Ford’s new EV pickup will come with more affordable home-power backup

Electric vehicles can serve as home backup batteries. But so far, most EVs have needed expensive bidirectional chargers to do that — a tough sell for customers.

Ford aims to remove this cost obstacle with its forthcoming Ford Fathom electric pickup truck. On Tuesday, the U.S. automaker revealed that the Fathom, which is set to retail at a starting price of $28,350 sometime next year, will be able to send power back to homes it’s plugged into without the same costly power-conversion tech that Ford’s now-discontinued F-150 Lightning, and almost every other bidirectional-capable EV on the market, now requires. 

Instead, the Fathom will come equipped with an onboard inverter that can convert its direct-current battery power to home-ready alternating current and deliver it via much cheaper equipment. 

Today, most EVs sold in the U.S. lack that capability, instead requiring a DC-to-AC inverter device connected to the home. That gear now costs from just under $7,000 to more than $10,000 — a significant price barrier. 

Ford hasn’t yet finalized the exact sum for the home power management tech that will work with the Fathom, but confirmed that it will be a lot cheaper than what’s available today. 

“One of the most central points of this whole story is the cost piece,” Dave McCreadie, Ford’s director of grid and energy services, told Canary Media in a Monday interview. ​“In order to see the adoption rate increase, reduced cost is a big piece of it, not just with the vehicle itself but the charging equipment — and now in this case, the discharging equipment.” 

Specifically, Ford said that the new AC-capable bidirectional charger compatible with the Fathom will be roughly half the $1,300 price of the Ford Charge Station Pro, the bidirectional charging system it developed for the F-150 Lightning. Both pieces of equipment allow homes to manage their power consumption when the grid remains up and running. 

To back up their homes during grid outages, customers also need to purchase a home backup power panel. That tech combo will cost 60% less than the $5,200 that the Ford Charge Station Pro combined with a home integration system does. (Note: These prices do not include installation costs.) 

“This is not going to be Ford’s last EV that is bidirectional capable,” McCreadie added. Other vehicles being produced based on Ford’s Universal EV Platform — the new technology line coming out of its retooled Louisville, Kentucky, factory — will also come with AC bidirectional charging capability, he said. 

Right now, the only other EV models sold in the U.S. that come equipped to send AC power back to chargers are built by Tesla. The company’s Cybertruck has been AC-to-home capable for more than a year, and earlier this month, Tesla announced its latest Model 3 and Model Y vehicles can send AC power back to homes equipped with Tesla’s Powerwall batteries. 

But the Fathom is a lot cheaper than Tesla’s EVs, and its system doesn’t require costly backup batteries. Meanwhile, DC-based systems from rivals such as General Motors, which makes a number of EVs capable of vehicle-to-home charging, are significantly more expensive — GM’s sale price for its DC V2H bundle is $6,748. 

If AC bidirectional charging is so much cheaper, why haven’t more automakers made it available? The reasons boil down to the cost and complexity of enabling EVs to convert their native DC battery power to home-ready AC, along with the uncertain regulatory environment that would allow customers to adopt the technology en masse. 

Ford’s onboard inverter tech for the Fathom and the Universal EV platform was developed in partnership with engineers at Auto Motive Power (AMP), a startup it acquired in 2023. Jiaqi Liang, AMP’s former vice president of hardware and now senior director of electrical hardware for Ford’s Advanced Programs team, said the cost of embedding a grid-ready inverter capability in EVs is relatively low. 

“The key here is to do it from scratch, so you don’t have the legacy-platform constraint,” he said. ​“We had the luxury of doing that from the Universal EV platform. It’s all integrated, from charging to discharging.” 

To ensure that the AC power flowing from EVs is safe for homes, Ford’s system uses communications technology from a tech standard certified by the automotive standards organization SAE International called SAE J3068. 

University of Delaware professor Willett Kempton led the development of the AC bidirectional charging capabilities for the J3068 standard along with Rodney McGee, the university’s EV standards expert.

Embedding power conversion tech in an EV ​“gives any automaker the ability to have the car and the backup power system in the house communicate all the things you need to for safety,” Kempton explained in a Monday interview. 

With that technology in place, the cost of enabling an EV to provide AC power is ​“in the $200 to $300 range,” he said — if it’s designed into the vehicle from the get-go. ​“If you want to add it on afterwards, it’s much more.”

Kempton is hopeful that additional automakers will choose to embed AC bidirectional capabilities in their EVs. ​“I talk with other automakers. They’re interested,” he said. ​“But when one of their peers announces ​‘This is what we’re doing, and we’ll be 60% cheaper,’ … I think that will have a big effect.” 

The other challenge is to get utilities to allow AC bidirectional charging. Only California and Maryland have set utility regulations for AC bidirectional charging outside of pilot projects, and most of the country’s 3,000-plus utilities have a ​“patchwork of rules and procedures” that complicate matters, McCreadie said.

Ford has been engaging with utilities and regulators in states including Michigan and Colorado to adopt clear guidelines for how vehicle-to-home charging can fit in with utility regulations. On Tuesday, it announced that it has been working since July with major utilities American Electric Power, BC Hydro, Consumers Energy, Exelon, and Pacific Gas & Electric to set common standards for how its AC V2H system can be integrated into standard utility interconnection rules. 

“We want to make sure that our customers interested in deploying this technology in their homes can get their system interconnected in the lowest-hassle way,” McCreadie said.