GM Wants To Own Your Entire Home EV Charging Process

by Chris Teague

Published: June 29th, 2023

gm wants to own your entire home ev charging process

Buying an electric vehicle is a great step toward cutting your driving emissions, but you’ll want to install a home charger to make owning one much less annoying. General Motors recently announced new home charging offerings for its EV customers, including solutions that enable vehicle-to-home (V2H) functionality.

GM’s Ultium Home products come in three bundles. The V2H Bundle includes a bidirectional charger and home charger that can let the structure go off-grid. The Home Energy System includes those two components and adds a PowerBank battery for backup. People without EVs can still buy the PowerBank and connectors to store power. The system also works with solar-powered homes, and GM has partnered with SunPower to create the connections. Owners can manage the power flow through the GM Energy Cloud app.

The number of GM Ultium EVs is about to grow quickly, as the Chevrolet Equinox EV and Blazer EV are set to join the lineup later this year. The Cadillac Escalade IQ is also expected soon, along with the Chevrolet Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV. It’s unclear if GM’s home power solutions will work with other automakers’ vehicles running on Ultium technology, but the company has paired up with Honda to build new electric SUVs for it and the Acura brand.

[Image: Chevrolet]

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#GeneralMotors #Ultium #homeevcharging

Chris Teague

Chris grew up in, under, and around cars, but took the long way around to becoming an automotive writer. After a career in technology consulting and a trip through business school, Chris began writing about the automotive industry as a way to reconnect with his passion and get behind the wheel of a new car every week. He focuses on taking complex industry stories and making them digestible by any reader. Just don’t expect him to stay away from high-mileage Porsches.

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14 of 41 comments

Kwik_Shift_Pro4X on Jun 29, 2023

Spying and control is what its about.

2 Reply
- See 2 previous
- FreedMike on Jun 29, 2023
  
  Spying on what - how many kilowatt hours worth of electricity you use? How does that help them?
  
  Like
- SPPPP on Jun 29, 2023
  
  @FreedMike - I would agree, except that FaceBook / Meta's enterprise value is about $700B, and Google's is about $1.5T. All of that built on collecting user data and serving ads. So it seems that there is a lot of incentive to do just that. Can you trust GM to maintain your privacy and not exploit the relationship? IDK.
  
  2
- EBFlex on Jun 29, 2023
  
  "Spying and control is what its about."
  Yep. Total control of their citizens. The wannabe dictator is soon to be just the dictator. Just too bad he can't put a coherent sentence together.
  
  1
- SCE to AUX on Jun 30, 2023
  
  No, they want to sell you a battery and a switch.
  
  2
- FreedMike on Jun 30, 2023
  
  @SPPP: True, Meta and other tech companies sell data. But they sell it because it's sellable, meaning there's data that buyers could actually use to sell you stuff.
  Now we have GM, who wants to sell you a home charger and a battery storage system. What sellable data do they mine from this - how much electricity you use? That doesn't seem like something that could be sold for much, if at all, and if it were, your electric company would already be selling it.
  Either way, the solution to all this is simple: opt out of data sharing. And there needs to be regulation of what companies can collect in the first place.
  
  1
Wjtinfwb on Jun 29, 2023

So... if I allow GM to "own" my EV power source, will it throw up all over the garage when I plug in a Mach-E or Tesla? Will the data transmissions work between manufacturers?

1 Reply
- See 1 previous
- SCE to AUX on Jun 30, 2023
  
  It'll work just fine. It's a battery and a switch.
  
  Like
- Luke42 on Jul 01, 2023
  
  There's a brand-agnostic serial protocol which allows the computer in the car and the computer in the wall-unit to negotiate the appropriate amperage so that the wiring doesn't overheat.
  There is a conspiracy here: one to prevent electrical fires.
  It's the J1772 "pilot signal" running through a NACS connector. It works with every modern brand and style of EV just fine.
  
  Like
Analoggrotto on Jun 29, 2023

General Motors is turning into a communist shadow entity.

2 Reply
- See 4 previous
- Syke on Jun 29, 2023
  
  You've gotten your aluminum foil shipment in for July yet?
  
  2
- FreedMike on Jun 30, 2023
  
  By doing what - selling stuff and making money on it? That's not exactly in the Marxist-Leninist playbook.
  
  2
- Analoggrotto on Jun 30, 2023
  
  They are communist just like china. Taking taxpayers' money to stay afloat, wrapping themselves in BS nationalism and now taking part in dismantling even the most basic freedoms. I don't care why you sympathize with communist china so much, but you need to seek help for it.
  
  1
- Luke42 on Jul 02, 2023
  
  Dude, they're trying to sell you cars and car accessories.
  If you don't like what they're selling, don't buy it.
  I happen to love driving an EV. I currently drive a Tesla and I love it -- but I'm a low-brand-loyalty person, and might very well own a Chevy. I'm not going back to a slow/smelly/noisy/expensive ICE vehicle voluntarily, so any car business that wants to sell me a car is going to have need to have EVs on the menu.
  
  You can keep driving expensive/smelly/slow/noisy vehicles if you like. But the more people who experience EVs, the more people will refuse to drive anyone else. And the car companies know it, too.
  
  1
- EBFlex on Jul 02, 2023
  
  "I'm not going back to a slow/smelly/noisy/expensive ICE vehicle voluntarily"
  Just so we are perfectly clear, no ICE vehicle made within the last-at least 20 years-is any of those things.
  Try again with your lies.
  
  1
- Analoggrotto on Jul 02, 2023
  
  Luke42 - GM has been bailed out with taxpayer's money and for that they try to sell us garbage vehicles, assembled by protocommunist union workers, they own the data collected in vehicles we buy so they can turn around and sell it to whomever they please, and yet are able to make such vehicles still because of our tax revenue (to be repetitive) and now they want to own part of our homes for more data collection? And so they can charge never ending leases for that equipment to lock customers into the dubious Ultium ecosystem which I'm sure is inferior to Tesla anyway.
  
  Go on and tell me about how your Tesla drives better than an Elise or STi. You aren't even a car enthusiast in the slightest.
  
  Like
- Multicam on Jul 03, 2023
  
  Luke42, while I agree with the spirit of your first two sentences, I can’t agree with your characterization of ICE vehicles as “smelly, slow, noisy…” etc. I just completed a 2,500+ mile cross-country trip in three days and three hours while towing 2,200 lbs and with another… say… 900 lbs of payload across two ICE vehicles. Most of the time with the A/C on full blast. Most stops lasting less than 10 minutes every 300 miles or so. It would have been utterly impossible to do that in an EV, and our ICE vehicles smelled fine, were plenty fast, and quiet enough that we could listen to whatever we wanted. So… while I’m glad EVs work for you and so many others, people like me who move every 18 months and don’t own houses can’t make them work.
  
  1
3SpeedAutomatic on Jul 03, 2023

With the number of recalls of Big Three vehicles, are there corresponding defects in the home charging system?
Will GM claim ownership when the system causes a fire at my home?
Also, do any corresponding defects fall under NTSB recall guidelines?

I hear the lawyers typing class action briefs as we speak.🤥🤥🤥

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