Can You Charge an Electric Car With a Generator?

Yes, you can charge an electric car with a generator, but only a particular kind: an inverter generator rated at about 3 kVA continuous, feeding the portable charger that came with the car. Do that and you get powerpoint-speed charging, roughly 10 to 13 kilometres of range for every hour the engine runs, at a fuel cost of around 12 litres of petrol per 100 kilometres. A cheap open-frame generator will usually be refused by the charger, a 2 kVA camping unit is marginal, and Tesla’s own manual tells owners not to try. It is an emergency option for remote Australia, not a way to run an EV.

What kind of generator can charge an electric car?

Two things matter: how much power the generator can hold continuously, and how clean that power is.

Start with the power. The portable charger most EVs ship with is a 10-amp unit, which draws about 2.4 kW from a 240-volt supply. Generators are sold on their maximum output, but the number that counts is the rated output, the load they can carry for hours. The classic camping generator, the Honda EU22i, is a 2.2 kVA machine with a rated output of 1.8 kVA. A 10-amp charger overloads it. The step up, Honda’s EU30iS, is rated at 2.8 kVA and runs a 10-amp charger with room to spare, and the 3 to 3.5 kVA inverter units from Kings, Yamaha and others sit in the same class.

Then the quality. An inverter generator produces a clean sine wave at a steady 50 Hz. A conventional open-frame generator, the cheap and loud kind on building sites, produces rougher power whose voltage and frequency wander with the load, and the control box on a portable charger checks the supply before it lets any current flow. Some portable chargers can be dialled down to 6 or 8 amps, which brings a 2 kVA unit into play at the cost of even slower charging. Many fixed-rate units, including some bundled with the car, offer no adjustment at all.

Why does the charger refuse to start?

Even with the right generator, the most common outcome is a fault light and nothing else. The reason is earthing.

A portable charger expects a supply that looks like the grid, where the neutral is tied to earth. Many portable generators run a floating output with no neutral-to-earth bond, because they are built to power drills and camping fridges, not a house. The charger looks for that earth reference, finds none, and refuses. It is doing its job: that check is part of what protects you from a live car body if something goes wrong. Tesla settles it for its owners with a one-line caution in the Mobile Connector manual: “Do not use private power generators as a power source for charging.”

The internet’s answer is a home-made bonding plug that links neutral to earth to fool the charger. Don’t. Generating sets in Australia fall under AS/NZS 3010, and the Queensland Electrical Safety Office’s plain advice for portable units is to run a good-quality lead straight from the generator to the appliance and to use a licensed electrician for anything more involved than that. Some generators come with an earthing terminal and instructions for it, and some portable chargers are designed for off-grid supplies. If you need this to work, that combination plus an electrician’s sign-off is the route. A jumper wire in a plug is not.

How far will a tank of petrol get you?

Assume everything cooperates: a 3 kVA inverter generator, a 10-amp charger, and about 2.1 kWh an hour reaching the battery after the charger’s losses. A typical EV in our vehicle database uses about 160 Wh per kilometre in mixed driving, so an hour of generator running adds about 13 km of range. A big SUV at 220 Wh/km gets closer to 10.

Now the fuel. Honda quotes the EU30iS at 7.1 hours on its 13-litre tank at rated load, so a full tank is 7 or 8 hours of running, 90 to 100 kilometres of range, and 13 litres of petrol. The smaller EU22i, dialled down to 8 amps, does about 3 hours on 3.6 litres for roughly 25 to 30 kilometres. Whichever way you cut it, generator charging burns 11 to 14 litres of petrol per 100 km, call it 12: the economy of a large petrol four-wheel drive, not a small car.

Filling a 60 kWh battery from empty is roughly 30 hours of running and about 50 litres of petrol. The realistic use is an hour or two, enough for 15 or 20 kilometres and the next real charger.

What does generator charging cost per 100 km?

Twelve litres of petrol at $2 a litre is $24 per 100 km. Charging the same car at home on a 30c/kWh tariff costs about $5 for the same distance, and even a public ultra-rapid charger at 60 to 75c/kWh comes in at $10 to $12. The generator route costs two to five times more than any charger before you count the generator itself. The full arithmetic for home, public and free charging is in our guide to the cost of charging an electric car.

Can you charge an EV while driving by towing a generator?

The video does the rounds every few months: an electric car towing a trailer with a generator on it, captioned “never needs to stop”. It doesn’t work. EVs will not select Drive while a plug is latched in the charge port, and even if they did, the sums above don’t change: a petrol car with extra steps, at 12 litres per 100 km, towing a trailer. The version of the idea that does work is a car with the generator engineered in, covered below.

Can you charge a Tesla with a generator?

Physically the same answer as any other EV, and officially no. Tesla’s Mobile Connector manual lists private generators under its cautions, and the connector’s earth check is the one owners most often report tripping on a floating-neutral generator. Out of charge, Tesla roadside assistance tows the car to a Supercharger rather than attempting a top-up.

Which electric cars come with a generator built in?

If a petrol generator charging an electric drivetrain sounds sensible, the car industry agrees, provided the generator is designed in rather than towed. A range-extender EV (REEV or EREV) is an electric car with a small petrol engine that only ever charges the battery and never drives the wheels. The best-known one on sale in Australia is the Leapmotor C10 REEV: a 28.4 kWh battery, about 170 km of electric range on the generous NEDC cycle, then a 1.5-litre engine that takes over as a generator for a claimed 1,150 km in total, priced from the mid-$40,000s as of September 2026. Nissan’s e-Power system, which the 2026 Qashqai uses exclusively, works the same way with a small battery and no charge port, which is why Nissan calls it a hybrid. Both do the generator trick properly, with the engine running at its most efficient point, and neither will leave you hunting for a 15-amp lead in a paddock.

What should you do instead if you run flat?

In order of preference:

1. Reach any powerpoint. A caravan park, a farmhouse, a servo with an outdoor socket. Your portable charger does the generator’s job with none of the drama, and a 15-amp caravan-park socket is faster.
2. Borrow from another EV. If a friend’s car has vehicle-to-load, it will charge yours at about 2 kW, the same 10 km an hour, with no earthing argument.
3. A portable power station. A 3.6 kWh unit such as an EcoFlow Delta Pro can run a portable charger and adds 15 to 20 km of range, once. Useful if you already own one for camping, not worth buying for this.
4. Call your club. In Sydney, Canberra, Perth, Adelaide and Darwin the motoring clubs run mobile charging vans that add 10 to 20 km in 15 to 30 minutes.
5. Take the tow. Everywhere else, roadside assistance gives an out-of-charge EV a flatbed tow to the nearest charger under your normal entitlement, and the Get Help panel on our map lists the three nearest fast chargers to wherever you are.

What the car does as it runs down, and how to stretch the last few kilometres, is in what happens when an EV runs out of charge. For businesses running EVs beyond the grid, the mobile charging for business guide covers the battery skids and vehicle-to-vehicle DC units that have made the generator question obsolete.

The honest summary: a generator can charge an electric car the way a rowboat can cross Bass Strait. Possible, slow, and a sign the planning went wrong somewhere. Outside a remote-area emergency where a 3 kVA inverter is already in the shed, there is always a better option on the list above.