It's so cold, Teslas are struggling to charge in Chicago | Hacker News Reader

It's so cold, Teslas are struggling to charge in Chicago

npr.org

37 pointsgreenie_beans65 comments

I live in Quebec. A lot of people here own Teslas, but a common complaint I hear from Tesla owners is the sub-par winter reliability.

It's not even the range reduction - EV owners here are prepared for that - it's the fact that the car seems to have been designed by someone in California who has never seen a winter storm in their life. A colleague had her windshield crack when the defrost was running in her driveway. Another broke the driver's side window because the window was iced shut after freezing rain and Tesla for some reason requires the window to automatically retract an inch when opening the door, which it can't do when frozen. There have been numerous reports in the media of paint peeling on brand new Teslas when exposed to winter road salt.

Notably, other EV manufacturers don't seem to suffer from these issues, but Tesla is currently the only game in town for reasonable delivery times - everyone else is 12 months plus.

Windshields cracking happens on all cars, but whether or not, it happens more with Tesla I don’t know.

Cracking simply when running defrost after having parked outside overnight? I have never experienced this or heard of anyone who has experienced this.

Yea. Talk to someone in glass repair or who’s worked at a dealership. Has never happened to me but did to at least one person I know.

The "window cracks when you open it" is very common in most frameless-window cars and not a Tesla-specific thing. Most people never notice it.

How are none of these problems affecting people in Norway, where electric cars have skyrocketed to become 80% of new cars sales?

This seems like just more of the old windows-breaking-in-US-built-Telsas nonsense; Norwegian Teslas are built in China.

The record low in Oslo is -15f, Montreal's is -36f

> Tesla for some reason requires the window to automatically retract an inch when opening the door

Tesla uses frameless doors, which are normally associated with high-end cars. To get a good seal without a window frame they use the standard solution of having the window raise slightly after closing, and having the door handle trigger it to lower again. You can break the seal with a credit card: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjRo-vYGhdw

(I think this is silly, and prefer my nice low-end full-frame reliable doors.)

A ton of coupes, especially German cars, have the window roll down a slight bit when you open the door. It’s not just a Tesla issue.

Paint issue are pretty common on Tesla but is a lot better on newer model years.

> Notably, other EV manufacturers don't seem to suffer from these issue

Is this actually true or are Teslas just more numerous than other EVs so the anticdata supports that claim?

> It can also be tricky to open the door on the Model S with a drained battery. Under normal circumstances, the car automatically adjusts the windows to ease the process. "Always connect to an external, low voltage power supply before opening a door when the vehicle has no power," Tesla says, "to avoid breaking a window."

It's such a silly situation to be in. Why couldn't they have made these with regular door handles?

Edit: Oops, sorry, it's not the handles but the window design. Still, seems needlessly complicated and fragile.

It's not the door handles that is the issue in that quote. It's the frameless windows. Cars with frameless windows often need to retract the window slightly when the door is opened, so that the window clears the edge of the body of the vehicle that they tuck up into when it is closed. Many other vehicles do this as well.

Frameless windows is an example of over complicating vehicles with needless technology that inevitably breaks and really doesn’t add anything to the experience of the vehicle. I am unclear why manufacturers keep designing features like this.

It is worth noting that not all vehicles with frameless windows require the glass to be retracted to clear the frame. It is mostly a cosmetic thing, but also, it is practically impossible to offer a convertible version of a car without it.

Pretty much every car with frameless windows works the same way. The window rolls down a little bit when you open the door to clear the trim.

Mini, Audi, Mercedes, Corvette, and so on. They all work the same.

Not the handle it's the frameless window, which is my least favorite feature on my car. It's just needlessly complicated and throws passengers off all the time.

Why don't they reserve some power just for that or have a separate battery using different technology? It's not a rocket science to have a low capacity battery which can last years in freezing temperatures.

FWIW, the low voltage system is separate from the high voltage system in most vehicles with electric drivetrains.

Are you aware of any that don't have a low voltage battery?

Nope.

Low voltage batteries are generally a bit more susceptible to the cold, since they don't have heaters and have a lot of constant draw circuits attached to them.

Do you know how do these teslas become dead? I mean after you cut off wireless communication, wouldn't they be able to stand in freezing temperatures for years even with lithium based batteries? I know capacity will be reduced, internal resistance higher etc but still I don't get how do they discharge enough not to even be able to open the door.

Low voltage circuits have constant draws attached to them. Simple circuits like keeping clocks ticking, and more complex circuits that listen for wireless keys or alarm sensors. Ideally, they can last for months with those draws, but when the battery is old and cold, it can die in weeks or even days.

