Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Visited NYC recently and didn’t need to rent a car. Primarily took the bus, ferry, and rail car/trains. In some cases I just walked from my hotel to the destination. Could have rented one of the e-bikes as well. Transportation costs for just 1 week were less than $100 (a quarter of this was because of LIRR usage). Didn’t have to deal with traffic, or some dumbass rear ending me because they weren’t paying attention. I could effectively multitask while traveling by alternative means.
Unpopular opinion: heavy investing in “EV infrastructure” is a waste of time and money.
Also, interesting phrasing to make it seem like a "small nyc apartment" is a bad thing. I don't pay for expensive repairs, yard maintenance, or big ticket appliances. Most renters don't pay for heat either (at least not directly). Not to mention interest on a mortgage or property taxes. All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.
[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-co...
You're not forced to pay the average if saving money is important. My primary driver costs me ~2K a year total.
> All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.
As someone who beat my head against the wall of trying to afford to live in NYC for several years and eventually gave up and moved to the suburbs, I assure you it's far cheaper to live in the suburbs.
(Sure, there are exclusive luxury suburbs that'll cost as much as living in NYC but you wouldn't move to those if affordability matters.)
So we have shitty apartments in Manhattan where the land is 99% of the cost and countless, cookie cutter suburban hellscapes.
It really doesn't. NYC isn't $ARBITRARY_SUBURB except without obligatory car ownership.
For that matter a person could very much live car free in a minor city like Binghamton or Ithaca NY if they work at a place that is well served by transit.
And I'm not talking about personal differences, like family. Paris isn't a world class city because my mom lives there. I get that individuals have reasons to live places. I'm talking about populations, not people.
When people express opinions like this you immediately know they live in the city and think everyone else does too.
There are very few policy decisions that will be universally good for everyone. That doesn't automatically make them bad policies.
it's a lot larger than you think, especially if you're a city dweller.
I'm not arguing we should ignore rural communities, just that we shouldn't rule out ideas that work in cities because they don't work outside cities.
this is not an argument for why we should be ignoring EV's in lieu of transportation, which is what I originally responded to.
Walkable cities sounds nice, but I like having space. At this point of my life, living in a suburban community is desirable.
One wonders how the hay gets baled if most of the population is elderly people.
you don't actually understand what a rural community is.
Unless it's a Hutterite colony, in which case your point is entirely moot because they have 0 private transport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redvers,_Saskatchewan
Population 1,000.
> Eligibility
> Elderly individuals and those with special needs.
which is what I expected when I went looking, calling that public transportation is against the spirit of what we're discussing here.
My further guess is that the majority of the people in this town are elderly (retirement community).
You still see this in rural Europe. There will be some little village in the middle of nowhere. But the shops and (now I'm picturing the north of England) a pub will all be in a cluster, and there are country lanes that you can actually walk on, and in that village center there's a bus stop, from which you can get to Carlisle or Newcastle and thence to Durham, or wherever.
Some developing countries too actually. You couldn't backpack around these places if they didn't have busses. The "third world" is often a better place to be a pedestrian than America is. Because everybody else is a pedestrian too.
America's problem is that all the private investment in railroads has been displaced by public investment in highways. It's Eisenhower's fault. It makes sense that the US would invest in dual use technologies for mechanized warfare, but it sucks to have to live with.
And now -- I like bike paths, but -- rails-to-trails efforts are just an admission of defeat. But they're what we're getting instead now.
they used horses...
I think it's hilarious how people are trying to argue that a single train stop in a town is somehow public transportation for the citizens of that town to get around said town.
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
It's interesting how quickly we forget about how things used to be. My grandparents were subsistence farmers in my lifetime, and they did not use horses to get around town. I don't think they ever owned a horse.
For regular everyday travel, they walked.
They'd sometimes need to go work out in a field. On those days, they'd hitch up the cows to the wagon and spend the day working there. This is a slow process, so they'd need to have enough work to spend the whole day there.
