Comment Re:Terrible feature (Score 1) 139
Why spend even more money on more equipment that you have to store and maintain, and buy increasingly expensive fuel for, when you can dual purpose what you already have?
As someone with two EVs in our household, I think I might be qualified to answer this.
1. As the other poster already said, the cars need to be usable as cars. Having one tethered to the house means still letting the food in the fridge spoil while one of us is at work. That's no bueno.
2. It's not expensive to have a portable generator. Yeah, the big monsters that the richer folks have on the side of their houses can run you a pretty penny, but something you keep in your shed for an emergency isn't going to break the bank to buy and maintain. As for the gas, presumably you've been saving a bunch of money not buying gas because you drive an EV, so having to buy some gas once in a blue moon to run a generator is no big deal.
3. You stock up on fuel before a storm. Yes, it feels very silly to take an EV to a gas pump.
4. The generator gives you another option for "fueling" your EV. We haven't needed to do it, but in a pinch the cars can be L1 charged from the generator. This essentially turns the EVs into extremely inefficient gas cars (somebody on YouTube did the math on MPG charging EVs from a typical portable generator and it's pretty bad), but it means not having to wait in some long ass queue at the nearest DCFC station that has power restored.