AN EV owner has revealed a hidden that can charge your car for free – but not everyone can do it.
Ryan, who runs EV review site The Kilowatts, shared the handy hack on his TikTok channel.
TikTok /@klwttsEV owner Ryan revealed how he can charge his EV for free[/caption]
TikTok /@klwttsBidirectional charging allows one EV to charge off another, as Ryan showed with his Tesla and a Kia[/caption]
In the video, he showed how you charge up your car with a simple gadget.
All you need is a bidirectional charging cable and a fellow EV owner with their motor.
These cables can cost as little as £60 and allow you to use another car to charge up your own and vice versa.
In this case, Ryan used a Kia to boost the battery on his Tesla simply by connecting them via the cable.
It was easy to do and his vehicle was powering back up in a matter of seconds.
He said: ” A lot of people say that you don’t have a gas can for an electric vehicle. Well, Kia is solving that problem here.
“Here we go, there’s the cable all connected, and we’re starting to charge. And we are now charging off the Kia.”
This could, in theory, effectively turn every EV into a roaming charging station.
And, if you have particularly generous friends, it can charge you up for free, although obviously, the car acting as the charger would need to be charged itself from commercial sources.
However, this nifty option isn’t currently open to everyone, as only certain EVs can support bidirectional charging.
Models from major brands, including the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and VW ID Buzz, do boast the feature but many vehicles, especially older ones, do not.
Likewise, charging from another car is much slower than from a commercial public charger.
Ryan’s Tesla had less than 50% of its range used up, but still said it would take five hours to recover to full charge.
For comparison, on Tesla’s rapid charging network, the company claims that most of its models can be fully charged in under an hour.
Nonetheless, if you run out of charge on the side of the road, this could be a great way for a kind passerby or road trip buddy to give you enough juice to make it to the next charging stop.
It comes after the UK’s largest EV, weighing a whopping 5,000lbs, was unveiled this week.
Meanwhile, Nissan introduced an electric version of one of its popular petrol models for the same price.