EcoFlow supplies the Stream Ultra X with a cable for connecting it to the grid, and that cable arrives with nothing on the end of it. Mr. EV holds it up in his follow-up video and says you have to fit your own plug. His guess is that the omission is deliberate, a way of not quite selling British buyers a function the regulations do not currently permit. The battery is finished. The rules covering what it may do with its 3.84 kWh are not.
That gap runs through most of today's stories. In Bavaria, an electric truck spent a night running a volunteer fire brigade's midsummer festival, which is not a category anybody sells trucks in, and the constraint there was never the hardware. The used BMW i4 makes the same case from the other side. On paper it loses: dearer than a Model 3, slower to charge, shorter on range, meaner on standard kit. Electrifying picks it regardless, which is a way of saying the comparison table was never measuring the thing that decides it.
The spec sheet version of this is smaller and stranger. Zeekr lists 230 kW as the peak for the X's 61 kWh pack. Out of Spec Roaming recorded 286 kW on good hardware in Norway and went from 10 to 80 percent in under fifteen minutes against a claimed eighteen. A published figure is a number a company can be held to, so it gets written for the worst charger on the worst day.
The commercially serious version is the one Dan Caesar sets out in the Everything Electric podcast. His argument is that the institutions around this industry, the trade bodies, the mandates, the media businesses covering it, are still shaped for a market that has already moved. He is stepping back from the chief executive job at the end of September. The figures he quotes are not the ones those institutions were built for: Denmark near 97 percent, the rest of the world up 96 percent, North America down 18.
What to watch is a date in Britain. By Mr. EV's account, panels with a micro inverter plugged into a socket become legal on 27 August, and batteries do not, a distinction resting on which direction electricity moves through the same socket. Whenever that second rule shifts, hardware already sitting in people's gardens becomes a different product overnight without a component changing. That is the cheapest capacity any grid can add, and it is waiting on a form.
A Home Battery Britain Lets You Charge but Not Discharge
Mr. EV has had an EcoFlow Stream Ultra X on a flat roof feeding his home office for months, and this update is mostly about what a British owner is allowed to do with one. He reports 3.84 kWh of storage, four MPPT inputs accepting up to 2 kW of solar, and two three pin sockets on the back. Off grid it delivers up to 1.2 kW, he says, rising to 2.3 kW when the unit itself is plugged in, while output back into a UK home is limited to 800 W.
The regulatory picture is the news. He reports that charging the unit overnight on a cheap tariff and drawing from it during the day is fine, that panels with a micro inverter become legal to plug into a socket from 27 August, and that batteries pushing stored energy back into a house or grid remain outside the rules. When that changes, he says, owners will need a G98 notification to their network operator and a bidirectional RCBO on the circuit.
His payback maths, roughly £357 a year against £1,299 for the unit, assumes all 3.84 kWh gets used every day. Until export is permitted, that energy has to leave through those two sockets, which means running leads to whatever you want powered. Charging a car from it meant dialling the current down to 6 amps, which he reports the MG5 would not accept and the household's Kia e-Niro would. It added 14 miles and saved about 30p.
The Company Behind Fully Charged Restructures, and Its CEO Steps Back
What starts as a catch up between Robert Llewellyn and Dan Caesar turns into company news. Caesar says he is leaving the full time chief executive role at Fully Charged Show Limited at the end of September, will stay on in an advisory capacity, and that a managing director is being brought in. He describes a hard year behind that: UK exhibitions moved outdoors as venue costs climbed, and the Sydney show deferred from March to September, which he says caused a cash flow problem.
The market figures they run through, quoted as given: around 1.85 million pure electric cars sold globally in July. Denmark near 97 percent of new car sales in the past month, roughly one in four in the UK. Europe up about 28 percent year to date, North America down 18 percent, and the rest of the world up 96 percent. Caesar's reading is that the open question is no longer whether battery EVs win, but which companies and countries do.
He is critical of the pressure on the UK zero emission vehicle mandate, an effort he attributes to the SMMT and a small number of carmakers, while acknowledging the trade body has a difficult job. He argues the makers missing targets are largely those without competitive products. That is his characterisation, and it is contested.
