Audi has released vehicle-to-grid charging for German customers and attached a tariff to it. Drivers of the new A2 e-tron and the recently updated Q4 e-tron will be able to feed electricity back to the grid through a bidirectional wallbox, billed under a dedicated V2G tariff from Octopus Energy. Volkswagen's own energy arm, Elli, announced a competing V2G offer earlier this year, so Audi going outside the group for this one is a deliberate choice.
What Octopus is paying
| Term | Detail |
|---|---|
| Charging price | 18 ct/kWh below the customer's standard rate |
| Effective rate | about 15 ct/kWh, against a 33 ct/kWh baseline |
| Monthly bonus | EUR 30 |
| Annual bonus | up to EUR 360 |
| Bonus condition | car connected at least 300 hours per month |
| Headline claim | up to 18,000 km a year free (A2 e-tron), 16,000 km (Q4 e-tron) |
The structure is the interesting part. Rather than buying power back at a spot price, Octopus pays a flat availability fee for the right to use the battery and discounts the electricity going in — a predictable return, which is what most European V2G pilots have lacked.
The conditions
Three of them matter.
300 hours a month is ten hours a day, every day. The bonus is all-or-nothing: miss the threshold and the EUR 30 is forfeited for that month, not pro-rated. Easy for a car that sits on a driveway overnight; not for one that parks at an office or goes away for a fortnight.
Audi has not said which wallbox qualifies. A bidirectional DC unit is required; brand, model and power rating are left open. That hardware is the single largest cost in the proposition, so the payback period cannot yet be calculated.
Most existing Q4 e-tron cars are excluded. The car needs software version 6.3 or newer, which the majority of the fleet does not have. The A2 e-tron is clear of that problem for the opposite reason: deliveries do not begin until December 2026. No start date has been announced for the tariff itself.
Does "18,000 kilometres free" hold up?
Octopus bases the figure on 16 kWh/100 km. At that rate the EUR 360 annual bonus buys 2,400 kWh at the discounted 15 ct/kWh, which is 15,000 km — the arithmetic is exact. The remaining 3,000 km comes from stacking the 18 ct/kWh discount against what the same electricity would have cost on a standard tariff.
The claim is real but conditional: it needs the full bonus every month, and counts a tariff saving as though it were free driving. Note too that 16 kWh/100 km sits well above the A2 e-tron's own 12.8 kWh/100 km WLTP figure — Octopus has used a real-world number rather than a cycle number, which is the honest way round.
What a Tesla owner in Germany can do with this
Nothing, which is the point.
No Model 3 or Model Y sold in Europe supports vehicle-to-grid. Tesla ships vehicle-to-load on the newest Model Y Performance and vehicle-to-home on the Cybertruck, but the hardware for exporting to the grid is not in the cars German buyers cross-shop against a 38,200-euro A2 e-tron. Rivals have been ahead on the capability for months — Hyundai and Kia put bidirectional charging behind a single brand in August — and Audi has now added the missing half: someone willing to pay for the electricity.
The hedge is that Berlin may take it away again. Paragraph 9 of the draft EEG 2027 would cap a household grid connection at 50% of installed capacity, measured at the property rather than the inverter — which throttles exactly the hard, short evening discharge a V2G tariff pays for. Octopus Energy is among the companies asking the Bundestag to amend it.