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Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

nytimes.com

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Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#201

Post by cozzyd »

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #114
tw04 wrote: post #6

90% of the complaints appear to be from folks who have no ability to charge at home. I would agree with the sentiment that if you have to drive any significant distance daily, and live in an apartment where you can’t charge at home, having an EV is going to be a giant pain and it might be a little too soon to go that route. I’d imagine we’re still several years away from having robust enough charging infrastructure a…

This is why apartments are stupid designs, and we should tax them appropriately.

Many of us apartment dwellers don't even own cars ... I suspect that's much less common for SFHs

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#202

Post by jjav »

vdnkh wrote: post #182
PaulHoule wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but a small apartment costs $4000 in NYC which would cover the payment, gas, insurance and everything on two or three big SUVs. Without some revolution in the cost structure of urban life, "transit friendly" is going to look like going from the frying pan to the fire for most people.

According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year [0], and that's just for one car. So New Yorkers can put that extra $1000 per month towards housing. As a New Yorker, $4000 is pretty high. You'd typically see that in hot areas for 1br's with in-unit w/d. Most people, including myself, do not pay that much. Also, interesting phrasing to make it seem like a "small nyc apartment" is a bad thing. I…

> According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year

You're not forced to pay the average if saving money is important. My primary driver costs me ~2K a year total.

> All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.

As someone who beat my head against the wall of trying to afford to live in NYC for several years and eventually gave up and moved to the suburbs, I assure you it's far cheaper to live in the suburbs.

(Sure, there are exclusive luxury suburbs that'll cost as much as living in NYC but you wouldn't move to those if affordability matters.)

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#203

Post by antisthenes »

thegrim33 wrote: post #198
antisthenes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should have pushed for hybrid cars. Who's this "we"? Toyota has already sold millions of hybrid vehicles to willing customers all over the world, probably more than all electric vehicles combined. Also, government can't force anything, if people don't have the money and the home charging needed for an EV, then they won't get it, short of govt giving them a free car.

> government can't force anything https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pathway-for-zero-emission... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/wa-adopts-zero-emi... https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/california-moves-accelerate-100-...

Wishful thinking that will get rolled back after backlash.

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#204

Post by jjav »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #89
thebruce87m wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICE cars have to go to a gas station every ~500 miles. For some EV owners like me, the trade off in time saved refuelling an ICE car is spent on charging on rare long journeys. I actually save time overall. But each use-case is different.

I would filled up twice on a trip between Ottawa and Quebec City in a gasoline car in the winter. Never let your tank get below 50% in case of emergency, and there's no such thing as a "destination charger" for ICE's.

> I would filled up twice on a trip between Ottawa and Quebec City in a gasoline car in the winter.

Why? A 275 mile drive should be easily done in any gas car without stopping.

Even my smallest tank car can do ~325 miles, my other cars can do ~425 and ~500 miles on one tank.

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#205

Post by jjav »

iAMkenough wrote: post #121
p0w3n3d wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is basically what some cities try to enforce at the moment: everyone convert to electric, without enough garage places

Cities aren't writing tickets or fines if you don't decide to purchase an electric vehicle. They may choose policies that incentivize EV use to meet climate/environmental goals, but any sort of enforcement policy that mandates private citizens must purchase and drive EVs would quickly get shot down in court.

> any sort of enforcement policy that mandates private citizens must purchase and drive EVs would quickly get shot down in court.

Citation? Have any been shot down in court? There are plenty of locations that have passed laws that all new cars be EVs after year 20XX (for example 2035 in California).

I suspect most of those will be reverted as overly optimistic, but for now, they are in place.

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#206

Post by jjav »

epistasis wrote: post #41
jdpedrie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differences are a) you don't lose notable range in cold weather (and your car continues to reliably tell you your remaining range), and b) there's always another gas station a block down.

Yes, you do lose notable range in a gas car in cold weather: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/coldweather.shtml It's really interesting what sort of things are considered problems with EVs that just get ignored with gas cars. The dual standard is pretty interesting to observe.

> It's really interesting what sort of things are considered problems with EVs that just get ignored with gas cars.

The very article you quoted says that range can drop 15% for a gas car in subfreezing temperatures, but 41% for an EV.

That's a huge difference! So it's not a double standard to notice the big difference.

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#207

Post by 015a »

FireBeyond wrote: post #150
015a wrote: post #79

This being the first midwest winter I've had a Model Y: there's parts of the experience that are really bad, and parts that aren't as bad as I thought they'd be. I don't have a place to plug it in most evenings, and it is parked outside. So, worst possible conditions. The amount of power the battery just loses overnight doing nothing is extremely predictable; if its -10-0F outside, it will lose 2%. 10F-20F, about 1%.…

> The door SUCKS. Its so stupidly bad that its startlingly obvious no one's fair-weather skin at Tesla in sunny California has ever experienced low temperatures. If the door is iced over, it takes "I'm going to break this" slamming force to break the ice and get the lever exposed. When you do, if the window seam is also iced over it won't recede below the frameless door when you open it, so you inevitably damage the…

Most Tesla owners' sense of how advanced other cars have gotten is influenced directly by the frames per second their infotainment systems run at; which, admittedly, is quite bad, but hardly a broad indicator.

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#208

Post by earthling8118 »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #153
xyst wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real blunder in this country is the lack of viable alternative transportation options in a majority of the nation. Visited NYC recently and didn’t need to rent a car. Primarily took the bus, ferry, and rail car/trains. In some cases I just walked from my hotel to the destination. Could have rented one of the e-bikes as well. Transportation costs for just 1 week were less than $100 (a quarter of this was because o…

Id like to see the US focus on walkability too, but the reality is most Americans disagree. Most Americans want to live in a SFH with a big yard in suburbia. Public transit does not really work with those constraints. Public transit is great for the people that want to live in cities, but there are more than enough that dont to make electrifying cars an important goal. NYC is great but its obvious to me that I would…

This is what is always said, but for what reason can it not work?

We already spend an ABSURD amount of money to create and maintain car infrastructure. These roads are not cheap and commonly are not maintained well in part due to costs. That's not getting into externalities not covered by the cost of car ownership/usage. And where does this money come from? Generally the places where there is more density.

It just doesn't make sense for each person to have a several ton hunk of metal and for it to sit there taking up space 95+% of the time. This solution is not scaling well at all. People want to have a big suburban home, but at the expense of many, many others. It's just not right.

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#209

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #96
_ea1k wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of cold towns in the US that didn't have the same issues as Chicago. There's more to it than just "Cold weather". TBH, perhaps the more general problem is that EVs aren't fully ready for dense cities yet. Or maybe dense cities aren't ready for EVs.

To be clear, when this problem was happening in Chicago, the temperature was a lot colder than Oslo. Like -30°C with a wind chill approaching -50°C. That's not "cold weather", that's "insanely cold weather". According to Wikipedia, it has never been anywhere close to that cold in Oslo. And yet, due to the climate change effect on the arctic jet stream, Chicago sees this kind of temperature for a few days in 2-3 out o…

Wow, that is almost as cold as Harbin!

Re: Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

#210

Post by natch »

_ea1k wrote: post #200
natch wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preheating is not an absolute necessity for charging. It is done because it helps the charge go faster.

True, but in an extreme case, the battery may not take a charge at all without being warmed up. This may take 30+ minutes if it is extremely cold soaked.

If we’re going to extreme cases, even worse, the battery won’t work at all if you disconnect it or grind it into small bits.

Or, you could take care of your car as recommended and if a battery preheat will help, use scheduled departure features and plug it in if needed and possible.

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