BMW’s Neue Klasse will bidirectional power your house

When BMW’s next-generation electric cars hit the showroom, customers can charge the lights, the oven, or the washing machines in their houses through their car’s battery. The Neue Klasse will be equipped with bidirectional charging when it arrives in 2025.

BMW CEO Oliver broke at the Annual Conference 2024: “With the Neue Klasse, we are introducing bidirectional charging, which we have already tested extensively. Our customers can feed electrical energy stored in the vehicle back into their own house and electrical devices like your e-bike or the public power grid. This lowers electricity costs and helps stabilize networks.”

Special wall box

The bidirectional technology transforms the Neue Klasse’s battery into a power bank, which can feed back energy to the grid (V2G), supply energy to your home (V2H), or power external devices (V2L). The Neue Klasse is the first electric mass-produced BMW to feature the technology. Customers will only be able to benefit if they buy a dedicated wall box, which is about three times more expensive than one-directional units. The accompanying software will be integrated into the MyBMW app.

Bidirectional charging is poised to shape the future of battery management. As Zipse mentioned, it helps balance the grid supply and increase cost efficiency. Customers can charge when electricity prices are low and supply the stored energy from their cars when demand and price rise.

For BMW, this is the next step in intelligent charging. Last year, the automaker announced its cooperation with energy provider E.ON, creating a charging ecosystem combining the separate units of electric vehicles, in-house energy management, and provider.

Test case with i3

Three years ago, BMW started a pilot project with the i3 and bidirectional charging, involving a long list of partners and 50 selected customers. The results from the concluded project haven’t been released, but the commercial introduction in the Neue Klasse points to a positive outcome.

BMW isn’t the first car manufacturer to offer vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-house charging. Volkswagen has already implemented it on specific ID models. Ford introduced it on the F150 Lightning, while Nissan approved it on the Leaf last year for the North American market.

For the typically adverse take on the technology, you need to look at Tesla’s solution, which claims that existing customers can upgrade their current Powerwall wall box at a reasonable surcharge and without additional installation costs.