Picture this: You recently received your Tesla Model Y delivery and you’ve been driving your brand-new EV around town with one hand on the wheel and the other patting yourself on the back for saving the environment. You wake up one morning to scroll through Twitter and you read about Tesla’s Autobidder system that they’ve been working on and using for years to autonomously monetize battery assets in their energy division. You scroll down further and you see another tweet that says newer Teslas are now fully capable of bidirectional charging, it’s just turned off for now and Tesla hasn’t told anyone about it.
You start connecting the dots.
What is Bidirectional Charging?
The concept of charging an electric car has been the same for a long time. We need to take energy from x and put it into y. In the case of a Tesla, x can be the grid, a Tesla Powerwall, or a hamster wheel. And let’s call y your brand new Model Y.
Well, now Tesla wants you to be able to take energy from y and put it into x, in fact they want it so bad they’ve already secretly added that capability to their cars. At least that’s the claim electrek initially made when they uncovered this hidden capability with the help of an enlisted electrical engineer.
If this is true, a Tesla could act as either a high-tech battery for your home in case of power outages, or even act together with other Tesla vehicles and products to give power to the grid. This could be done either for emergencies or to potentially make some money for Tesla and/or the owner of the vehicle for having energy closer to where it is needed.
Debunked
Turns out, it was all a dream. An electrical engineer on YouTube has debunked the bidirectional functionality supposedly included in Tesla Model 3s and Model Ys.
We can’t blame electrek for their initial report, they updated their post swiftly when they got more information. Things like this would be very exciting developments for a car company. And bidirectional charging isn’t out of the realm of possibility either. Even the guy in the video above says that with some additional components bidirectional charging could be acheivable.
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