FWIW, the high voltage circuits (the one with the Li batteries) are physically disconnected with a contactor (a high voltage relay) once the car is turned off. You can literally hear the clicks inside the car as you turn it on and off.

All that said, I have heard of some cars which can charge the low voltage battery using the high voltage circuit, but I know nothing of those those are connected.

This seemed entirely separate to the rest of the article. No one is literally running their battery down to absolutely nothing - they are just having longer queues than average at the charger. And if you do run your battery down to exactly nothing, this can be an issue even on a hot day.

The model 3 will open the window a bit when you open the doors, but if you use the mechanical override, it doesn't break the window, it just risks damage to the rubber seal around the window. I believe it's not really a problem unless you use that as your normal method to open the door for an extended period.

My e46 BMW had frameless windows and it was built in 1999. I prefer frameless windows after having that car. My newer cars don’t, the windows are harder to clean and don’t look as good.

I think I'll take "windows that don't break when it's cold" over "windows that look better when cleaned" any day. But that's just me... ever the utilitarian, I guess, lol. Different cars for different folks!

Side rant: Mainly my gripe is that there still aren't affordable electric utility vehicles. Tesla's way too much of an "image" and fashion car for me, and I wish there was some bog-standard AWD SUV that's electric or a plug-in hybrid. The Subaru Solterra (a rebadged Toyota with AWD) is close, but very expensive.

The Chevrolet Equinox EV might be what you're after, although it's not available yet (was supposed to be available Q1 this year, it's slipped): https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/equinox-ev

No one is breaking frameless windows unless they yank the door extremely hard when the battery is dead or I guess if you let it freeze over and don’t chip ice away. Never heard of it ever happening on the BMW forums. Only some random Canadians fried of a fried.

The media seems to be hyperfocused on one specific supercharger station in Chicago. When in reality

* There are lots of other EVs and EV charging companies in Chicago

* There are lots of other cold places in the US

* Hell Stockholm looks colder than Chicago this week and there are plenty of electric Volvos driving around

It seems that a single local news story grew into a monster for no good reason

sounds like you have a problem with the way the news cycle works. i read the entire article because i thought it was interesting. never would've known about it if it stayed in the local news.

also, you clearly didn't read the article, otherwise you would've read the counterpoints, like the section titled "Other Tesla drivers report no issues"

love it when people complain about the media and don't read and/or apply news literacy to the article that prompts their complaint.

Now HERE'S a good local Chicago story that grew into a monster for no good reason:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/us/chicago-rat-hole.html

this is nice and odd, a great candidate for national coverage.

I have a friend who grew up in Irkutsk, Russia where, while quite a bit colder, ICE cars had to be run all night, because if they stopped running they would never start again. All machines have a failure rate at a certain (lack of) temperature. Sounds like electric is just a big higher. I hope this tech improves with time.

The _real story_ here is that there appears to be a strong mismatch between supply and demand for powerful enough tesla chargers to charge cars quickly in cold temperatures.

Cities/Charging companies that expect cold weather that can impact this should have a strategy to match this demand when needed, or owners should have stronger chargers to plug their cars in at home (where possible)

I heard the same story, but it was chiefly about equipment, and largely diesel (which is what kinda makes them okay to idle overnight as supposedly the consumption of diesel engines on idle is quite low.)

0.4 to 0.5 l/hr for a 1.6l VAG CAYC TDI as used in e.g. Škoda Octavia II. Source: one of those is currently parked in the snow in front of our house. It starts without problems and without the need for a block heater at -25°C, the coldest it has been so far this winter here. A full fuel tank (55l) will last for about 100-110 hours (4-5 days) when idling.

Somehow in Norway where EVs make up more than 1/3 if entire vehicle stock on the road, it's not a problem. That's a seriously cold ass country.

Isn't most of norway's population concentrated in the southernmost part, around oslo? I would guess that electric car ownership is even more disproportionately concentrated there too.

Checking wikipedia quickly it looks like oslo and chicago have similar winter temperatures, so chicago's cold snap would be an outlier for most norwegians too.

It's concentrated in the south, yes, but people in Trondheim, Tromsø, Narvik, etc. also have EVs, they are everywhere in the country.

OK, I probably should have left that part out then because at a quick look it seems like they still have comparable winter temps to chicago, and chicago's recent weather would be extreme in those places as well. Norway has much milder weather than I had assumed!

> Norway has much milder weather than I had assumed!

Due to Earth's rotation affecting winds the western coasts of continents usually have much milder climate than the eastern coasts, most of Scandinavia has much milder climates than the same latitude on eastern North America.

Except for the northern parts of Fenno-Scandia most places here have a quite mild temperature range during winter (I'd guess the southern 70% of Fenno-Scandia will vary between -15C to 0C throughout winter).

