DJI has quietly unveiled a powerful new car charger for its giant portable batteries. The ultra-fast 1kW car charger, priced at $299 / €269, can charge the company’s expanded line of power stations with up to 1000W from your car’s alternator with the engine running.
This new class of (almost) DIY do-it-yourself chargers is having a moment now that the most popular solar generator and power station manufacturers have switched to DC chargers. I wouldn’t have survived without it when I was working remotely in my van last summer.
Once the Power 1kW is mounted inside your vehicle and connected to the vehicle’s battery with a 5m (16ft 5in) fused cable, it plugs into the proprietary SDC port of the DJI Power 1000 dongle-enabled power station I recently wrote about. It also charges the DJI Power 2000 2048Wh expansion batteries when daisy-chained with the SDC cables for a total capacity of up to 11kWh that can be stacked. The Power 1kW can also be configured to reverse charge your vehicle’s battery to prevent it from draining.
At full power, the DJI Power 1kW ultra-fast car charger can charge the 1024 Wh Power 1000 battery in just over an hour of driving. However, out of the box, the Power 1kW charger has a 500W charging capacity. To reach 1000 watts, you need to purchase another dongle, the DJI Power Dongle for $25, and then change the setting to 1000 watts in the app. Luckily, DJI is offering this dongle as a “free gift” with new purchases of the DJI Power 1kW ultra-fast car charger, at least in the US.
DJI’s announcement follows the introduction of the 800-watt EcoFlow Alternator Charger, which I wrote about last summer, and the new 560-watt Bluetti AC500, announced in the fall (review coming soon). The EcoFlow charger, like the DJI, uses a proprietary connector, making it best for charging your own giant batteries, while the Bluetti AC500 can charge solar generators and power plants from almost all manufacturers, but at half the price of the DJI. Of course, all of this assumes that your vehicle is equipped with a powerful alternator that can do without boosters.