Horses were never a transportation method, except for the extremely rich. They were agricultural tools. Looking at France, because data is easy to get there, the population of France was about 40 million in 1900[2]. Around that time, France also had about 3 million horses, or about a horse for every 13 people. Of these 3 million horses, 2.5 million were "draft horses" used for pulling plows.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-horse-p... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Histori...
What you're arguing is that there are towns that would pop up around these railways after the fact, and while that's true, they would also pop up around water, gold, and other natural resources.
It turns out there's lots of reasons why communities form, but one thing we know for sure is that railways require demand FIRST, not second.
Railways induce demand, both for work for the railway (moving trains, moving goods between trains, services for passengers), and for the excellent transport connections they provide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_towns_in_the_U...
before they had cars people used horses.
This is true from both an economic and an environmental standpoint: not only is it expensive to run public transit when fewer people use it, it’s also less environmentally friendly because you have big heavy buses and trains spending a lot of time driving around with few people riding them.
That said, I would certainly like to see better public transportation in many areas, but it’s not a silver bullet. The idea that EV infrastructure is a waste of money because we just need more public transportation is pretty preposterous, IMO.
We already spend an ABSURD amount of money to create and maintain car infrastructure. These roads are not cheap and commonly are not maintained well in part due to costs. That's not getting into externalities not covered by the cost of car ownership/usage. And where does this money come from? Generally the places where there is more density.
It just doesn't make sense for each person to have a several ton hunk of metal and for it to sit there taking up space 95+% of the time. This solution is not scaling well at all. People want to have a big suburban home, but at the expense of many, many others. It's just not right.
That's a significant demographic of the car owning population, especially here in Europe. Having your own house with a charger is an extreme rarity.
I'd guess that this usually works pretty well, but with winter and a higher than normal number of broken chargers, those became more congested than normal, and this usage pattern will lead to it getting steadily worse throughout the day.
IIRC on a Tesla the car screen displays that it's warming the battery, but the app on the phone doesn't. The phone screen just says that it's charging with 0 amps.
TBH, it sounds like a lot of things going wrong (or even just weird) at once. In every report that I saw, there were at least some cars sitting unplugged in front of stalls with noone in them. Even if those were broken, when they get fixed they might need to tow cars to make them usable again!
You are definitely right though. Someone with a cold soaked battery could easily think the charger isn't supplying current, when it is really just running the battery heater for 30+ minutes first.
This isn't quite accurate. The Tesla app on iOS at least shows the battery preconditioning.
They just don't have one at home. That's going to become even more common as not every single parking spot can be turned into a charging space.
Long story short: a 15A outlet really isn't going to get the job done for charging a car. Also you cannot just charge off a 15A outlet, you're going to need to run an extension cord within 15ft of the car give or take and plug in your charger there (you can't just plug a NEMA 5-15 plug into an EV).
That charger >> extension cord connection is going to need to be weatherproofed somehow. And oh, by the way, if you're in a big city good luck not getting your $500 charger stolen since there's probably no good way to secure it.
So yes, they are going to need an EV charger.
[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...
I have multiple EVs in my household, I'm completely onboard. People acting like they're for everyone today are delusional with the current state of charging infrastructure in the US.
We've had the unfortunate need to use public charging a handful of times and almost every single time it has been an absolute nightmare. From non-working chargers to long lines (because of all the aforementioned people who only have access to public chargers). The only time it has been relatively painless was road trips when it's the middle of nowhere middle america because most folks that live there don't have EVs.
If you live in an apartment without an electrified garage then of course the BEV use case is less likely to work for you. And I totally agree on public chargers. Non-Tesla is a complete crapshoot and probably will be for several more years until the adoption curve forces the infrastructure to improve.
People also like to think that their car can get them out of any personal jam, eg, if they need to take a family membership to the hospital, they will simply assume that their car is going to be the mode of transporter, and anything that makes them think that an EV might not be able to cut it in that hypothetical is going to be damaging for the EV transition.
