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Comment by feverzsj | Hacker News Reader

According to Russian users, Chinese EV works poorly in cold climates. I don't think Canadians prefer EVs anyway.

There are a massive amount of new EVs in Quebec, which isn't exactly tropical. Part of it is subsidies, $2K for new EV, and $600 for charging. The other thing is the crazy scale of hydroelectric production in that province, some of which gets exported as far as Baltimore. So electricity is very available and reasonably cheap in QC.

We'll see how BYD's handle the bone chilling Montreal winters... Unless they're an absolute flop, I can see some fairly solid future prospects.

(I live in Ontario, but I've been to Le Belle Province quite a bit ;) )

https://www.quebec.ca/en/transports/electric-transportation/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project

As an EV driver from Ontario it's amazing crossing over, or even getting close to the border, the EV situation is just so much better.

That said, while hate Tesla the company ... I'll take their chargers over the patchwork of various apps & cards I have to install in order to make use of things there. There's a notable absence of Tesla stations there, but a lot of variety of other things and I had bad luck installing half the apps and it was not fun trying to set that all up while standing in the -20C cold in a gas station parking lot while just trying to get to the ski hill.

The vast majority of Canadians live near the US border. The weather is not tropical but it is quite normal compared to a lot of US states and northern Europeans.

EVs and cold climates are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, if you want to road trip with snowy 30 mph headwinds, the charging times will be meaningfully worse. Not impossible, but definitely noticeable.

On the other hand, the traction control is fantastic and they tend to have the best preconditioning features so that you never have to get into a cold car for your commute.

For a lot of people, that second paragraph is far more important than that first for at least one of the cars in their household inventory.

They're also a lot more resilient at extreme temperatures. Your range will be crap, but you can count on it running in -30C or more without problems.

I (Canadian) drive a Polestar 2. Chinese manufactured car by Chinese company Geely (tho with Volvo DNA).

It's the best winter driving car I've ever owned. A set of Michelin X-Ices on it's amazing. I've been driving for 35 years and I've never driven something with better winter handling, including Subaru I used to own, etc.

> I don't think Canadians prefer EVs anyway.

One of the more popular locations for the Ford Lightning is Toronto. They seem to do fine. Canadian politics echoes American politics a bit, but they are not quite so ideological about EVs as we are.

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