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.