The 15A charger that came with my car is weatherproofed and locks into place when connected to my car outside my apartment building. The rent I pay also pays for that overnight trickle charge, so a replacement charger would still cost less than I was previously spending in fueling up my Ford Fusion each year.
This is frankly silly though. In reality the EV sales will ramp over time and then ICEs age out of the fleet over multiple decades. And that's the timeline that is being attacked as insanely rushed.
> “This is not a categorical problem for electric vehicles,” he added, “because it has largely been sorted out in other places.”
> ... Cold weather is likely to be less of an issue as companies update electric vehicles models. Even in the last few years, companies have developed capabilities that allow newer models to be more efficient in the cold.
Tesla in particular had a single charging station in Chicago that was down, but was reporting to the fleet as if it were up. Effectively summoning several cars, only to leave them stranded.
> the majority of people in Norway live in houses, not apartments, and nearly 90 percent of electric vehicle owners have their own charging stations at home, he said.
A lot of cold countries have plugs at every parking spot for block heaters. It's not too big a leap to retrofit those for some level of charging.
TBH, perhaps the more general problem is that EVs aren't fully ready for dense cities yet. Or maybe dense cities aren't ready for EVs.
According to Wikipedia, it has never been anywhere close to that cold in Oslo. And yet, due to the climate change effect on the arctic jet stream, Chicago sees this kind of temperature for a few days in 2-3 out of every 5 winters.
People lose heat through evaporation, which is worse if there's wind.
Objects don't, and normal wind speeds are usually well below driving speeds anyway.
I have no clay cars sadly, not sure how ordinary cars handle wind chill.
Normal warm days. They sold too many teslas for the number of charging stations available for the cold climate.
My take is that this is one of the inevitable complications discovered along the energy transition path. Lesson here: Making and selling cars is the first hurdle, and they got over it. Build a factory, build a marketing apparatus, get them out there. Placing fixed assets to support the service needs in individual markets is lagging behind - a process may not be in place to anticipate and support market adoption at current pace.
—
Owner of an EV that would take days to charge on 120V
Of course, there are caveats. If it is cold and the vehicle has to be charged at the street, charge times will be much longer. But he's right that people often underestimate the usefulness of L1 charging, even though it would literally take days.
Coincidentally, in this thread we have people talking about a car that ran out at the airport and required a tow. L1 is perfect for airport parking.
Seems like you're then trapped in a corner case that you can't get out of: not enough energy to allow for any kind of charge at all.
Even if the charger is working perfectly, the first 30 minutes might be spent just running the battery heater. It might even be worse with rear drive model 3, which unfortunately might also be a big part of the Uber rental fleet.
It is a really odd situation, so most people would likely be seeing it for the first time.
If it has been in operation, there would have been no problem charging in the cold.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/chicago-area-superch...
And then you have a cascade of drivers going from charger to charger looking for an open plug.
The last couple of days have been different. People have left their cars in the parking lot for hours, which effectively is what OOS did in their test.
Or, you could take care of your car as recommended and if a battery preheat will help, use scheduled departure features and plug it in if needed and possible.
I've never seen this scenario happen in the real world, but I guess we've found one weird edge case where it can happen.
You seem to be making a common mistake of thinking that one always needs to charge from empty to full in every charge. Not so. A common scenario would be arriving home with 190 miles of range left on the battery, and plugging in. After a few minutes, you have to go out again, no problem. Eventually you come home for the night with 160 miles of charge left, and plug in again. Overnight you get let’s say (super slow case) 40 miles and now you’re at 200 or more. Not the problem you are envisioning.
You may also be forgetting that public fast chargers which can be used in a pinch do exist.
220 is also an option so let’s not restrict ourselves to 110/120.
