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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

#381

Post by cesarb »

kalleboo wrote: post #372
isityouyesitsme wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon, you have to purposefully be this obtuse. There's no other way it can happen. Literally any location in the northern US, especially the more rural and more dense urban, and doubly true if you make under 30k per household person and don't already have a circuit in your garage for an electric oven or electric clothes dryer. I suspect the same is true for other locations in the world.

> and don't already have a circuit in your garage for an electric oven or electric clothes dryer. I suspect the same is true for other locations in the world Only North/Central America and Japan uses ~100V systems. The rest of the planet uses ~200V systems where more wattage in your outlets is standard.

> Only North/Central America and Japan uses ~100V systems. The rest of the planet uses ~200V systems

Brazil (which is in South America) has many cities using 110V/115V/120V/127V (you can see at https://antigo.aneel.gov.br/tensoes-nominais which voltages are used for a given city). Note that a single city can have both ~110V and ~220V, and sometimes both can be found in the same building, or even in the same room.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#382

Post by Phlarp »

KMag wrote: post #379
Phlarp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's cold enough a Tesla plugged into 120v/20a charging circuit will actually lose voltage over time. It's consuming over 2000 watts just to keep the battery at an acceptable temp for the chemistry to function. The weight of the battery pack is great for traction in warm / dry conditions, but when driving on ice that weight is just momentum sending you sliding into snow banks. After a bumper or body panel gets rip…

> The weight of the battery pack is great for traction in warm / dry conditions, but when driving on ice that weight is just momentum sending you sliding into snow banks. Not necessarily. In Minnesota, people often put sandbags in trunks/truck beds to get better traction in Winter. Also, one has to be careful when following semi tractor-trailers, as in some Winter conditions, they actually have a shorter stopping dis…

Putting a pair of sandbags in the back-end of an unloaded rear wheel drive pickup is not the same thing as driving a 9000 lb sedan.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#383

Post by Gigachad »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #363
alwayslikethis wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, who would pay for this? Car drivers? City dwellers?

In wealthy parts of the city, the building owners could be made responsible for the upkeep of the walking areas adjacent to their building. The infrastructure to support it would have to be maintained or inspected by an honest third party. In not as wealthy parts of the city, I don’t think this idea makes sense. This is just an idea to reclaim walking space in our cities without making the enormous leap to banning ca…

If I’m paying for the road in front of my building, then I don’t want car access. I don’t need it. Just make it a pedestrian space with an allowance for deliveries/moving vans/etc.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#384

Post by tnel77 »

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…

Perhaps warmer states won’t need to worry about the cold and the issues it brings?

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#385

Post by Hamuko »

jws wrote: post #73
GalenErso wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

>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.

Filling up the car is the least painful part of driving in the winter. You park up next to a fuel pump with the heated seats slow-roasting your ass (and the car is probably warm by the time you reach a station), you get out of the car for about 4 minutes, and then you go back in the car to continue the slow roast.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#386

Post by [deleted] »

hedora wrote: post #108
Phlarp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's cold enough a Tesla plugged into 120v/20a charging circuit will actually lose voltage over time. It's consuming over 2000 watts just to keep the battery at an acceptable temp for the chemistry to function. The weight of the battery pack is great for traction in warm / dry conditions, but when driving on ice that weight is just momentum sending you sliding into snow banks. After a bumper or body panel gets rip…

At what temperature would it consume 2000 watts keeping the battery warm? Surely it uses a heat pump, so it is pumping 8000-4000W of heat into the battery pack. That would be a large steady state heat loss!

[deleted]

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#387

Post by Hamuko »

jhoechtl wrote: post #336
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plug-in hybrids are strangely missing from online discussions. Are they too heavy or something? Cause it seems perfect to me. Run electric day-to-day when the weather affords. Run gas for long trips or bad conditions. No need for a giant 300 mile battery made with minerals from a developing country. Nor a huge ICE, since you can shrink it to a very narrow power band and rely on the batteries for peak power like take-…

Yeah, strangely people talk as if hybrid id a thing of the past although its the best of both worlds.

It's also the worst of both worlds at the same time, since you have the issues of both petrol engines and battery electric cars. Your 50 km of pure electric range drops to like 20 km in the winter, and after that you're driving on your cold-ass petrol engine and lugging around a heavy battery.

I drove my mom's BMW 530e plug-in hybrid to the store and back (5 km in each direction). At the end, I think we had 5 km of range left. Granted, it did handle a grocery run just on battery and the heating system worked well, but that was about all that it had. The NEDC rating for the car is 50 km of electric range.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#388

Post by quonn »

adrianN wrote: post #364
isityouyesitsme wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, 10 years behind EV. It makes sense that it is where it is. Please point out anywhere where anyone says the accomplishments are not remarkable on their own, if you are not comparing them to the thing with 100 years infra behind it. Now compare that to the seemingly endless number of evangelists who think that 10 years from now is a good time to impose a mandate to kill all new ICE vehicle manufacturing, in spite o…

We should kill all EV manufacturing five years ago. Spend the effort instead on building charging infrastructure, bike lanes, and public transport. Used cars are good for another fifteen years or so to cover edge cases where EV adoption is slower, giving us ample time to figure out solutions that don't drive mass extinction.

Bike lanes won‘t change a thing. Those who don‘t bike will mostly not be convinced by a lane. I know this, being born in a rather rural area with plenty of bike lanes. I‘m in favor of building them, but would take any bet that by itself that won‘t make a big difference.

Public transport will also have to be EV based. Trains won‘t cut it in most areas outside cities.

And besides - what you‘re saying is insanely risky. You want to keep going with ICEs for 15 years? This would just push back the necessary transition another decade. We would loose the time we desperately need to make the necessary changes.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#389

Post by Karrot_Kream »

fwungy wrote: post #327
Dylan16807 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think it's the pro ponents that miss that it doesn't need to be 100%? The arguments I see that act like it has to be 100% EVs are basically all anti -EV arguments.

States are mandating no ICE sales by 2035. That is why people are becoming anti-EV. No one would care about EV policy if it wasnt being forced on an insane schedule.

No new car sales, and PHEVs are included which should solve edge cases. That's very different than all cars. Also, most of CA doesn't get cold enough that any of this discussion is relevant.

Re: The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter

#390

Post by [deleted] »

josephcsible wrote: post #224
devb wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not having a 220v outlet in the garage will be like not having a microwave What about the millions of people who live in apartments and rowhouses?

Where do those people park their cars now? Wherever that is, put a charger on a post next to the spot.

[deleted]
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