Costs vary wildly and owners have to go through Tesla-approved installers, which may make it harder for some to get the work done.
The Cybertruck is Tesla’s first consumer EV that supports bidirectional charging. The EV maker calls the feature Powershare and it basically means that the truck’s roughly 123-kilowatt-hour battery pack can be used to power tools and appliances, charge other EVs and even provide backup power to an entire house if the grid goes down.
To act as a mobile generator, though, Tesla requires Cybertruck owners to install a so-called Powershare Gateway–a hardware panel that takes power from the pickup’s battery and routes it to the house’s electrical installation. It can also route power from the grid to the car’s battery to keep it topped up. Those who ordered the top-spec Cyberbeast Foundation Series get a $4,000 installation credit included in the vehicle’s purchase, but as one owner recently found out, that amount might be extremely low.
One Tesla Cybertruck owner was quoted over $30,000 to install the necessary hardware that transforms the angular EV into a battery generator capable of powering an entire house. However, as several commenters pointed out, that estimate might have been inflated, with other owners saying they were quoted less than $5,000.
Joe Tegtmeyer, who’s best known in the EV community for his drone videos of Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, bought an all-wheel drive Foundation Series Cybertruck, so he didn’t get the $4,000 installation credit. The purchase did, however, include a $595 Powershare home charger, a $230 Powershare mobile connector and the aforementioned $1,800 Powershare Gateway.
As he explained in detail in the X post embedded below, Tegtmeyer wanted to take advantage of his truck’s power-exporting capabilities and contacted Tesla about it. The company sent a certified installer to his house to survey the electrical system which included an existing 36.6 kW roof-mounted solar system and an upgraded 250-amp main panel.
After everything was said and done, the Tesla-approved installer–Treehouse in this case–came up with an eye-watering estimate of $33,837.5. According to the company’s estimate, the biggest piece was represented by a utility upgrade to 320A amounting to $24,150. With two Tesla Powerwalls–that’s a stationary battery that also acts as a generator–the estimate went up to $64,275.
Tegtmeyer was told that the utility upgrade was necessary to make all the components work together flawlessly and that it wasn’t an option that could be deleted, but some commenters pointed out that might not necessarily be the case.
People also revealed in the comments section that Tegtmeyer’s situation might be an outlier and that the cost of installing Tesla’s Powershare gateway varies wildly from home to home. One person in Southern California said he got quoted $3,500 for the installation. Others got estimates of $4,400, $2,150, $2,870 and $5,000.
As a reminder, the all-wheel drive Tesla Cybertruck starts at $79,990, so a $33,000 installation cost for the extra hardware amounts to almost half the price of the car, which is unreasonable, to say the least.