But if we must talk about 110, I’ll point out that we survived just fine for 2 years with 2 BEVs sharing (alternating cars) ONE 110 outlet in an apartment after laboring, like many mistakenly do, under the false assumption that you still carry that it was not an option, for an entire year, before we realized that it was totally doable. It worked great. We also used fast chargers when needed but they were not needed very often.
Ignorance is definitely a thing, but it works both ways.
The comment could be someone in Europe (etc) where "an outlet" means 220-240V, with a continuous power of around 2500-3500W, depending on the regulations in that country.
I live in Toronto, own a Kona EV, and am lucky enough to have a garage. I've literally never needed anything more than 120V except when going on >300km car trips. Any daily commute that wouldn't be handled by an overnight charge at 120V probably isn't a commute I'd put up with even with an ICE vehicle.
Solve that, and EVs will become more viable. Only the "road trip problem" will remain.
Edit: Let me be clear. I am not saying that EVs are causing the housing crisis. That would be crazy. But I am saying that the housing crisis is blocking the adoption of EVs.
That's clearly not an option for the cars that are abandoned and dead because they couldn't charge.
It's also not just the one station that was an issue. One guy left his Tesla at the airport parking lot, came back after his trip, and had to pay to get it towed to a charger.
Plugging in to a charger provides all the power to heat (and slowly charge) the battery, you just won't get full speed while the battery is below-freezing.
Barring a fleet of mobile generators, this is in fact something that ICE cars handle better than BEV.
Tow/push the cars to a place where Level 1 or Level 2 charging is available and they'll be fine to get going if someone has allowed the battery to be totally depleted in the cold.
When I lived in Calgary, I sometimes had to spray a can of ether into the carburetor to get my car started.
I want EVs to be there too, but they just aren't.
The first is always true for at least a Tesla and you use the nav. A Tesla knows it's cold outside. If you punch a destination into your nav, it'll tell it what percentage will remain when you get there and it's always accurate.
The second is true if you charge the car while it's warm. We travelled from Ottawa to Quebec City in the cold, stopping to charge 3 times, and it always charged quickly. We knew enough to charge before parking the car rather than charging after the car has been parked.
The third is true if the car is plugged in and you tell it when you want to leave. It prewarms the cabin & battery.
It seems that fewer and fewer people actually have any plan at all for emergencies.
Why? A 275 mile drive should be easily done in any gas car without stopping.
Even my smallest tank car can do ~325 miles, my other cars can do ~425 and ~500 miles on one tank.
I started thinking maybe a sporty car (thus gas tank is not huge) with a huge engine (bad MPG) but couldn't find anything, even a Viper seems to get over 300 miles on the highway. Maybe some Ferrari with particularly bad MPG? Seems the worst is a 812GT, but that has a range of just under 300 miles. So I give up, what is it?
P.S. Most gasoline vehicles in my experience don't have 500 mile range, either. My Mazda 5 has a 375 mile range.
My ICE almost stranded me during the recent freeze. Conditions affect fuel economy for all vehicles.
> Did you have reliable, strong heat in the cabin?
This feels like an imagined problem. EVs heat their cabin more efficiently than ICEs. If you end up off the road during a storm (been there) an EV will last longer for the same fill level. They also tend to heat up faster due to not having to adjust the entire thermal mass of the engine block. I used to leave my heat off in my ol' minivan during most commutes. If there wasn't snow on the windshield for me to clean off while the car warmed up, it wouldn't heat up fast enough.
Citation needed. Are EVs using different cabin heating to ICEs? My Audi will recirculate waste engine and coolant heat to the cabin for up to 20 minutes (like if you're in a grocery store) with nothing but a fan.
> They also tend to heat up faster due to not having to adjust the entire thermal mass of the engine block.
An ICE doesn't heat the engine block? Modern ICEs also use auxiliary heating on cold starts. I can have warm air out of the cabin vents within ~30s even on a 20F day (not horribly cold, granted, but I'm talking properly warm air).
