Indra Smart PRO vs Wallbox Quasar 2: £599 charger or £6,100 bet on V2G

A £5,501 gap and a philosophical divide

These two chargers do not compete on the same shelf. The Indra Smart PRO costs £599, charges at 7.4 kW, and goes on the wall today. The Wallbox Quasar 2 costs £6,100, pushes up to 12.8 kW of bidirectional DC power, and — as of April 2026 — is not yet available to order in the UK. The £5,501 between them buys not just more hardware but an entirely different proposition: one charges your car, the other promises to turn your car into a home battery.

• Indra Smart PRO — a competent 7.4 kW AC wallbox with included surge protection and solar CT clamp. British-made, OZEV-approved, installs for £400–£600.
• Wallbox Quasar 2 — a bidirectional DC charger capable of vehicle-to-home backup and vehicle-to-grid export. Pre-registration only, not OZEV-approved, installed total likely north of £7,600.

What the Quasar 2 actually requires of you

Bidirectional charging sounds transformative — and it may be, eventually. The Quasar 2 can pull energy *from* a compatible car's battery and feed it back into your home or the grid at up to 12.8 kW. That is a meaningful power flow, roughly equivalent to a mid-sized home battery.

The caveats are substantial. The car must support CCS2 bidirectional DC — today that means the Kia EV9 and a short, slowly growing list. Most Teslas, most VW Group cars, most BMWs cannot use the feature. You also need a DNO G99 application for grid export, which carries a 30–60 working-day lead time and may result in a G100 power cap. Installation is not a standard wallbox job; fewer electricians are qualified, and the £1,500–£3,000+ install estimate sits on top of that £6,100 unit price. The £500 OZEV grant does not apply.

Three-year warranty on a £6,100 unit stings, too — the same length Indra offers on hardware costing a tenth as much.

Where the Indra earns its keep

The Smart PRO is not glamorous. It is a 7.4 kW single-phase AC charger with a 6-metre cable, an app that does the job without dazzling, and smart-tariff scheduling for Octopus Intelligent Go, Octopus Go, OVO Charge Anytime, and EDF GoElectric. Its quiet advantage is what arrives in the box: a surge protection device (SPD) and a CT clamp for solar diversion, both included. On a typical install, those two items save £150–£250 that other chargers add to the electrician's invoice.

Factor that in and the Indra's effective installed cost drops into the same territory as the Easee One at £405 or the Tesla Wall Connector at £478 — both of which require the SPD bought separately. For solar households, the included CT clamp means excess-PV charging works from day one without an additional £50–£100 accessory. Buyers who want deeper tariff automation — half-hourly slot chasing on Octopus Agile, say — will find the Ohme Home Pro at £535 more capable. But for fixed off-peak windows, the Indra handles scheduling without fuss.

OZEV-eligible renters and flat owners can claim the £500 grant against the Indra, which nearly wipes out the unit price and puts the remaining spend squarely into installation.

The V2G question — and who should wait

Indra markets itself as a V2G pioneer, and the company does have bidirectional products in its commercial range. The Smart PRO itself, however, does not support V2G. If you want bidirectional capability at home *right now*, the Quasar 2 is the only mainstream product approaching UK availability — and "approaching" is doing heavy work in that sentence.

For buyers who like the V2G direction but are not ready to spend £6,100 on pre-registration hardware, chargers marketed as V2G-ready — the Zaptec Go 2 at £500 or the NexBlue Point 2 at £530 — hold the position with OCPP 2.0.1 support at a fraction of the outlay. They charge your car today and, in theory, stand ready for bidirectional firmware when standards and cars catch up. Whether that theory converts to practice remains unproven, but the financial exposure is modest. For a closer look at how the Indra stacks up against one of those, see the Zaptec Go 2 vs Indra Smart PRO comparison.

The verdict

Buy the Indra Smart PRO if:

• You want a charger on the wall this month, not a place on a waiting list
• Your install quote includes an SPD — the Indra's included one saves you £100–£150 immediately
• You have solar panels and want excess-PV diversion without buying a separate CT clamp

Buy the Wallbox Quasar 2 if:

• You own (or have ordered) a CCS2 bidirectional car — today, that mostly means the Kia EV9
• You have a concrete V2G tariff or time-of-use arbitrage plan that repays the £7,600+ installed cost
• You understand the DNO application process and accept the 30–60 working-day timeline

For the vast majority of UK households charging a Tesla or any other EV in 2026, the Indra Smart PRO does the job for £5,501 less. The Quasar 2 is a fascinating piece of hardware aimed at a future that has not quite arrived. When it does — when more cars support bidirectional DC, when V2G tariffs mature, when UK availability moves past a registration form — it will deserve a fresh look. Until then, the Indra is the purchase; the Quasar is the aspiration.