Can electric cars save the grid? CA might require EVs to have V2G by 2027
A bill has been introduced in California which would require all EVs to have bidirectional charging capability starting in model year 2027.
The bill is numbered SB 233, introduced in the California Senate by Senator Nancy Skinner, who represents the Oakland area, just north of Tesla’s factory in Fremont; it has a lot of organizations supporting it.
It would require all new electric vehicles to be “bidirectional capable” by model year 2027.
The bill doesn’t specifically define “bidirectional-capable” and directs the California Energy Commission to convene a work group and produce a report on the bidirectional capabilities of various vehicles. This would likely include vehicle-to-grid capability, which means that the car’s battery can feed energy into the electrical grid (or a microgrid), much the same way that a home solar system does when it produces more than a home can consume.
There are other types of bidirectional usage available for EVs, notably vehicle-to-load and vehicle-to-home. V2L is the most limited type and typically has lower peak draw capability – for example, the 1.8kW capability on the Kia Niro EV. V2H allows homeowners to power their home with a car’s battery, much like a Tesla Powerwall might work or like Ford’s “Intelligent Backup Power” system.
Another umbrella term for all of this is “vehicle-to-everything,” or V2X.
The bill is meant to help California’s grid tackle challenges with peak loads. As climate change makes temperatures hotter, California’s grid is often overtaxed on the hottest summer days, which are becoming more numerous. Even worse, natural gas peaker plants are the highest-polluting form of electricity California consumes, and these need to be used at peak times in order to deal with high demand.
Electric cars can be a solution to this problem, since they could function as a distributed backup system for the grid. With incentives to charge overnight (utilities give cheaper rates for night charging) and additional incentives to discharge a battery when demand is high, EV owners could help the grid, the air, and also potentially their pocketbooks by buying electricity when it is cheap and putting it back onto the grid when it’s expensive.
California has already moved to incentivize grid-connected storage with its recent changes to its solar net metering program. In a change that was controversial for many rooftop solar advocates, the new 3.0 net metering provision gave higher incentives to stationary battery storage and fewer incentives to normal nonbattery rooftop solar installations.
But there aren’t a lot of V2G-capable cars out there. Currently, only one EV on the market is fully V2G capable and has an available charger to unlock that capability for fleets. That car is also the oldest EV on the market – the Nissan Leaf, which was introduced in 2011 and has been equipped with bidirectional charging capability since 2013. But it only finally got its charger last September, several years after introduction and four years after Nissan partnered with Fermata Energy to deliver this charger.
Other vehicles have V2L or V2H capabilities (or have been promised to eventually have V2G capabilities), but only one is fully V2G capable in the US at the moment.
The bill has already been through two committees (Transportation and Energy, Utilities and Communications), during which it has been watered down significantly. Earlier versions of the bill would have also applied to all electric vehicle supply equipment (chargers), had specific incentives for bidirectional-capable EVs, and may have required these vehicles to use interoperable standards, but these aspects have all been removed as the bill has been amended.
Next, it has to go through the Appropriations committee, then pass through the state Senate and Assembly, and get signed by the governor – so there’s a lot more to go, with the potential that anything could be changed by more amendments.
Then many specifics of implementation would be left up to the California Air Resources Board, California Energy Commission, and California Public Utilities Commission, and the work group convened to study this issue. This includes potentially exempting certain vehicles from the requirements if they are found not to have a “likely beneficial bidirectional-capable use case.”
Electrek’s Take
V2G hasn’t really taken off with consumers, not solely because there aren’t many vehicles available that allow it but also because it’s not all that easy to use. You can’t just plug your car into an outlet and use it – you need to have a grid interconnect, a system which manages the charging and discharging of your vehicle, and so on.
So far, V2G has been more of a curiosity or potentially something for fleets which have large amounts of dispatchable power, but not really something that consumers can take advantage of.
A system like Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant, which connects Powerwall owners together into a large, automatically-dispatchable reserve of power for the grid (all while making those Powerwall owners money), would make it easier for consumers to use their cars in this way.