I'm not sure how to cite the fact that EVs do not have engines. Electric motors do generate waste heat, but via a significantly more efficient process, so an additional source of heat is needed.
> An ICE doesn't heat the engine block?
Yes they do. Where's your Audi recirculating waste heat from?
Auxiliary heating systems like you describe are the exact same design that EVs use as primaries, just driven electrically. Advantages are that the electricity to torque conversion is still significantly more efficient than chemical energy conversion, and you can run the system without powering the main drive.
I'm confused, what non-electrical method of generating cabin heat are EVs using, then?
But for the sake of argument - auxiliary heating in an ICE is similar to a floor heater, electrical resistance heating.
Beyond that, the argument is that on an ICE, the heat in the engine block is a byproduct of the combustion required to move the vehicle. That heat isn't "free", but is paid for by the primary purpose of moving the vehicle. The effort to push it into the cabin via fans is relatively minimal.
Heat pumps are the fancy way to do it that can be installed in both ICEs and EVs.
> the heat in the engine block is a byproduct of the combustion required to move the vehicle. That heat isn't "free", but is paid for by the primary purpose of moving the vehicle.
Agreed! It's free in the sense that it's already being generated, but it's still waste because it's generated regardless of need as a result of a suboptimal conversion process. We use it as heat because it's unusable for anything else, but it'd be nicer if it wasn't generated in the first place.
Given that ICEs take advantage of waste heat - which they will have in abundance as long as the engine is running - I disagree. Especially since many EVs still use resistive heating (the F150 Lightning and some Tesla models, for example).
And even vehicles with heat pumps will have to use backup resistive heating on really cold days, since they have a lower limit where they can operate.
Right, as long as the engine is running (and warm). It's still inefficient, however, as a significant portion of the heat still leaves with the exhaust. An EV can add a resistor inside the cabin for 100% conversion efficiency, and can power it for longer than a tank of gas will allow an ICE to idle.
Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. "Strong, reliable heat" is not a clear differentiator.
Instead, governments want to force us to all electric too early with nowhere near the proper infrastructure.
Plus, hybrid has lots of regenerative energy recovery that can be done to extend the mpg on the same fuel.
I'm sure those chargers are all relatively expensive per kWh though, so yes compared to a petrol/diesel it would be a more expensive journey.
Who's this "we"? Toyota has already sold millions of hybrid vehicles to willing customers all over the world, probably more than all electric vehicles combined.
Also, government can't force anything, if people don't have the money and the home charging needed for an EV, then they won't get it, short of govt giving them a free car.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/coldweather.shtml
It's really interesting what sort of things are considered problems with EVs that just get ignored with gas cars. The dual standard is pretty interesting to observe.
The 2024 Toyota Camry gets over 600 miles of highway range. We don't think about ICE vehicles in that way, but compare that to a Model 3 Long Range: ~340 miles @100% battery, but realistically you're running 90%-10%, so its more like ~270 miles. Losing 20% of your range to cold weather is A LOT more tenable when you're working with 400+ miles of range to begin with.
Superchargers are pretty reliable. Inhumanly reliable actually, especially compared to other charging networks. Many, many parts of the country have stretches of 130+ miles with no DC Fast Charging options, or just a Supercharger and one non-Tesla option.
So, run the math on that. You're looking at a 280 mile range EV. Subtract 20% just because you can only run it 90%-10%, not 100%-0%: 224 miles. Subtract 20% because cold weather (and that's charitable; some of these brands are more like 30%-40%, bad insulation, no heat pump, etc): 180 miles. There's one DC Fast Charging station between you and your destination. Your destination is 160 miles away, and that DC Fast Charger is managed by Electrify America. This isn't a double-standard or "range anxiety": This is a legitimate problem.
> The effect on hybrids is typically greater. Their fuel economy can drop about 30% to 34% under these conditions.
