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Comment by MegaDeKay | Hacker News Reader

Another consideration is your local climate. It can get down to -40C here. Both ICE and EVs pay a range penalty in those conditions, but it compounds the problem with charging station density that EVs have + the time it takes to charge. And at least with an ICE, all that engine heat can be put to good use trying to keep the interior warm.

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These problems are (imo) vastly overblown for the way most people drive. The only time the cold temperature reduced range / reduced charge speed are relevant is for long road trips where you’re driving > ~200mi at once. Otherwise, you just charge up at home overnight and easily recoup any normal driving range you used during the day, regardless of the temperature.

Norwegians have apparently figured this out. Despite being pretty damn cold, they’re buying EV’s almost exclusively now (97%).

Norway is not damn cold. It sits next to a warm, Gulf-stream ocean. Rarely gets much (<-10 Celsius) below freezing.

Finland, that's another thing.

Around 38% of new cars sales in Finland in 2025 were EVs [1], so they apparently have figured out how to make them work. PHEVs were another 20%. Gas cars were around 39%, and diesel cars were about 4%.

[1] https://alternative-fuels-observatory.ec.europa.eu/general-i...

EVs work in cold weather, just the range is reduced.

If it is a second car in the family, used for short range commuting ... or if your lifestyle does not involve frequent long-distance trips, EV is perfectly suitable even in Finland.

In those countries most people own a house so they can plug in every night.

Where I live it's all apartments (without parking because they were built before cars existed) and there's maybe one charging station on the street per 300 spaces or so. A few more in parking garages but you pay hundreds a month to access those.

I don't think an EV will work here until every space has a charger.

Sounds like you might live in a sensible place where you probably don’t need a car at all. That’s the ideal! Unfortunately, much of, e.g., the U.S. (outside of ~4 cities), “cities” are built around individual car ownership. There, where a car is pretty much necessary, and you likely already have a dedicated spot to store it, it often makes sense to choose an EV version.

As others said, Norway isn't that cold - the ocean is pretty warm. That does mean, however, that the temperature varies greatly with how far you are from the sea. Go far enough inland and it can get cold. -30C or, even these days, some places much colder, though only for shorter periods now (global warming). Most places are barely as cold as -10C, which isn't much of a problem for batteries. And it's often a bit warmer.

The cold problems are not as overblown as most people who live outside of these environments think. Yes, for most commutes the reduction in winter (sub-freezing temperature) range when home-based charging is available is not significant.

For my anecdote, my (occasional) commute distance is enough that I need to change my driving habits to have enough range/safety margin to make it back home during this cold period. In these conditions, my EV gets roughly 175 miles of range while driving 60-65 MPH with some (resistive) cabin heating. This makes my 150-mile roundtrip not exactly an afterthought like it is during the summer when I have 240-mile+ range ignoring the speed limit. If I couldn't fully recharge at home every night, preheat the car (even garaged it's still bitter cold)

Statistically maybe these edge cases are all irrelevant... But it is a hard limit on what you can and can't do with an EV that ICE vehicle users do not have to ever think about. Maybe once we start getting commonly-available and affordable EVs that come standard with ICE-like range - 300 miles all-season at the minimum - this will change.

Your 150 mile daily commute seems like a much bigger factor in this dilemma than the cold temperature range reduction. That’s over 3x the average American daily commute distance! For the huge majority of Americans, the cold weather thing just will not be a factor at all. And yet, it’s probably the #1 fact they know about EV’s.

https://youtu.be/ebGLFVzvdfM?si=kJNHWJ5zuF3s9JIb

Turns out it’s not a major thing

norwegians seem to not mind

> ..that ICE vehicle users do not have to ever think about.

Well.. the comment you replied to said "-40C" (which is about -40F too, AFAIK), and, back in time before global warming really hit, a friend used to live and work in an area where it was -40 nearly every day, from late October till March. At least that year I visited that place. I and friends arrived at nighttime and he picked us up at the airport and brought us to where he lived. His car was a small utility car he used for work.. a diesel car. When we unpacked and went inside, he didn't turn off the engine.. when asked, he said he had done that mistake in October (this was now late February), and had to tow the car to a garage, as the diesel fuel had all turned into wax (and this was diesel with cold-weather additives). So, since then, he never turned off the engine. It ran 24/7, for months at the time.

(These days it's much much warmer there, not cold at all, so the above is an anecdote from back in the old days, by now).

at -40C you need to start plugging a block warmer into the ICE when you park, something that an EV doesn’t need, although it can benefit from the same plug for the block warmer into Fairbanks parking lots.

Yep, I know all about block heaters. But that's a separate issue from range.

It says a lot about the viability of ICEs in really cold temperatures though. You are just trading one problem for another. An EV can be kept plugged in while idle and the cold weather tech can probably manage better than an ICE would, especially with what the Chinese have been developing in Harbin and Mohe.

Lithium batteries perform terribly at that temperature and cannot be charged at all without permanent damage. They basically need to have a block heater hooked up to the battery if you ever want to charge.

I believe modern EVs have battery heating built in for exactly that reason.

Which uses the energy from the battery, so if they did that, you better not go out of town for a couple of weeks or you'll come home to a dead car.

You just keep it plugged in when you are gone, what’s the issue?

This reminds me that in Yakutsk, you put your car in a big sock while it’s parked and the car will occasionally start on its own to keep the block from freezing (they don’t have plugs outside, so no block warmers, no EVs). If you leave your car parked long enough, you’ll run out of gas and your engine will probably be hosed.

It’s a solved problem and built into the car. You can do an AI lookup on Chinese EVs in Mohe/Harbin to get a summary of the tech they’ve developed.

Besides breathless or from universities, all I could find is articles like this (https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-electric-veh...) talking about the exact problem I described.

Can you stop hinting at things google can’t find, and just provide sources (not AI, since that is necessarily an unreliable secondary source)?

Cold soaked batteries are definitely less ideal but if you can plug in at home, planning your charge times and pre-conditioning the car while plugged in significantly reduces the range effects (and preheats the cabin for you!)

Current generation EV batteries solve this problem but you can’t buy them in the US :(

Having a heat pump for heating is then really important, as compared to a simple resistive heating element

Heat pumps work up to a certain temperature delta. They don't heat so good in -40.

Yep. I put a heat pump in my house last year. It doesn't function at all below "only" -30C and doesn't make economic sense vs my natural gas furnace until around 0C. I got it instead of a plain air conditioner only so I had a backup to my furnace.

The number of cars that experience -40F(C) in a year is something like 3% of all cars. In the US that number is more like 0.5%. And even within that 3%, the average number of days where cars experience that temperature is on the order of a 3-6 at most. We spend a lot of time worrying about edge cases.

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