Bidirectional charging may be required on EVs soon due to new CA law
It’s an exciting week for grid resiliency-lovers in California, as Governor Gavin Newsom followed up his earlier smart grid law and signed another law this week which may require bidirectional charging on EVs in the future – though the law has no hard timeline attached, so it may be a while before we see this happen.
Bidirectional charging refers to the capability of electric vehicles to not just take electricity from the grid to charge, but to output electricity in various forms, whether this be vehicle-to-load (plugging in devices, like the 1.8kW capability on the Kia Niro EV), vehicle-to-home (like Ford’s “Intelligent Backup Power” system), or vehicle-to-grid (like the Nissan Leaf is capable of).
While these applications may seem like a party trick, widespread use of bidirectional charging could lead to huge benefits for efficiency, grid resiliency, and enable much greater penetration of renewable electricity generation.
Most electric grids don’t really have trouble meeting the regular everyday needs of electricity consumers, it’s when big spikes happen that things get difficult. Either on a hot day when everyone is using air conditioning, or a day when electricity generation is curtailed for some reason or another, that’s when things get difficult.
And as climate change makes temperatures hotter, California’s grid is often overtaxed on the hottest summer days, which are becoming more numerous. Even worse, methane-burning fossil gas peaker plants are the highest-polluting form of electricity California consumes, and these are currently used at peak times in order to deal with high demand.
One solution to this problem is adding energy storage to the grid which can be dispatched when needed, and which can fill up when the grid is oversupplying electricity. This helps to balance out supply and demand of electricity and make everything a little more predictable.
This is why there has been a push for grid-based storage like Tesla megapacks, which represent a large source of rapidly-dispatchable energy storage.
But there’s another source of grid-connected batteries out there which was right under our nose the whole time: electric cars.
EVs, which are mostly connected to the internet anyway, could be used as a distributed energy storage device, and even called upon to help provide electricity when the grid needs it. We already see this happening with Virtual Power Plants based on stationary storage, but if cars had V2G, theoretically cars could contribute in a similar way – both saving the grid, and perhaps making their owners some money along the way via arbitrage (buying electricity when its cheap and selling it when its expensive).
The problem is, not many automakers have included V2G capabilities in their cars, and in the cars that do have it, not many manufacturers have made V2G-capable equipment, and the ones who have built it haven’t seen that many customers who are interested in spending the extra money to upgrade their electrical systems with V2G-capable equipment.
So there needs to be something to jumpstart all of that, and California thinks it might just have the thing.
New CA law might require bidirectional charging… eventually.
The idea started in 2023 when state Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a bill which would require EVs to have bidirectional charging by 2027.
As this bill made its way through the legislative process, it got watered down from that ambitious timeline. So the current form of the bill, which is now called SB 59, took away that timeline and instead gave the California Energy Commission (CEC) the go-ahead to issue a requirement whenever they see it fit.
The bill directs the CEC, the California Air Resources Board, and the California Public Utilities Commission to examine the use cases of bidirectional charging and give them the power to require specific weight classes of EVs to be bidirectional-capable if a compelling use case exists.
The state already estimates that integrating EVs into the grid could save $1 billion in costs annually, so there’s definitely a use case there, but the question is the cost and immediacy of building those vehicles into the grid.
The reason this can’t be done immediately is that cars take time to design, and while adding bidirectional charging to an EV isn’t the most difficult process, it also only really becomes useful with a whole ecosystem of services around the vehicle.
Even Tesla, which for years has touted itself a tech/energy company and sold powerwalls, inverters, solar panels and so on, is still only gradually trickling its bidirectional Powershare feature out onto its vehicles.
And that ecosystem has been a bit of a hard sell so far. It’s all well and good to tell someone they can make $500/year by selling energy to the grid, but then you have to convince them to buy a more expensive charging unit and keep their car plugged in all the time, with someone else managing its energy storage. Some consumers might push back against that, so part of CEC’s job is to wait to pull the trigger until it becomes apparent that people are actually interested in the end-user use case for V2G – otherwise, no sense in requiring a feature that nobody is going to use.
Electrek’s Take
Given all of these influences, we wouldn’t expect CA to require bidirectional charging any time soon. But it still gives the state a powerful trigger to pull if other efforts, like the recently-signed smart grid law, turn out not to be enough as California works to, grow, clean up, and make its grid more affordable all at the same time.
But having the force of law behind it could turn V2G into less of a parlor trick and more into something that actually makes a difference the way us EV nerds have been dreaming of for decades now (true story: Electrek once turned down Margot Robbie for an interview and instead talked to some engineers about V2G for an hour).
So, telling manufacturers that California may start mandating bidirectional charging soon means that those manufacturers will perhaps start taking V2G more seriously, particularly given the size and influence of CA’s car market. Even if the CEC doesn’t make it a requirement, the threat of it eventually becoming one means that EV-makers will probably start getting ready for it regardless.
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 we hope this law helps us get just a little closer to that potential future.
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![Is this the Hyundai Santa Fe EV? Well, sort of [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/10/Hyundai-Santa-Fe-EV.jpeg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Hyundai’s midsize SUV is already due for a facelift, including a new design and electrified powertrain. It’s not a pure EV, but the new Hyundai Santa Fe will offer electric-only driving.
Is Hyundai launching the Santa Fe EV?
The Santa Fe is slightly bigger than the Tesla Model Y and one of Hyundai’s most popular vehicles, so an EV version would make sense, right?
Hyundai introduced hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrains for the 2021 model year. The fifth-generation, launched last year, brought a bold new look, added power, and a new hybrid option.
Now, it’s official, the next Santa Fe will be radically different from the current model. A camouflaged prototype was spotted in South Korea with a few design updates, but that’s not all.