> For electric vehicles (EVs), fuel economy can drop roughly 39% in mixed city and highway driving, and range can drop by 41%. About two-thirds of the extra energy consumed is used to heat the cabin.
Gee, I wonder why people are more concerned about EV's. Could it be that they lose upwards of 40% range whereas ICE loses roughly 15% fuel economy?
And don't tell me I'm being unfair, ICE can lose up to 25% for 3-4 mile trips, which is not the use case anyone is worrying about.
And a longer commute makes a gas car more efficient as the engine has time to come up to operating temperature. Something that EV's are weaker at.
So it is more of an issue for BEV's depending on what kind of commute you have and whether you easy access to daily charging.
The very article you quoted says that range can drop 15% for a gas car in subfreezing temperatures, but 41% for an EV.
That's a huge difference! So it's not a double standard to notice the big difference.
But now I’m curious how an EV would handle being an outdoor car in -50 windchill.
I have plenty of experience with plugging in block heaters. One nice thing is they don't have to be plugged in all night long, just for an hour or so in the morning. In fact, modern vehicles specifically call out not keeping them plugged in all night long.
Yes, it is inconvenient (and likely more expensive) if you can't charge the car at home, or at work. Cities have electric street lights, but curb-side EV charging is rare so far. I guess that will change.
Heating the battery does need some energy, but heating the interior of the car (for the passengers) needs more. But driving needs most energy, of course. Electric cars typically have a heat pump by the way. Gas cars don't need that because they can use the waste heat of the engine, which is otherwise lost.
If that makes sense.
(I have a bias on singapore, because the car market/culture there is, in my experience, rather unique. Singaporians, in my experiences (which is a decade ago) - really treat their cars/car infra with a lot more care than the US due to how expensive it is to get a car there (for good reason)...
They 80%+ of the time back into their spots, their roads are clean and I dont recall seeing a dirty car in Singapore... They integrate green parking lots (vegetation growing through the X cobbles, plants on the sides of over passes - they SEEM to have a healthier relationship with the car than most)
They may choose policies that incentivize EV use to meet climate/environmental goals, but any sort of enforcement policy that mandates private citizens must purchase and drive EVs would quickly get shot down in court.
Citation? Have any been shot down in court? There are plenty of locations that have passed laws that all new cars be EVs after year 20XX (for example 2035 in California).
I suspect most of those will be reverted as overly optimistic, but for now, they are in place.
In terms of buying, yes, if all new cars must be EVs then an EV is the only thing you will be able to buy new.
One example leg was 156mi using 84% of battery in 30F weather. The stats said I lost 13.1% due to a 9.5mph wind, and 1.3% for low tire pressure. I topped the tires up after that one. When it was well below 0 I was doing less. I still got where I was going, but I spent so much time charging, and it's not cheap enough that the time cost made any sense.
Some of my legs really did need close to 100% to get to the next charger with any margin for error. That means sitting at a charger for 30-60 minutes at times. Several of the chargers were in locations that didn't feel safe, so I actually took a longer route back to hit different chargers.
Keep in mind that probably like most people, long road trips are infrequent. In daily use it's charged every morning (at cheap rates) and ready to go, no matter the temperature. Plus I warm it up without needing to open the garage! I will take another car for a long trip now, but I still like having an EV for daily driving.
If you manage to get it going, it's fine after a few minutes. But the cold start is a pain.
https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/37320/is-it-tr...
Even the 2007 Yaris we had up to 2018 never had an issue (after I replaced the dying battery).
Now the -40 C weather they've been having in the prairies recently is a different issue, one I can happily say I don't have any experience with.
Though engine block heaters are also standard in cars where it gets cold so at some temperatures this is a “nowhere to plug the car in” problem for both kinds.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Holland_TC30_HST...
but before that I struggled to get one of these
https://www.pinterest.com/marshallwoodyar/john-deere-tractor...
to start in the winter (even with the block heater) and probably killed it by switching it to a multi-viscosity oil when the straight 20 oil specified for it became almost impossible to get and could well be blamed for the hard starting.
