Was reading on the Renault Zoe subreddit about fitting an Inverter because this Car has No V2L, and i thought about that in the past but never did it because why throw Money at Something where i can’t think of usecases other than ‘it would be neat’. So to the people who have V2L, what are you using it for?
I guess there’s two kinds of V2L isn’t there?
There’s the “we put an electrical outlet on your car so you can plug things into your car” type of V2L. That just seems kind of gimmicky to me but I could see it being nice while going camping, except I never go camping. Plus it seems like you could just buy a 12v to 120v inverter, hook it up to the 12v accessory battery, then turn on the car so it keeps the accessory battery topped up.
Then there’s the other V2L. The one that’s supposed to be a game changer. The one that runs everything in your home automatically whenever your power goes out. The one where you can have it fill up the car battery overnight when your power costs are cheap, and then run the home off of the car during the day when the power costs are expensive. I know the Ford Lightning was supposed to be able to do this but I don’t think they ever got anywhere with it. Are there any cars on the market that do this?
The first type can still be useful if you have a transfer switch or just need it for power outages. But yes, I think vehicle to home tech overall is going to become a huge part of EVs.
Bidirektional types are
V2H Vehicle To House - is where you can use your Car as a solar storage battery but only for your House.
V2G Vehicle To Grid - is where the Car is used for grid stability and your Car Powers parts of your neigbourhood.
To be fair (and pedantic! 😁) the first kind is V2L (Vehicle to Load), the second is V2H (Vehicle to Home) or V2G (Vehicle to Grid).
And yes, Ford “got somewhere” with V2H on the F-150 Lightning if you buy their bi-directional charger and a transfer switch (to isolate the house from the grid during power outages protecting linemen from being hurt when repairing the grid.)