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Comment by tedd4u | Hacker News Reader

And human occupants will still run the heater more in winter. But it sounds like there could be a future where makers offer a sodium battery and heat pump version of their cars for sale in colder climates.

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Running a preheater loop for the heat pump from the systems than need to be cooled, inverter and motor that run better cold,and other optimisations could likely supply cabin heat with very little battery draw, solar pv blended into the exterior could zero that out on an average basis,but 40 below is nothing to play with unless you know exactly what you are doing, even if they say it will still work.

https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...

> future where makers offer a sodium battery and heat pump version

AFAIK most EVs already use heat pumps today, so the future happens whenever sodium batteries become mainstream.

IIRC there are some surprising holdouts, at least in the NA market. For example as far as I'm aware the Mustang Mach-E still ships with a resistive heater.

> Mustang Mach-E still ships with a resistive heater

Nope, the Mach E and Lightning both have a heat pump (well, just the Mach E now, I suppose, since the Lightning is out of production).

It should be noted that started with the 2025 model. Earlier Mach-Es just had resistance heating.

Vehicle ASHP do little in deep cold temperatures, since the evaporator is necessarily so small. They're mostly effective in the 0-15C range. Note that all EVs have PTC heaters, regardless of heat pump. The PTC is what does most of the work for getting the interior to temperature quickly (they're 5-10 kW).

The cheaper EVs don't. Think 35k range.

Obviously Tesla and the like are more luxury cars but if EV is to become mainstream they need to compete with ICE Kia's and Volkswagen.

The VW id.3 costs about 30k. It doesn't have a heat pump by default, but it's a 1,200 EUR add-on. Which probably makes sense; in some markets where it's sold it doesn't really get cold enough that one is of significant benefit.

Interestingly, the Hyundai Inster (20k EUR) and Renault 5 (25k EUR) both have heat pumps as standard equipment.

I think our id.4 2023 model already has that. It has crappy software too. Great car, drives fantastically, but horrific software!

But if they add buttons back as planned, I might be willing to try a new id.4 in 5-10 years.

just fyi for the MY23 and older software 3.8/9 should be available for update, which is a pretty significant upgrade compared to 3.2 or the 2.x builds (which I don't think a MY23 should have but idk).

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