The Used i4 Still Costs More Than a Model 3, and Electrifying Still Picks It
Electrifying's used buying guide opens by conceding the point. The BMW i4 costs more than a Tesla Model 3 or a Polestar 2, and the presenter would take the BMW anyway. The timing is the argument. On sale since 2021, the i4 is now the oldest car in BMW's electric range, and with the Neue Klasse generation arriving its showroom life looks short. It has also been a consistent UK bestseller, so used supply is plentiful.
The quoted figures: early high mileage cars from under £18,000, over £30,000 for younger examples, and more again for the 2024 facelift with its updated infotainment. The entry eDrive35 pairs a 67.1 kWh battery with up to 319 miles WLTP. The rest of the range uses 81.3 kWh, rated up to 341 miles for the xDrive40 and 380 for the rear wheel drive eDrive40. Real world, the presenter reports 190 to 260 miles from the 35 and 220 to 330 from the 40.
The traps are the ones a spec sheet hides. Adaptive cruise was standard only on the M cars, the head-up display needed the optional tech pack, and active dampers came with the M models or the M Sport Pro pack, so two cars at one price can differ a lot. The review puts degradation at roughly 1 percent of range a year as a rough guide, and calls the three year vehicle warranty underwhelming next to longer cover elsewhere.
A 400 Volt Car That Beat Its Own Charging Number by 56 Kilowatts
Out of Spec Roaming drives a 2026 Zeekr X from Oslo to Bergen to test a single number. Zeekr's site lists 230 kW as the peak for this long range rear wheel drive model, which pairs a 61 kWh LFP pack the host calls the golden battery with a 400 volt architecture. He records 262 kW at a truck charging site, taking 15 to 48 percent in six minutes twelve seconds. A Tesla V3 supercharger returns 257 kW at 558 amps. An Alpitronic HYC400 peaks at 286 kW and takes the car from 10 to 80 percent in under fifteen minutes against an advertised eighteen.
That is the argument in full. A higher voltage architecture reduces the current needed for a given power, but how much current a pack accepts is a property of the pack, and this one asks for close to 600 amps. He reports 194 kW still flowing at 43 percent and 152 kW at 67 percent, a notably flat curve on a 61 kWh battery.
The caveat sits in the hardware, not the car. Those speeds needed cables rated well past 500 amps, and he notes an earlier site's 500 amp cables running warm. He reports roughly 17 kWh per 100 km.
A Festival Ran All Night on a Truck Battery, and the Truck Barely Noticed
Electric Trucker spends a week moving trailers of battery storage between France and Germany, then parks his DAF XF Electric in a Bavarian wood and plugs a village midsummer bonfire into it. He reports a 525 kWh pack in the truck, about 5 kW drawn through an inverter to run refrigeration, lighting and a bouncy castle, and the battery still at 88 percent the following morning. The alternative, he says, would have been a diesel generator.
The other find is a charging quirk he had spent the week blaming on grid load. Opening the truck's door, or waking the cab in any way, dropped charging to between 100 and 120 kW. The cause, he says, is DAF's silent mode, which quietens the external cooling fan, and with battery thermal management off the charging rate caps itself. He reports that a DAF engineer contacted him with a detailed explanation and that the behaviour is intentional, designed to keep the truck quiet for overnight stops.
Also in the video: a range display he believes is hardcapped at 600 km, and a trailer carrying a 422 kWh pack plus an Alpitronic charger. Bidirectional trucks are usually pitched on emergency backup. On this evidence the earlier market is events, where the customer already rents a generator and knows what it costs.
Bottom line: If you are in Britain and eyeing a plug-in battery, buy it for the sockets on the back rather than the house behind them, and treat the payback figures as a forecast of a legal change rather than a product feature. The day's other lesson is that published numbers mislead in both directions. Zeekr's understate its car by 56 kW. The i4's flatter every rival that beats it on the table and loses in the driveway. If you are shopping used, go and sit in the thing before you trust the spreadsheet.
Commentary on third-party videos. Figures and claims are as presented in the sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.