2024 Mazda CX-90 Long-Term Update: The charged becomes the charger

After a conspicuously mild and uneventful winter, I was caught unawares last week when our utility company decided to bring our entire substation offline for emergency maintenance ... at 8 p.m. on a Friday. Fortunately, the weather was beautiful and I had no plans that required electricity. Not so fortunately, my phone was quite low on juice — circling the proverbial drain on a single-digit battery percentage, in fact. And while I could hear some of my neighbors' generators coming online, I opted for something a little closer to home.

Our long term 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV was parked out back on the now-cured foundation for my new garage, fresh off an early-morning charge (so as to avoid my utility's peak rates). Using a plug-in hybrid car as a phone charger may seem like a shortcut to mammoth-sized carbon hoofprint, but 1) this is sort-of an emergency and 2) this is really no different than a vehicle-to-grid setup, right? So what if "the grid" consists of nothing more than USB-C cable and my thirsty Samsung.