Oh for- who the fuck is putting resistive heating in an EV?! What brain-dead PM greenlit that pants-on-head jackassery? Was it GM? I can see an American OEM getting that close to the goal line only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Really though, that's just disappointing; I had earnestly assumed every EV that made it to market (in North America at least) would be using a heat pump.
Heat pumps are expensive, complex, prone to warranty claims, and subject to additional regulatory control (refrigerants). Resistive heating is cheap and simple.
I'm guessing that the development costs for a heat pump that is good enough for automotive use is well into 8 figures, and would probably take at least a year to fully test.
Given all those constraints, it makes a tremendous amount of sense that many cars were built with resistive heating.
Yes they both use compressors and refrigerant, but essentially none of the expensive and hard to engineer parts are interchangeable.
If that was true you could just replace your broken fridge with a car AC system, or for that matter just use a fridge to heat your house. After all they all use the same “not magical” technology.
As it turns out the underlying concept/technology is pretty simple, but adapting it to be fit for purpose is where the complexity lies.
If it was that easy the car companies would have done it instead of designing a novel resistive heating system that can only be used in their lowest volume cars.
The real world evidence is that many manufacturers came to the conclusion that designing an entire separate system for resistive heat was a better solution than the obvious step of reversing the cycle on the AC.
Though perhaps I'm simply blown away living in a colder climate. Resistive heating if it's only to defog windows in the morning, or similarly rarely used, is reasonable. Resistive when getting started (one major hurdle, ICE -> EV, resistive -> heat pump, at a time) is reasonable. I just thought the automotive world had moved forward more rapidly than it had.
The evidence is that engineers on greenfield projects at multiple companies on multiple continents all arrived at roughly the same solution.
Make of that what you will.
[0] https://www.recurrentauto.com/questions/which-electric-vehic...
Tesla before 2021.