And having the force of law behind it, requiring all vehicles to be capable of this, could just be the kick-start needed to make these widespread. V2G definitely benefits from a network effect, where it becomes more useful the more people participate.
There’s no real point to a single person discharging their car into the grid, but when millions of cars are involved, you could work to flatten out the famous “duck curve,” which describes the imbalance between electricity supply and demand. We hear a lot about “intermittency” as the problem with wind and solar, and grid storage as the solution to that, so being able to immediately switch on gigawatt-hours worth of installed storage capacity would certainly help to solve that problem.
And that could be worth a tremendous amount of money to the grid. Not only does it eliminate peaker plant usage, which is costly both economically and environmentally, but it also saves money on grid storage installation and helps to avoid costly and even deadly widespread power outages. These benefits could be thought to balance out any cost of additional incentives for V2G-capable cars. But many of those benefits are had simply by charging the car at the right time, which helps to balance out peaks and troughs on its own.
The question of cost is important. This could increase the cost of EVs, and certainly of electrical charger installations. Will the incentive be enough to make up for this increased cost for consumers? Will enough people install grid interconnections to make this useful? And how can they even do so, when there’s a massive backlog of people waiting for grid interconnections to be installed?
And with 2027 coming so soon, do automakers have time to implement this, given that Nissan’s system took more than a decade to get a V2G-capable charger commercially available in the US? Tesla’s VP of Powertrain and Energy, Drew Baglino, recently said it could have bidirectional charging in two years, and immediately afterward, CEO Elon Musk stepped in to say that he thought nobody would want to use bidirectional charging.
This brings up a point: It still remains to be seen if car owners would accept having their car’s charge controlled by an algorithm. People are already obsessed with buying cars that have much more range than they need, so coming back to a car and finding out it’s got 100 fewer miles than you left it at might rattle some owners. This is solvable by setting minimum thresholds in an app, but that could also limit the overall usefulness of the system to the grid.
While this is a great idea that could solve many problems for California and elsewhere, we could see it being difficult to implement unless the system is made easy to use, easy to install, and people are properly incentivized to use it in a manner that is understandable to a public that doesn’t know the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. State regulators will have their work cut out for them to design these regulations by the end of 2024 as the bill describes, but if they get it right, this could finally give us the V2G dream we’ve been thinking of for so long.
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Based on the excellent Hyundai IONIQ 5 N platform, Vanwall gives its Vandervell H-GT a high-performance aesthetic makeover inspired by the classic Lancia Delta HF Integrale. But what makes this body kit a genuine “high-performance” upgrade isn’t the way it makes the car look: it’s the 500 lb. weight savings!
Developed by Austrian racing team ByKOLLES Racing and invoking the name of a 1950s Formula 1 team, the Vandervell H-GT is essentially a new Hyundai IONIQ 5 N in aggressive, Lancia Delta-inspired carbon-fiber bodywork that the company claims gives the car an, “unprecedented weight optimization in this vehicle category.”
The H-GT’s new “thin wall” carbon fiber body slashes the car’s weight by over 230 kg (507 lbs.), which means ByKOLLES’ new Vandervell can do anything that Hyundai’s “special” IONIQ 5 N hot hatch can do. Only faster.
Raw carbon, raw performance
Mechanically identical to the IONIQ 5 N and packing the same 641 hp (with N Grin Boost) and 568 lb-ft of torque. That’s enough to launch the Hyundai version of the hatchback from a standstill to 60 mph in just 3.0 seconds.
After its 500 lb. crash diet, it’s even quicker.
The car was first announced in 2023 (along with the renderings shown, below), when ByKOLLES was competing in the World Endurance Championship (WEC) with what used to be called an LMP car – but they keep changing the names of these things so it could be a Daytona Prototype, Hypercar, or even a 24 Hour LeMans Wonkavator by now.
The important part, however, is that a few of these cars have now broken cover, with ex-Formula 1 supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, having been seen trying the new-age Lancia on for size.
