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First look: A software update doesn't usually change what a car is, but General Motors is betting this one might. The automaker has begun enabling certain electric vehicles to send power back to the grid, building on a setup that, until now, was mostly talked about as a backup for homes during outages. With the update, the same cars can work as small energy sources, feeding electricity into local grids when demand jumps.
GM has already put the basics in place. Roughly 250,000 of its electric vehicles on US roads can perform bidirectional charging – power can flow into the battery and back out again. That has mostly meant keeping the lights on at home during an outage. Now GM is trying to plug that same capability into the wider grid.
The company can "turn every GM EV on the road into a distributed power resource," said Sterling Anderson, the automaker's chief product officer, at a company event in San Francisco on Tuesday.
