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Comment by daly | Hacker News Reader

Tesla chargers use a fluid in the charging hose to handle heat buildup. The chargers in question got too cold and the fluid froze to the charger stopped working. Tesla needs to change the fluid formula for colder weather.

The press got it all wrong. It had nothing to do with batteries.

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Getting it wrong implies they cared to investigate the cause to begin with, before coming up with those headlines. It's not the first time they're putting out such misleading pieces when it comes to Tesla.

Without knowing anything about EVs, a layperson can see that when most Teslas (and other EVs) are fine, and the problematic cases are with folks trying to charge at public chargers, it must have to do with those chargers and not the "batteries dying in the cold".

Phantom drain though supposedly means if you can't charge a Tesla's main battery in time it may damage the low-voltage battery:

> If you allow the Battery to discharge to 0%, other components may become damaged or require replacement (for example, the low voltage battery). In these cases, you are responsible for repair and/or transporting expenses. Discharge-related expenses are not covered by the warranty or under the Roadside Assistance policy.

If you discharge the high voltage battery to 0, you’ve got much bigger problems than potentially needing to replace the low voltage battery. Leaving the high voltage battery at 0 is terrible for it as well, which is much more expensive to replace. Unless you’re leaving the car in that state for days, I don’t anticipate that you’d have any real damage to anything though.

Most likely those chargers weren't prepared for extreme cold.

There are Tesla chargers literally above the Arctic Circle and I've heard for zero cases where they stopped working because it was too cold.

Maybe the non-NACS Tesla chargers are built better.

Has nothing to do with NACS; there’s a decent amount of superchargers in Canada or in Alaska, and I’ve never heard reports of issues of the chargers freezing over so they’re unusable.

Many probably did die due to defects at first but since it’s so cold for longer periods of times, those units were fixed along time ago. It’s nothing new: abnormal events causing abnormal results.

They have superchargers with fluid in them that work in much colder conditions. It seems that this is either this is Tesla choosing the wrong coolant mix for the climate (or, they got caught flat footed by the extreme weather that day), or they misconfigured the supercharger so it didn’t adequately heat the coolant so freezing conditions occurred. Either way, seems easily fixable for the future.

Thanks for the explanation. One more reason I won't touch an EV with a pole in near future.

very interesting, and in theory easy to fix

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