This problem is a combination of growing pains, uneducated EV drivers, old EVs with crappy batteries, some bad infrastructure, and EV manufacturers that don't put enough diagnostics.
1. Ask anyone who has lived in these kinds of cold temperatures. Cold starts in ICEs are always a problem. in upstate NY, you always need a pair of jumper cables ready. you might get to where you're going, and then can't make it back.
2. Different battery chemistries have different cold vs. warm characteristics. Surprise, surprise, the newer, better, more expensive battery packs don't suffer in the cold as much. The loss can be as low as 3% (Jaguar I-Pace) to 30% (Ford Mustang Mach-E, VW ID.4). See https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-temperature-affec...
3. EVs have two battery packs: a small 12V one, like a regular car battery, and the BIG one. If the 12V one dies, you can't start the car, even if the BIG one is good. (EV manufacturers should install better 12V batteries and provide better diagnostics for this kind of problem.)
4. EVs also have a "pre-conditioning" charge, where (massively simplified) battery warms itself to prevent damaging itself when it's too cold. This can drain the battery, but if the car is plugged in, it's not a problem, it'll just pull the charge from the plug (even if the battery doesn't need charging).
5. Sounds like a few chargers "froze" up. Just like gas pumps, but obviously it's a much bigger issue because there's always another gas station down the road, unlike EV chargers.
6. Most EV owners charge at home, and we just plug in all the time because it's easy, convenient, and we can pre-heat the car with a button on our remotes, saving on battery.
7. Some EVs use resistive heat instead of a heat pump for heat gen, which can eat a lot of juice, but it's not a big deal anymore because the battery packs are so big.
So, really, my takeaway is that Tesla and the other EV manufacturers need to:
- cold proof their charging stations (probably a simple "growing pain")
- educate their users a bit. (if the car won't make it overnight because it'll have to do a conditioning charge based on the weather forecast, WARN the driver!)
- use better batteries. this issue will fix itself as the better manufacturing techniques spread throughout the industry
This is something they could do immediately. Send a push notification showing how tomorrow's bitter cold forecast will reduce their vehicle's range by XX%.
An EV is a far superior winter car to my gasoline car. My comment one of the first times it came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39015773
EV drivers struggle to keep batteries charged amid winter freeze
If everyone does that and shows up to chargers with cold-soaked batteries, the only result can be chaos.
When it's -40c and you're running the video security systems. It only drains about 1% a day.
Yes you have less range, but so does gasoline. About the same amount of loss.
Turning it on... harder for gasoline. Better plug in those block heaters!
Blackout at your house because the grid failed because renewables arent generating? Your car is your house battery backup.
Very poor traction? Better put sandbags in the bed of your truck. Oh wait not a problem for heavy EVs. Not to mention traction control is next level in EVs.
The cherry on top... 0-60 for EVs is amazing!
This is absolutely not the case. The worst case scenario for ICEs (cold starts, intermittent short trips so the engine block doesn't get heat) is 15%.
The average for EV in subfreezing is about 24% loss. And up to 39% when you're on longer trips and heating the cabin for extended periods.
The kia soul for example, which originally had 150km range has been upgraded now. I believe the cold weather package is standard now?
Today in 3rd generation evs, you have to cross the heat pump temp limit of -25c for there to be worse then ICE range losses.
There's obviously always going to be rough losses. Afterall, the colder it is, the more I want to jack up the heat.
Ford, chevy, and vw I believe are still in 2nd gen? Though honestly I havent heard how well the new ultium are doing for chevy?
I believe 3rd gens, jaguar, audi, and tesla at -20c will be around -5% range loss or so?
Personally I'm waiting on 4th gen with solid state batteries in hopes/expectations they handle the cold weather better. afterall it is -15c right now for me. Toyota has all the patents and might be first to market?