I wonder if models destined for Norway get better heaters.

FTA: "This means that Chicago's climate site spent about 35-36 hours below 0°F."

https://weatherspark.com/h/y/68697/2023/Historical-Weather-d... https://weatherspark.com/h/y/68746/2023/Historical-Weather-d... show the daily highs didn’t get below 0°F in Oslo or Trondheim in 2023.

So, it’s colder in Chicago now than is typical in those cities. They are in the south of Norway, but that’s also where most Norwegians live.

Narvik is further north, and also didn’t have days below 0°F (https://weatherspark.com/h/y/82944/2023/Historical-Weather-d...)

In general, land climates beat sea climates in extreme temperatures.

Norway also benefits from the North Atlantic Current (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Current)

Chicago has half the population of the entire country of Norway, in a space 1/50th of the size. It also has extremes on both ends of the temperature spectrum. It's hardly a fair comparison. I spent 20 years in Chicago, the people there are used to and ready for winter extremes.

Teslas have their fair share of issues, but the real problem in Chicago is relatively few people have access to home charging compared to the number that own EV's. It's one reason Teslas are so popular, as every other EV is a pain to charge exclusively with public charging. Reduce their range with cold, increase their charge time with cold, increase the rate of usage with cold (as it's too cold to use bikes and walk for many people) and yes - you're going to run into supply shortages during extremes. To prevent that, you'd need oversupply in the bulk of the year, and the footprint of Chicago and real-estate cost simply doesn't support that.

A lot of Norway isn’t amazingly cold compared to the interior US. Wikipedia tells me that the January mean temperatures in Chicago and Oslo are pretty similar. (Pretty confusing to read though because they each prioritize Fahrenheit and Celsius in opposite ways.)

What you would typically worry about here—unless you live in one of the frigid parts—is distance and if you have to drive over a mountain.

dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013931

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39015954

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39027696

and probably more

Tesla cars are live in a weird space where their tech under the hood is massively overengineered but the parts of the car you interact with are designed around an extremely minimalist borderline reductionist dogma with random capacitive touch button inconveniences sprinkled on top

If you keep the car warm, then you'll have no problems.

Temperature has a great effect on chemical reactions. Charging a car battery relies on a chemical reaction.* Cold weather -> poor charging.

Just another environmental/infrastructure shortcoming that requires attention before EVs can become common enough to give economies of scale.

They didn't warn you when you bought that EV that you'd need to garage it protectively enough in an insulated space to enable proper charging, did they?

* Discharging a battery also relies on a chemical reaction. So same problem of poor chemical reaction arises when using that battery in cold weather to drive with.

This is certainly a media frenzy and it appears to be all about a single charging station. My ICE vehicles have also struggled or refused to start in this cold.

if you read the article then you'll come across the section titled "Other Tesla drivers report no issues"

Tesla could have done better I feel in proactively informing owners of what to do/not do with this cold snap. They would have saved themselves a few bad headlines

The cold weather limitations and suggestions to get going are documented fairly well in the owner's manual, available both online and from within the car on the display. Don't get me wrong: I think Tesla deserves blame for a multitude of problems, but in this case blaming the manufacturer for the failure of the customer to RTFM doesn't seem fair.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-F907200...

Does Tesla have heaters on the battery packs?

yes

Yes

It takes a lot of power to heat the batteries. If there is no power, can't heat them, and you can have total failure if you try and charge them when they are too cold.

You don't get total failure, you get an extended charging session as the car first warms the battery and then charges the car.

The car needs enough power to warm the battery though. So what happens if the car doesn't have enough power and tries to warm the battery and runs out of power before it has warmed enough to charge?

This is not a new problem.

Starting a Lanz Bulldog with a blow torch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHT2NE0Sukc

Why would you need to use car power to warm the battery? If you're connected to a charger you can use charger power to warm the battery. And you can't charge if you're not connected to a charger, so charging a cold battery is impossible in that case.

There should be a lot of power available if you're at a charger.

My understanding is that this particular Supercharger station is broken and either not putting out any electricity, or putting out way less than it should

I think battery heaters are standard and necessary on any EV battery.

not all electric vehicles have battery heaters.

Eg it's only part of the Eco pack for an Ioniq.

The issue at hand may be whether they keep the heaters on during charging. FTA: "A charge that should take 45 minutes is taking two hours."

They do keep the heaters during charing, unlike other manufacturers like Renault

My dad had to use some warm water in a sealed bag to get his charger to engage and disengage, seemed to work well tho.

By Teslas, NPR means EVs, but Tesla is now synonymous with electric vehicles for the general public (like Kleenex is for nose improvement rectangle).

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