evee Central

These Are All The EVs That Can Power Your Home

Vehicle-to-home (V2L) technology can transform an EV into a huge generator on wheels, making stationary battery packs irrelevant.

Having a huge battery under the floor of an electric vehicle not only enables long-distance driving on a single charge, but it can also do what batteries do best: power stuff. But in order to do that, an EV has to be fitted with the right parts to enable owners to export power from the high-voltage packs.

Thankfully, some automakers have seen the light at the end of the tunnel and are building EVs with something called vehicle-to-home (V2H) functionality, which allows them to act like stationary batteries when they’re parked at home.

This is similar to vehicle-to-load (V2L), but the main differences are that V2H can output more power and it needs extra equipment to power an entire house via the car’s charging port. This means a whole home can survive a multiple-day outage if the battery is full, but it also means that owners will have to shell out thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to set up everything.

While many EVs are equipped with V2L capabilities, the following ones are explicitly designed to power a whole home using automaker-supplied equipment.

Nissan Leaf (Second Generation)

The CHAdeMO charging port on the aging second-gen Nissan Leaf might be on its way out, but it was designed from the get-go to allow the export of power from the high-voltage battery. That’s very good.

What’s less than ideal is that the only approved bidirectional charger for the Leaf comes from Fermata Energy. It’s called the FE-20, and it’s only available for businesses that have a three-phase grid connection.

Kia EV9

Hyundai Motor Group’s spacious three-row electric SUV can provide power to your house when used with Wallbox’s Quasar 2 bidirectional charger and the associated Power Recovery Unit (PRU).

That said, deliveries of the Quasar 2 are not yet up to scale, with Wallbox’s website claiming the company is preparing the next wave of deliveries. It can charge the car at up to 12 kW, while the discharge power is capped at 12.8 kW on a split-phase system.

Ford F-150 Lightning

When paired with the Ford Intelligent Backup Power bundle, F-150 Lightning owners can send up to 9.6 kW of power from their truck’s high-voltage battery to their house to keep everything running in an outage. The Charge Station Pro home charger is also needed, as well as a home integration kit from partner Sunrun, which includes an inverter, a transfer switch, and a small battery to initiate the system when the power goes out.

Tesla Cybertruck

The Cybertruck is the only Tesla EV to support V2H. To power an entire house with the Cybertruck’s high-voltage battery, owners need to install a Universal Wall Connector charger, a Powershare Gateway and a Tesla Backup Switch. If you happen to have a Tesla Powerwall energy storage solution installed, no additional hardware is needed for home backup.

General Motors

GM put in a genuine effort to make most of its Ultium-based EVs compatible with V2H. Besides spec’ing a dozen cars with the necessary parts to export power from their high-voltage batteries, the American auto giant has also come up with all the bits and pieces that need to be installed in your house.

These are all the GM’s EVs that currently support V2H:

• 2024 and 2025 Chevrolet Silverado EV WT and RST
• 2024 and 2025 Chevrolet Blazer EV
• 2024 and 2025 Chevrolet Equinox EV
• 2025 and 2025 GMC Sierra EV Denal
• 2025 and 2025 Cadillac Lyriq
• 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ
• 2025 Cadillac Optiq
• 2026 Cadillac Vistiq