At least with Tesla, it isn't this good. Running sentry mode will cost a lot more than 1% a day. Best to leave it off if the car will be sitting at the airport for days, for example.
Otherwise, I agree. EVs in the winter work great for many (but, of course not all) use cases.
Country needs to invest in supporting alternative transportation options across the nation. Cities need to be redesigned. The attitudes need to change. Car centric transportation doesn’t work at scale.
High-density cities have received a huge amount of subsidization from the internet bezzle too such as half-price Uber rides and same day Amazon deliveries. I think a lot of this is about deceiving the chattering classes so they can deceive us. If my farm had 1-day Amazon shipping and Hollywood had the 5-day shipping I get you can be sure that you wouldn't hear glib talk about how fast Amazon shipping is and in fact slow AMZN shipping would be a running gag on sitcoms. It's no accident that Jim Cramer gets 1-day shipping or that my congressman gets 1-day shipping (otherwise Bezos buying The Washington Post would have been a waste.)
In 2024, NYC and San Francisco have more to answer for in the "sustainability" department than Austin, TX, Scranton, PA, or any "normal" city in the US which is affordable.
I don't have a place to plug it in most evenings, and it is parked outside. So, worst possible conditions. The amount of power the battery just loses overnight doing nothing is extremely predictable; if its -10-0F outside, it will lose 2%. 10F-20F, about 1%. 30F+, you won't notice drain. That's manageable.
The door SUCKS. Its so stupidly bad that its startlingly obvious no one's fair-weather skin at Tesla in sunny California has ever experienced low temperatures. If the door is iced over, it takes "I'm going to break this" slamming force to break the ice and get the lever exposed. When you do, if the window seam is also iced over it won't recede below the frameless door when you open it, so you inevitably damage the trim every time you open the door (unless, maybe, you kept a blowtorch around to deice the window?)
A friend with a Mach-E (long range) took a ~140 mile trip the other day. Left with 90% charge; made it to the destination with 4 miles of range left. -15F outside. IIRC that car should have something like 280 mile range. It might not have been as close if she could have stopped at the one non-Tesla DCFC (Electrify America) between the two places, but none of the stalls were functional. Just a horrible situation all around. You can't rely on Ford, Electrify America, anyone; you're sold a car on promises that did not materialize, and of the few people I know who purchased non-Tesla EVs, all of them are buying Teslas next.
That being said, I think its a grass-is-greener situation, and while Teslas are better in almost every way, we're talking about very core aspects of the technology shared between brands. Nothing has put me more in the "BEVs are a fad" camp than owning a BEV. This isn't the next generation of propulsion. At minimum, the sector needs: double the raw battery capacity standard; triple the roadside charging speed (~500kw) standard; including when its cold (supercharger @~0F won't go above 60kw; that's ~90m 20%-80%); ~20x (yes, twenty times, maybe more) the number of roadside DCFCs; and regulate/litigate the hell out of these DCFC networks who take federal clean energy funding (EA was founded by VW as part of their emissions scandal restitutions. They do not deserve even a drop of free market capitalism.)
None of that feels likely to happen at costs comparable to ICE, even with considerable technology advancements. Which is why I tend to feel that by 2035 we'll look back on BEVs as a weird little fad in automobile history; interesting for fleet vehicles and warn climate metropolitans, but a really poor choice for the rest of the country.
What's worse is that this isn't a new problem. My Audi has frameless doors, and zero issue opening in the cold.
> None of that feels likely to happen at costs comparable to ICE, even with considerable technology advancements.
That's the other part too - though slightly orthogonal. Way too many Tesla owners seem to believe that auto makers haven't advanced since the 90s, and parade things like adjustable ride height as miraculous, while the "dinosaurs" have nothing of the sort. Meanwhile my car is mapping the road surface, actively leaning into corners and following road camber, actively avoiding potholes, and adjusting the suspension, including ride height, constantly.