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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)?

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.

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