Although it’s still under wraps, a sticker on the side of the vehicle confirms that this Santa Fe is actually an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV). Hyundai announced plans to launch its first EREV in 2027 during last month’s CEO Investor Day.
According to Hyundai, the new electrified vehicle will offer an “EV-like” driving experience, delivering over 600 miles (960 km) of combined range.
The vehicle is still equipped with a battery for pure EV driving, but it also has a gas engine that acts as a generator to extend the driving range when the battery gets low. Hyundai will use in-house batteries, which it claims will offer “full EV power performance with less than half the battery capacity.”
The video from HealerTV takes a closer look at the vehicle to show where the battery and high-voltage lines are located.
Although it’s covered, you can see a few design updates, including new head and rear lights that appear closer to the Palisade.
While Hyundai is preparing to launch the Santa Fe EREV, Genesis is also planning to introduce its first extended-range EV. We caught a sneak peek of the Genesis GV70 EREV earlier this month, which is also expected to arrive in 2027. It will follow the luxury brands’ first hybrid, the GV80, due out next year.
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In the last week, two former Tesla self-driving/Autopilot program leaders have commented on the state of autonomous driving, telling a very different story than their former boss, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has been notoriously wrong about predicting when Tesla would solve self-driving.
The CEO first announced that “all Tesla vehicles produced since 2016 have all the hardware necessary to achieve full self-driving,” and then claimed, every year from 2019 to 2025, that Tesla would deliver the capability through software updates by the end of each year.
He reiterated the prediction recently, saying Tesla would remove the safety monitor from its robotaxi service in Austin and enable “unsupervised self-driving” in consumer vehicles by the end of 2025.
There’s been a running gag at Tesla about engineers finding out that the company is supposed to deliver something as Musk announces it publicly – leading to a large discrepancy between what Tesla is working on and what Musk claims it will deliver.
Self-driving has been a good example.
While Musk has repeatedly claimed for the last 6 years that Tesla is on the verge of solving autonomy, the people actually working on the technology are not really in agreement. Some of them who left are starting to speak out.
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former head of artificial intelligence, who led the Autopilot and self-driving programs at Tesla from 2017 to 2022, recently warned that autonomous driving is far from a solved problem.
In a new podcast this week, the AI expect again warned that autonomy is not solved:
He said that he would “push pack” on the idea that what we are seeing in the world of autonomy today, with Tesla and Waymo, means it is a solved problem.
Karpathy said:
“[…] I think basically what takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines and every single nine is a constant amount of work, so every single nine is the same amount of work, so when you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine, and then you need the second nine, and third nine, fourth nine, fifth nine, and while I was at Tesla for five years or so, i think we went through maybe three nines or two nines. I don’t know, but like multiple nines of iteration, there’s still more nines to go, and so that’s why these things take so long […]”
Some data support what the engineer is claiming, as the latest FSD Beta software updates that the Tesla team delivered under his leadership did result in a significant reduction in driver intervention, but the progress has been much less evident since:
The first few ‘9s’ deliver a much greater impact, statistically, than the next ones, even though, as Karpathy pointed out, the next ones are just as important and they are just as tricky as the previous 9s.
While he highlights that there’s still a lot of work to be done, Karpathy did say that he belives Tesla’s approach to be more scalable.
He is not the only former Tesla Autopilot program leader to speak out recently.
Sterling Anderson is recognized as the first Autopilot program leader at Tesla in 2015-2016. He now leads global products at GM, which announced this week that it plans to launch level 3 autonomous driving in 2028.
During the event announcing the new autonomous driving timeline at GM, Anderson took a jab at his former employer:
Our customers have driven over 700 million hands-free miles with Super Cruise without a single accident attributed to the technology. I led Autopilot, and you can’t say that for Autopilot. I think this is the long-term play: we build trust with customers by delivering safe products.
He has a point considering Tesla is currently flooded with lawsuits related to accident that involved its Autopilot or ‘Full Self-Driving’ features.
The GM executive favor the more careful approach to autnomous driving.
Electrek’s Take
As I often point out, there’s what Elon says, and there’s what Tesla’s lawyers say.
Elon’s own lawyers say Tesla shareholders shouldn’t listen to him, calling his statements “mere corporate puffery.” That’s an actual quote.
I do believe that Tesla will achieve unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles at someone point, but I don’t have any evidence that it is close to happen.
As Karpathy said, there are still several 9s to go through before it can be at 99.9999999%, which is needed for level4-5 autonomy, and each of those 9s represent years of work.
I think there’s a clear discrepenacy between how Elon talks about self-driving at Tesla and what people who are actually building those systems, like Anderson and Karpathy from 2015 to 2022, are experiencing.
Elon has been lucky to find Ashok, Tesla’s current self-driving leader, who seems to be perfectly willing to endorse his consistently wrong FSD predictions.
It’s not really surprising when you know that Ashok is the one who produce the infamous FSD demo of 2016. As Karpathy pointed out, we should be doubtful of AI demos.
Looking the prediction markets, people don’t really believe in what Elon is claiming. On Polymarket, people who have been betting on Tesla’s not delivering unsupervised self-driving this year have made a lot of money:
Elon reitereted the goal this week and the “no” answer still gained ground after his claim that Tesla was on track.
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This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes Rivian’s new ALSO e-bike, FLIT sells a pound of caviar with its new lightweight folding e-bike, Florida wants e-bike riders to get a license, and more.
The Wheel-E podcast returns every two weeks on Electrek’s YouTube channel, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.
As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.
After the show ends, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:
We also have a Patreon if you want to help us to avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.
Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the Wheel-E podcast today:
Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 11:00 a.m. ET (or the video after 12:00 p.m. ET):
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