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The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

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Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#71

Post by gambiting »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #59
simfree wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18Mpg becomes 10Mpg or worse in the winter in my experience. EV driving can be more efficient if you don't let your battery cold soak for hours, or equally inefficient if you do leave your car unplugged overnight.

I live in place that routinely goes below freezing in winter. I’ve never noticed gas mileage change because of temperature. I would definitely notice a difference of 8 MPG. Where do you get that info? Is it personal experience? If so, where do you live?

I easily notice the difference in my car, it goes from about 8L/100km in summer to 10L/100km in winter. That's on the same tyres in both seasons.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#73

Post by jws »

GalenErso wrote: post #32
brianglick wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't really need a heated garage (at home, anyway) if you had a 220 volt charger. That should be able to overcome any charging challenges in extreme cold, anyway. Relatively easy to get that into your garage. Also - if you arrive at your friend's place in the winter and park overnight, you won't lose a ton overnight if the car's just parked there.

Meanwhile, with an ICE car, you don't need to worry about having a garage, nevermind a heated one; the right charger, warming a pack, losing fuel overnight, or taking three hours to fully charge. I can pull up to any gas station and fill my tank in 2 minutes. And my gas isn't magically evaporating if it's a little chilly. The 30 different requirements for EVs to work in cold weather are too complex and prohibitively…

Spoken by someone who's never had their diesel fuel begin gelling in the fuel line at night on a frigid, remote highway and trying to figure out if you can make it to somewhere with heat before you stop completely. Then finding out they only have gasoline, so you try to figure out how much gas you can add to the diesel tank to keep it from gelling but still run adequately to move you along.

Sometimes we forget that we have 100 years of infrastructure behind our internal combustion engines and about 10 behind the electric vehicles.

In the first 10 years of internal combustion engines, you bought benzene at the local apothecary and used that to fuel your car.

Three years of EV in a more or less unheated garage and I'm still just charging off my 15A 120V outlet. It's fine. I plug in every other day or so. But you know what I don't do? Freeze my ass off standing in a gas station in subzero temperatures and howling winds! Not missing that at all.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#74

Post by hristov »

GalenErso wrote: post #32
brianglick wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't really need a heated garage (at home, anyway) if you had a 220 volt charger. That should be able to overcome any charging challenges in extreme cold, anyway. Relatively easy to get that into your garage. Also - if you arrive at your friend's place in the winter and park overnight, you won't lose a ton overnight if the car's just parked there.

Meanwhile, with an ICE car, you don't need to worry about having a garage, nevermind a heated one; the right charger, warming a pack, losing fuel overnight, or taking three hours to fully charge. I can pull up to any gas station and fill my tank in 2 minutes. And my gas isn't magically evaporating if it's a little chilly. The 30 different requirements for EVs to work in cold weather are too complex and prohibitively…

With an ICE car, if you park regularly in very cold weather, your car can fail randomly for an obscure reason and it can take a long time to figure it out or you will need a trip to the mechanic. Or you may need a massive and expensive repair.

Remember that a lot of people have to spend 10-15 minutes warming up their cars before they drive them in cold weather.

I do not want to go into details, better car mechanics than me should, but there is all kind of chaos that can happen if your engine freezes and you try to drive it immediately. And it is much more complex and can be much more expensive. Once you start getting cracks in various things and liquids flowing where they should not be you will wish for the simplicity of just plugging in your EV.

So lets not pretend that driving in the cold is some kind of new problem that EVs introduced.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#75

Post by tshaddox »

GalenErso wrote: post #32
brianglick wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't really need a heated garage (at home, anyway) if you had a 220 volt charger. That should be able to overcome any charging challenges in extreme cold, anyway. Relatively easy to get that into your garage. Also - if you arrive at your friend's place in the winter and park overnight, you won't lose a ton overnight if the car's just parked there.

