Dead-beat instantaneous power control strategy for electric vehicle off-board V2G charger is presented in this paper, to suppress harmonic pollution to power grid and realize bidirectional flow of electric energy. The charger consists of three-phase voltage source PWM grid-side converter and bi-directional dc/dc converter. A double closed-loop for three-phase voltage source PWM grid-side converter is designed firstly. And the outer voltage loop is used to keep dc bus voltage constant. The expected switching voltage components are achieved by substituting predicted instantaneous power with its instruction value, to form the inner dead-beat instantaneous power loop. Then a voltage current double closed-loop for bi-directional dc/dc converter is proposed to implement two-stage charging, combining with constant-current charging and constant-voltage charging. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control strategy are verified on the power-hardware-in-loop-simulation platform. (C) 2017 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.