GM’s Vehicle-to-Home Charging Will Be Standard by 2026, Thanks to Ultium

• GM will offer V2H, or vehicle-to-home, bidirectional power on all its Ultium-based electric vehicles by model year 2026.

• The Silverado EV pickup truck will be first to get it when it debuts this year.

• The technology is already offered by Ford, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Hyundai.

Electric cars run on juice provided by the electric grid, but more and more EVs are going the other way and sending electricity from their battery packs back to the home or even to the electric grid from whence the power came.

Ford has been offering it for two years on the F-150 Lightning, while Nissan’s Leaf and Mitsubishi’s Outlander PHEV offer it, but now GM has announced that it, too, will offer bidirectional charging on all its Ultium-based electric models by 2026.

Better late than never.

There are basically four types of bidirectional charging now:

1. Vehicle-To-Grid, where electricity stored in an EV’s battery is sent back to the electric grid that originally supplied it, potentially keeping CON Edison or Nevada Light & Power from instituting rolling blackouts on really hot days when everyone’s using their air conditioning.

2. Vehicle-To-Load, which means having a 120-volt AC electrical outlet on your car or truck into which you can plug appliances that run on electricity like a power drill, your home window-mounted air conditioner, or the laptop computer on which you’re reading this.

3. Vehicle-To-Home, which is like turning your electric car’s battery into a Tesla Power Wall that charges everything in your house.

4. Vehicle-To-X, meaning vehicle to everything—sort of a catch-all phrase that generally means all of the above.

The GM systems will be that third one, V2H. They will turn GM Ultium batteries into the wheeled equivalent of a Tesla Power Wall (or other fine home battery system).

“General Motors announced today that it will expand vehicle-to-home bidirectional charging technology across its retail portfolio of Ultium-based electric vehicles by model year 2026,” the company said this morning.