Meanwhile, with an ICE car, you don't need to worry about having a garage, nevermind a heated one; the right charger, warming a pack, losing fuel overnight, or taking three hours to fully charge. I can pull up to any gas station and fill my tank in 2 minutes. And my gas isn't magically evaporating if it's a little chilly. The 30 different requirements for EVs to work in cold weather are too complex and prohibitively…

But most of those “worries” are things you do upfront when choosing where to live or what car to get. And most of those worries have analogous worries for ICE vehicles if you’re really going to be living or frequently driving in extreme cold temperatures or snowy/icy weather. If you live in the Bay Area you probably can’t just take your ICE vehicle to Tahoe on a whim in the winter. You’ll have to consider for a moment what car you have, what kind of tires are on it, and what the weather and road conditions are. Again, it’s upfront “worrying,” not some constant sense of dread that you can’t eliminate with a bit of upfront consideration.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#76

Post by marginalia_nu »

simfree wrote: post #46
gambiting wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But......EVs do work in cold weather? You lose a bit of range, but so what? My ICE car also gets worse mileage in winter. And if you're talking about extremes - then there's a reason why block heaters with external power connections are very common in certain places - even the best ICE struggles to start in -40C or less.

18Mpg becomes 10Mpg or worse in the winter in my experience. EV driving can be more efficient if you don't let your battery cold soak for hours, or equally inefficient if you do leave your car unplugged overnight.

In colder climates, it's common to have an engine block heater, which to some extent mitigates this. A significant chunk of the lost "mileage" is from cold starts.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#77

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

Living in a region were you need to warm up car for 5 minutes to stop it being an unwelcoming block of ice, and experiencing frequent failures to get the starter running due to discharged battery due to cold, I always wondered how much cold affects battery performance and his much the heating costs in miles. Tesla's figures look unbelievably good, and I think they don't account for heating. In -20° you'd need at least 1-2 kWt heater to not freeze, so heating alone would take 5-10% of total energy consumption.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#78

Post by bsder »

api wrote: post #26
thrashh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully we discover a new battery chemistry We seem to stumble on new chemistries that get to production every few decades so cross your fingers

Or just more range. If you have 350 miles of range and it drops to 300 in the winter that’s not noticeable for 99% of drivers. We have a 220 mile Nissan Leaf that drops to 180-200 in the winter. We also live in Cincinnati which is a metro area about 75 miles in diameter at the widest span. Most drives are 10-30 miles. The range drop doesn’t matter unless you are doing a road trip. Recharge time does matter more but a…

> For some reason they put a bunch of DC chargers in the city and none between which is the inverse of what you really need. Is there a grid capacity problem in small midwestern towns or did they just get the priority wrong?

Likely ROI--Return on Investment. You can predict quite well the usage of chargers in cities from other charger installations. In between, not so much. On my latest trip between San Diego and Austin, the fast-charging stops were almost completely empty. This is in constrast to the summer, for example, where most of the fast charging was completely full and not a small amount were broken.

People have forgotten that gas stations at every convenience store is a relatively new thing in the US (starting about the mid 80s). Prior to that, part of the advantage of the Turnpikes and major interstates were regular gasoline station placements. And that happened because the governments subsidized them.

The ironic part is that "gas stations everywhere" has been absolutely terrible for groundwater--contamination is now ubiquitous. Paying gas stations to dig up old tanks and replace them with electric chargers would be a big environmental win.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#80

Post by blamazon »

orangepurple wrote: post #18
rcarr wrote: post #16

There's a long distance motorcycle travel series with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman called "Long Way Up" where they go from the bottom of South America to LA on electric motorcycles. They had a lot issues with both range and charging the motorbikes in the first few episodes when they were dealing with the cold winter climate in Tierra del Fuego. Once they got far enough north into warmer climates the bikes were c…

WarpedPerception solved this problem by installing a 400cc generator in his Tesla that ran continuously on his 1800 mile road trip

Given the exhaust noise, I would put some quotation marks on "solved":

https://youtu.be/hHhf223jGIE

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