Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
nbcnews.com1060 points by PLenz a day ago
1060 points by PLenz a day ago
After 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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).