The Vanwall Vandervell website still shows the same €128,000 ($145,405, as I type this) price tag and specs it did in 2023, which either means they haven’t updated it in a while, were really, really good at pricing the thing in the first place, or both.
That’s presumably on top of the IONIQ N’s already hefty $66,100 price tag.
Electrek’s Take
This isn’t the first time my weird love of Lancia models from the 70s and 80s has been highlighted on these digital pages, but even my biased sensibilities can see that this is a unique, ultra-luxury statement piece that offers supercar levels of performance with the sort of daily driver dependability that Hyundai has offered for years.
It’s an incredible machine – and the only thing they did wrong, in my book, was not show one in Martini colors on its debut.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Vanwall Vandervell; CarExpert.
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I had the chance to drive the new 2025 RS Audi GT e-tron for a few hours in the Nevada desert and for a few minutes on a race track.
Here are my thoughts.
Audi has stepped up its EV game in a big way with its new electric vehicles based on the PPE platform. Over the last year, I drove both the Q6, an electric SUV based on the PPE, and the A6, an electric sedan based on the same platform, and I came out extremely impressed.
I think those vehicles are going to take Audi to the next level when it comes to EVs.
But they are not the EVs pushing Audi’s limits; that’s still its flagship Audi GT e-tron, now with a top-performance RS version launched with the 2025 model-year refresh.
The new GT e-tron, which is built on the same platform as the Porsche Taycan, is more than a model year refresh; it’s a mid-cycle update, but not a normal one. While mid-cycle updates often focus on design changes and adding a few features, the 2025 GT e-tron looks very similar to the previous version, but it’s significantly different under the hood.
The design has been slightly updated with a honeycomb grill, a few new wheel designs, and a very cool new motorsport-inspired rear reflector.
I think that the rear diffuser with vertical reflector looks sick on the RS GT:
It still looks like the same sporty vehicle, but more refined, especially the RS version.
Speaking of the RS version, it’s now the most powerful Audi ever with almost 1,000 horsepower (912hp). That’s thanks to new motors with increased copper density, resulting in more power and lower weight:
An added bonus is that they can also regen at a higher rate of 400kW, which quite impressive. I prefer the regen modes in the Q6/A6, but the 400kW capacity has some incredible stopping power. That’s 0.45G at max deceleration.
It’s useful when you launch the RS GT e-tron from 0 to 60 mph in 2.4 seconds with launch control is engaged. I did a few quick acceleration and fast launches in the desert and on a small racetrack outside of Las Vegas and you need to make sure your head is firmly on the headrest.
Audi also has a “push-to-pass” power boost button on the steering wheel that unleashes an extra 94 hp (70 kW) for 10 seconds. The German automaker emphasized that this is repeatable. I didn’t test that, but I can say that I tested the RS GT e-tron on the racetrack after a dozen people did with the same car, and I was impressed by the capacity at about 50% state-of-charge.
Now, if you look closely at this launch, you might have noticed how the front end of the vehicle adjusted itself down after shooting up from the launch.
That’s thanks to the new advanced adaptive air suspension with with damper control.
It’s extremely fast and impressive. I am pretty sure they could make the car jump and down with the suspension if they wanted to, but they don’t.
The suspension is so advanced you don’t need an anti-roll bar. It adjust so fast that it is able to keep the vehicle solid and balance even in high speed corners. It felt effortless driving somewhat aggressively on the desert roads outside of Las Vegas, but Audi enabled a very cool test on the track.
They had me do a lap without the active suspension’s cornering compensation activated and then I did the same lap with it enabled. It was night and day. In fact, it felt like cheating. I’m no track driver, but the second lap felt incredibly easy, almost as if the car was on rails.
Here are the different suspension profiles:
The new 2025 GT e-tron also has 12% more battery capacity resulting in up to 51 more miles of range depending on the configurations and wheel choices. It results in 278 miles of range mac for the RS and 300 miles of range for the S.
