Hyundai announced this week at the Los Angeles Auto Show a new way for its customers to charge at home as part of the company’s efforts to attract a new group of EV buyers.
Hyundai Home, as the automaker calls it, includes solar panels, energy storage and EV charging for Hyundai owners. Hyundai has announced a partnership with Electrum, an installer of solar panels, home batteries and heat pumps, that will help customers in 16 states find the right installers and power systems for their EV charging needs. With the new partnership, users in Arizona, California, Colorado. Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington can now work with Electrum Advisors to find the best and most affordable solutions to power them.
Before this week’s announcement, dealers were helping customers connect with local installers and electricity providers to set up charging and storage for their new Hyundai EVs like the Ioniq 5, according to Ian Tupper, senior group manager of strategic environmental partnerships at Hyundai.
“With Hyundai Home, we’re really trying to democratize not only EV charging and the ability to adopt an electric vehicle, but the entire ecosystem around it. We want to make it easier for customers to go solar to get energy storage and ultimately use all these systems together to lower their energy bill,” Tupper told TechCrunch during an interview at the LA Auto Show.
We’re making EV charging more affordable
As the US increasingly pushes to reduce carbon emissions, especially those from tailpipes (aka fossil fuel vehicles), states like California have banned the sale of new gasoline vehicles until 2035. This means that increasingly -large numbers of Americans will look to EVs, PHEVs and hybrids for their next new car purchase. Still, rentals account for roughly one-third of American housing, according to the U.S. Census, and most of that housing stock is older, meaning that in order to gain access to home charging, landlords will have to be ready to invest in upgrade panels and provide charging access in multi-family garages.
The average cost of retrofitting a single-family home’s electrical panel to handle vehicle charging at home can reach between $1,300 and $3,000, or by Add that to the high cost of electric, hybrid and battery electric vehicles, and many people won’t be able to afford or have access to home charging, especially those who live in multi-family buildings without access to home charging. It’s something Tupper says Hyundai is taking into consideration, but he wasn’t able to share any specific details about future plans.
“If we’re going to achieve mass adoption, we need to solve this problem for tenants, and so we’re attacking it in a few different ways. First through our partnership with Electrify America. We’re working with them to encourage building as much charging infrastructure as possible and trying to give it to customers for free,” Tupper told TechCrunch. “We take a strategic partnership approach and try to identify the players that are suitable to offer, really many solutions. If there’s a city where, you know, we can help support the manufacturing or development of a charging hub, great. But if there is a way to even incentivize low power AC charging. We will look into that as well.”
Tupper says Hyundai is working with its partners like Electrum to bring more charging and energy storage options to more customers in countries beyond the 16 that Electrum currently serves.
“We’re just getting started,” said Tupper, “Our guiding principles are that customers not only get the right products, they get the right products at the right price. Electrum helps us help customers find the right solution in the market, so we’re actually able to deliver, usually a significantly better deal than something they would normally get by going to a local supplier.”