICE car?
You would need to add an accessory generator (which probably won't fit under the hood) and possibly upgrade the cooling system.
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.
---
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.
---
[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.
The cheaper version even, which may be what you are talking about, is literally just a piece of plastic or metal called an interlock on the breaker box that prevents the main from being on while the generator inlet is supplying power (backfeeding the line). Then all you need to do is install the inlet on top of that which when I did this a few years ago was around $1,000 USD all in parts and labor.
Electricians like their transfer switches because they are right sized and everything, e.g. they are more foolproof for the end user to operate, but the interlock approach actually gives you more control because every breaker is allowed (a transfer switch will only expose some small subset of all your breakers usually), you just have to manage the power supply yourself.
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.
Its still a margin issue. The Powerwallproducer wants their 20% margin, the car company might want there 20% too, but from the whole truck.
The battery installer probably chargers a 100% markup.
10% to pay for their costs - materials and labour
90% to pay for their new Cybertruck financing
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?
If you are using solar why need the cybertruck at all?
Because when you produce more energy than you need, you need to store it somewhere and if the cost is roughly equivalent for that place to be mobile vs a static construction, choosing the mobile one is superior.
Standard grid-tie systems shut themselves off during a grid outage due to anti-islanding safety requirements.
If you want your solar panels to be operational during an outage, the typical install for this is a system that already includes batteries.
There are specialized options that exist with islanding features, but if you didn't install your solar system specifically for this you probably don't have it.
But the cost isn't equivalent at all???
Is this thread being astroturfed? This defence for the Cybertruck ITT is one of the least rational threads I've seen on HN in the past few years and if the CT was actually valuable tech it wouldn't be one of the worst selling vehicles of all time.
Are you maybe a bit overreacting? The question of emergency power is a rational one and no one here said they thinj a cybertruck is awesome because of it. Just that this is a selling point.
I am certainly overreacting. I was just dumbfounded by the question I was responding too. If the concern is emergency power there are so many better alternatives than a cybertruck. If the concern is storing an abundance of solar power there are much better alternatives than a cybertruck. I don't want to come onto HN and be marketed products; I come to HN for tech news and to see cool software that people build, not to be marketed a cybertruck.
> The question of emergency power is a rational one
And the additional value of Cybertruck in this question is about $1000 - $1500. $1k of additional value for $60k purchase is still a selling point, but marginally small selling point.
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.
There was a great write up by a Bosnian survivor about prepping vs reality and the top concerns were fuel, cooking oil, and paper goods. Water didn’t even make the list.
Sure, in Bosnia where it rains regularly. In drier climates, different story.
Diesel can't be stored forever. Maybe a few years with stabilizer. So you need to remember to rotate it out (and have some use for the fuel you're rotating out).
Much easier to just buy some solar panels to recharge the electric truck.
A prepper will already be rotating out food and water anyway. Solar is still a good idea, but so is having fuel powered generators. Might not be too much sunshine in situations like a nuclear winter or geoengineering gone wrong.
>Diesel can't be stored forever. Maybe a few years with stabilizer. So you need to remember to rotate it out (and have some use for the fuel you're rotating out). Much easier to just buy some solar panels to recharge the electric truck.
Much easier to use diesel in your diesel-powered vehicle.
And then you have much, much energy in your stockpile.
Diesel just lengthens the storage time. You still have to go somewhere to get it when your onsite tank runs dry. For the electric side you could also have a bunch of solar panels. Lots of choices.
And if the needle is so far towards apocalypse, then the horse beats your diesel. Repairs itself, refuels itself, and replaces itself.
The ultimate preppers just become Amish.
If it works it's not stupid. Or something.
> replaces itself At least two horses then.
That's fun till you run out. The sun isn't going to replace your daily use.
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.
sure, you can get propane or diesel setups that keep somewhere between a long time and indefinably.
You can't store diesel forever, either.
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.
I do agree with you on solar for moving off grid. I'm working to convert my full farm and most farm rigs to battery over time because "You can't be your own refinery, but you can be your own power plant."
But for conversations sake, if we're talking about diesel trucks, and specifically an old mechanical diesel like a 7.3 ford or a 12 valve cummins, and we're talking about stored diesel, ideally a class D died diesel with a high sulfer content, then you'll get considerably more lifetime out of it than the recommended 18-24 months.
Additionally, you can burn about anything, old motor oil, fry oil, diesel with algee in it if you treat it and change your filters. A good, mechanical, not very picky diesel will burn fuel that is 20+ years old. Not forever, and you'll go through some filters and maybe injectors. By the time you get to fuel sources that can't be burned in a machine like that, or you've burned it up past your parts and ability to repair. you'll probably have a lot of other problems.
If we're talking generators, you can get off the shelf propane generators and propane stores well.
>You can't stockpile gasoline for a long time without stabilizer.
If you have a vehicle that runs on gasoline, you don't have to store gasoline for a long time to have a stockpile.
The cost of a few empty canisters is by far smaller than the cost of solar batteries, and putting gas into a vehicle in case of an emergency within a span of seconds rather than hours is a huge asset.