As usual, one of the most impressive things about Audi’s EVs is the fast-charging capacity, and the new 2025 GT improves on that thanks to the updated battery pack:
That results in 10 to 80% charging in about 18 minutes.
All that performance doesn’t come cheap. The S e-tron GT starts at $125,500, and the RS e-tron GT Performance starts at $167,000. The version that I tested with closer to $180,000 with options.
Electrek’s Take
This was actually my first time driving an Audi GT e-tron so I can’t compare it to the previous version, but I came out impressed.
With Audi, I love their quiet, comfortable luxury with the A6 and Q6. This is not that. It’s a performance vehicle, but it’s still a 4-door, 4-seater, with decent space in the back, so Audi clearly also focused on comfort, and you can feel it.
I can see this being a great daily driver even though the cabin wasn’t as quiet as the previously mentioned vehicles and you could feel more vibration.
The Audi GT e-tron really shines when you start driving more aggressively. Like I previously said, the active suspension’s cornering suspension is truly impressive and makes things easier.
Though I’d note that, unlike the active suspension in the latest Taycan, the one in the Audi GT does allow a bit of roll to give you some road feedback. I appreciated that.
I also appreciated the vehicle’s steering. Again, I can’t compare it to previous versions, but the ratio was reportedly reduced and it did feel short and precise.
The lower weight and higher battery capacity are also appreciated as it can be hard for people to buy an electric vehicle at $100,000+ with fewer than 250 miles of range, which was the case before this 2025 update.
Now, to be fair, Audi put me in a fully loaded RS GT e-tron Performance that cost closer to $200,000. It was incredible, but I don’t know how the car performs with the base S GT e-tron. I’m sure you can have fun with it too and you get more range.
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A Unifor union rep at the Ontario production facility where GM builds the all electric Chevy BrightDrop van is temporarily halting production of the commercial EV due to slow sales – but with massive discounts, Costco member programs, and state and utility incentives driving costs well below its diesel competitors, it might still be the best EV deal you can get.
Donald Trump’s planned automotive tariffs may have been put on hold, but the uncertainty they caused just from being threatened has caused waves of damage across a dozen industries – and that’s causing companies like GM to expect more pain in the near term.
To that end, GM says it’s making, “operational and employment adjustments to balance inventory and align production schedules with current demand,” at the CAMI Assembly plant in Ontario, Canada, where it makes BrightDrop vans. The layoffs will begin on April 14, according to the union, when production will temporarily cease until October 2025.
During the downtime, GM says it plans to retool the plant to prepare for production of the (presumably updated) 2026 model year BrightDrop vans.
“(The production pause is) a crushing blow to hundreds of working families in Ingersoll and the surrounding region who depend on this plant,” said Unifor National President, Lana Payne, in a statement. “General Motors must do everything in its power to mitigate job loss during this downturn, and all levels of government must step up to support Canadian auto workers and Canadian-made products.”
GM reported sales of just 274 BrightDrop vans in the first quarter of 2025. That’s up about 7% from the 256 sold in Q1 of 2024 – but still really. Definitely. Not. A lot.
When production resumes in October, the plant will operate on a single shift, which will result in reduced manufacturing rate for GM’s commercial vans and the indefinite layoff of nearly 500 union factory workers, according to Unifor.
Electrek’s Take
We’ve covered the $30,000-plus discounts currently available for Chevy BrightDrop customers. Those discounts are already enough to take the $84,235 BrightDrop 400 eAWD EV all the way down to $52,985 – and that’s before utility incentives like ComEd’s commercial EV rebates (which the Chevy van qualifies for) can bring it down even further.
ComEd is offering up to $30,000 in rebates (per vehicle) if you snap up the Class 3/11,000 GVWR version … meaning Chicago area fleets can electrify their delivery operations for much, much less than they probably think.
Check your state and local rebates at this link to see what a BrightDrop might cost you in your state, then let us know if you can think of a better EV deal in the comments.
SOURCE: Unifor; via Reuters.
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