Lucid‘s long-promised vehicle-to-home (V2H) capability, which the company last January said would arrive in the first half of 2026, appears on course to miss that window, making the home-backup feature the latest item on the carmaker’s roadmap to slip.
The feature allows an EV to power a house during an outage by sending energy from its battery back through the home’s electrical panel.
The Saudi-backed brand has the hardware for it built into every Air and Gravity, yet the feature has stayed perpetually on the horizon.
The first target date is now days from passing unmet after being quietly widened from the “first half of 2026” to “Coming in 2026” last March.
Where the ‘H1 2026’ Date Came From
Jason Fenske, who runs the Engineering Explained YouTube channel and its roughly 4.1 million subscribers, had published a video cataloguing problems with his leased 2025 Lucid Air Touring.
Lucid responded by putting three of its engineers on a call with him and, in a follow-up video published January 9, gave him what product chief Emad Dlala billed as an insider preview of coming features.
The EV maker planned to release its V2H kit, he said, “in the first half of 2026,” supplying up to 17 kW peak or 14 kW continuous — enough, by his calculation, to run his house for about four days on the Air’s 92-kWh pack.
The Date Quietly Widened
By the time V2H reached investors, the first-half pledge had quietly loosened.
At Lucid‘s first Investor Day in New York on March 12 — two months after the Fenske briefing — the software roadmap filed with regulators listed “V2H Energy Back-up” and “Smart Home Charging” under a blanket “Coming 2026” heading for both the Air and the Gravity, with no half-year attached.
The specific first-half date Lucid had given Fenske in January was gone, replaced by the full year.
That shorter window is now nearly gone too.
As of mid-June, with roughly two weeks left in the period, no V2H launch has materialised, and the only major over-the-air update Lucid has shipped to the Gravity recently delivered hands-free driving, but not home backup.
Owners have been asking directly. A thread on the Lucid Owners forum this week, titled “V2H still 1H26?”, opened with a member asking whether the feature was still coming in the first half, had been pushed later, or had stalled entirely.
A Capability Years in Waiting
Lucid has dangled home-backup capability since 2020, when it said the Air and a forthcoming home charging unit would let owners send energy to the house by mid-2021.
Five years on, that has yet to materialise.
The roughly $1,200 Connected Home Charging Station that followed, rated up to 100 amps, was described as having built-in bidirectional capability that would “soon let you power your home.”
Then interim chief Marc Winterhoff revived the pledge last October, saying V2H would arrive “in the not-too-distant future” without naming a date.
The first bidirectional feature to actually ship was vehicle-to-vehicle.
In late 2023, Lucid launched RangeXchange, letting an Air charge another EV at up to 9.6 kW — the first real application of its proprietary Wunderbox bidirectional hardware.
The Gravity added vehicle-to-load, with three 120-volt outlets supplying a combined 5.4 kW for powering devices.
Vehicle-to-home and the grid-feeding version, V2G, are the pieces Lucid has repeatedly described as in development.
Most recently, the company said bidirectional charging — V2H included — would be standard on its upcoming Cosmosmidsize SUV.
The Pattern Around It
The missed window fits a broader rhythm of slipping software dates.
Hands-free highway driving for the Gravity sat on the same “Coming 2026” roadmap, then was narrowed by former interim chief Marc Winterhoff to “a few weeks” away at a March summit — only to arrive in June, weeks past that promise.
The backdrop is a software organisation under strain, having weathered repeated layoffs and a wave of leadership departures — including, this month, Emad Dlala, the product chief who had personally given Fenske the V2H preview in January.