Not to mention: not everyone has space for solar. City dwellers are particularly constrained (as in: people who live in apartment complexes).
I wouldn’t feel terribly comfortable storing gas cans in an apartment.
People who live in apartment complexes can have storage spaces that are appropriate for a gas can (basement, shed, etc).
Finding space for a solar battery installation is a bit harder.
Not to mention: your Cybertruck isn't going to power your 7th floor apartment. You can probably figure out why.
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.
In places like Florida its absolutely something that would not be considered niche.
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.
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).
All generators are supposed to be operated outside, so there should never be a concern about carbon monoxide.
If you are concerned about that, you get solar panels and a battery. You still do not have to worry about losing your means of transportation.
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.
Which is why PG&E started charging for grid connections. They still get their dollar at the end of the day unless you island.
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).
Acknowledging the existence of people without educations is not bigotry. For example, can you explain why remote tribes in the amazon rainforest don't all have space programs? I think it's because the lack the societal and individual development to have the productive capacity to do such a thing. Why do you think they don't? It's economic reality that if there is only a limited number of people who can do a thing, the amount of that thing is going to be limited. And when you abstract that through culture and modern life, the way you say that is GDP per capita.
You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states, affected tens of millions of people and cause $78 billion dollars in damage. It was a major event like nothing that has ever happened in Iceland. That level of event in Iceland would remove it as a going concern.
To respond to your add, yes I brought up Europe because outside of Europe there are like 3 countries that even have comparable infrastructure to the US. If you say "America has a terrible track record with infrastructure." Then the implication is that there is somewhere that does better. And my argument is that selectively you can probably find places but nothing as large as the US or with as many people who can't contribute to it's maintenance. (Did you know that in the US more than 50% of households are not net tax payers? All of the American infrastructure burden is carried by less than half of the households.) Your example of Iceland has 13000 KM of roads, of which 7,300 KM are paved. How is that some comparison?
> Acknowledging the existence of people without educations is not bigotry.
It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].
> You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states.
A Volcano erupted in the town of Grindavík, the main line which connected the town to it’s power plant, went under lava. The town was out of power for a maximum of 7 days.[2]
But in any case, 2 week long blackouts are extremely common in the USA regardless of the severity of the natural disaster. When I first moved to the Seattle area in 2016 a common snow storm caused a blackout which lasted for 2 weeks in some areas outside of Seattle. The reason for the length of the blackouts in the USA is simply due to the quality and maintenance of the infrastructure and any lack of action plans to fix them when they break.
1: https://youtu.be/SLmD23UpLOo?si=hnyOlxPqDmWwQfRp&t=1299
2: https://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2024-06-05-koma-rafmagni-...
> It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].
Modern Zimbabwe is not particularly known for having reliable electric infrastructure, even by the low standards of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a good argument against the parent commenter's point.
You are putting two completely unrelated parts of my post and putting them together to form an argument I never made.
– “a) The sky is blue and b) there are rocks in the ground.”
– “Aha, gotcha. You claimed there are rocks in the sky; there are none.”
Comparing a volcanic eruption, a totally stationary event with predictable flows, that affected 3500 people in a town, where most of the residents have since left because of the problems living there, to a class 4 hurricane that crossed over six states, hundreds of miles, and affected millions of people, is dumb.
I've lived in the Seattle area since 2007. There has not been any power outage that affected 3000+ homes that has lasted longer than a day.
Additionally, Seattle area does not have common snow storms. It has extremely infrequent snow storms and thus has no reason to have lots of cold weather equipment. What we do have is frequent wind storms and lots and lots of trees (orders of magnitude more trees than all of Iceland, for example) and the wind often knocks trees into power lines and those are fixed in less than a day. In terms of neglect, that's not a problem. The longest outage I've ever had in the suburbs is 18 hours.
The real reason for the long duration blackouts is not failure to maintain infrastructure, it's because of natural disasters that damage and destroy entire swaths of infrastructure in a single event over thousands of sq km.
That someone, somewhere once used some accusation about a trait of populations as a form of discrimination does not mean that every recognition of that trait in a different population is also discrimination. Like, we can look at a person and say "oh, he never finished high school" that doesn't mean we're irrationally discriminating against him. You discriminate on exactly this basis every single day. You don't have people who don't know driving/cooking/medicine/engineering/automobile repair/etc. provide those services to you. I guess you're a bigot.
> Comparing a volcanic eruption, [...], to a class 4 hurricane [...], is dumb.
I agree. One can judge America’s lousy infrastructure and lack of action plan on its own merits. There is no reason to bring Europe into this. All I am saying is, America’s sparse population, nor the education level of immigrants is not an excuse.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure an overall C in 2025, including a D+ for roads and a D for transit.
The EU invested about 9% more relative to GDP, while the U.S. invested more dollars per resident because its economy is much richer.
American infrastructure is bad, the boomers in charge have no idea how to get anything done anymore, with California being the case study of nimbyism.
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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