Keeping the Lights on

You’d think that after every hurricane flattens another island nation, someone in government might look at the fleet of cars sitting idle in driveways and connect a couple of dots. The average modern car has an alternator that could power half a village’s fridges and phone chargers – yet when the lights go out, we’re still fumbling about with candles and praying the generator starts.

It’s daft, really. We’ve spent a century turning cars into rolling computers, capable of parallel parking themselves, chirping reminders about our seatbelts, and phoning home when they’re low on washer fluid – but ask one to run a fridge and it sulks. The technology’s there, it’s just not mandated.

In hurricane-prone countries like Jamaica, that’s a moral failure disguised as bureaucratic oversight. Every year, storms knock out power for days while perfectly serviceable vehicles sit in the street doing nothing but charging their own batteries. For the cost of a set of alloy wheels, every new car could include a 2-kilowatt inverter – a plug socket, in other words. Flick the switch, plug in the house, keep the insulin cold and the lights on. Not hard.

Japan figured this out after the 2011 tsunami. They didn’t wait for a committee to debate “the business case”. They told Toyota, Nissan, and Honda to make cars that could feed power back into homes. Ten years on, it’s standard practice. Meanwhile, the West is still busy arguing over the colour of the warning triangles.

And the numbers? They’re laughably small. Adding vehicle-to-load capability costs maybe £400 on a production line. In return, you get a national fleet of rolling generators – no fuel convoys, no panic buying, no daft politicians flying in for photo ops with torches. A country of 400,000 cars becomes 400,000 emergency power units overnight.

Governments love to talk about “resilience”. It’s a word they sprinkle into speeches after every disaster, usually followed by the promise of a task force. But resilience isn’t a slogan – it’s the ability to plug your house into your car and carry on living.

So here’s the challenge: mandate it. From 2027 onwards, every new car sold in hurricane-risk countries should come with a standard 230-volt outlet and a cut-off relay to prevent back-feeding. Call it what you like – a “Community Power Port”, if the marketing people insist. Then watch as entire islands stop going dark.

Because when the next hurricane comes, people won’t remember the minister’s statement. They’ll remember who had the sense to make sure the cars could keep the lights on.