Ford Says Its New $30K Fathom EV Truck Will Make Bidirectional Backup Power Cheaper

Ford has just announced that its upcoming Fathom electric pickup truck will come with bidirectional charging, meaning that it will be able to send power to your house if the power goes out.

And because the Fathom is designed to be an affordable truck, starting under $30,000 when it goes on sale in 2027, Ford says it wants this feature to be affordable as well. To that end, the new system will not require a separate and expensive wall-mounted inverter.

Bidirectional power can effectively turn an EV’s battery pack into a mobile energy delivery device, allowing for the battery to potentially power your home through a connection to the larger power grid. Although an attractive idea, the technology has proven expensive to implement. EVs store power as DC (direct current) but homes use AC (alternating current), which usually necessitates the need for an expensive inverter and associated installation costs, as we found out with Ford’s own F-150 Lightning.

Ford says the Fathom won’t need an inverter to supply more than 10 kilowatts of AC power to the home. The automaker worked with Auto Motive Power, a startup that Ford bought in 2023, as it was engineering the Universal EV Platform that underpins the Fathom. They worked together to redesign the bidirectional hardware and software in an effort to come up with a lower-cost way to do it.

The solution: fewer parts and an inverter built into the truck’s E-box, which is one of five main modules that run all aspects of the truck. The result is a system that’s both simpler and costs less, one that meets all requirements and regulations needed to connect to the grid, according to Ford.

Ford’s F-150 Lightning has since been discontinued.

Managing the Power Flow

Fathom owners will be able to use bidirectional charging in two ways. The first is more basic power management, where owners can use their Ford home wall unit to charge their EV during off-peak hours when electricity is less expensive and help power their home when electricity is more expensive, reducing cost in both scenarios. Customers will need to buy Ford’s Home Power Station, which Ford says is expected to cost about half as much as its first-generation Charge bidirectional charger.

The second scenario is home backup power that allows the Fathom to send power to the owner’s home when the power goes out. To do this, the customer needs both the Home Power Station and the Ford Home Backup Panel, which is expected to cost about 60 percent less than the first-generation backup hardware.

The original package for the Ford Lightning, announced in 2022, was for a $1,310 Charge Station Pro (the names of the equipment have changed) that was an 80-amp home charger. And there was the $3,895 Home Integration System to connect the charger and truck to the home’s electrical system, thereby allowing backup power during an outage. Total cost was $5,205, excluding the cost of installation. So, the new system in the Fathom should be in the $2,500 range before installation (note: installation could ramp up costs considerably).

Ad for the upcoming Ford Fathom

Working With Utility Providers

Connecting to the grid is not easy when there are more than 3,000 utility companies across the U.S. and Canada and numerous regulations and processes, most of which apply to solar panels and stationary battery storage units, not vehicles.

Ford formed a working group in July with five major utilities: American Electric Power, BC Hydro, Consumers Energy, Exelon, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to help define interconnection processes before Fathom hits the road. The goal is clear regulations and processes for those who only use their EVs for charging and the occasional power backup as opposed to rules for those who are actually connecting to the grid.

As for the Fathom itself, it will be built at Ford’s Louisville plant that is undergoing a $2 billion retooling to make vehicles on the new platform designed to offer affordable electric vehicles that better compete with low-cost Chinese vehicles flooding the global market. The base truck is expected to use a rear electric motor powered by a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery pack that is less costly.

The Fathom is due to go into production sometime in early 2027, although Ford CEO Jim Farley recently said it will be a challenge to launch the Fathom at scale, at cost, and on time.