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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

#71

Post by 5555624 »

brad_Saggy wrote: post #40
chollida1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have a place to charge their cars. There are charging places all over the place, and possibly at their work. They just don't have one at home. That's going to become even more common as not every single parking spot can be turned into a charging space.

That's the funny part I don't understand. We want EVs to become mainstream but all apartment/condo dwellers should magically have a personal charging station.

And there's the assumption that everyone with a house has a place where they can charge an EV. My neighborhood was laid out prior to 1900. (Several houses, including mine, were built in 1900 or earlier.) Many houses don't have a driveway (or a place to build one). The streets are one-way, in order to allow parking on the north side of the street. Many people cannot even park in front of their house.

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

#72

Post by bryanlarsen »

NDizzle wrote: post #70
bryanlarsen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the car was plugged in before I left, then yes to all three. The first is always true for at least a Tesla and you use the nav. A Tesla knows it's cold outside. If you punch a destination into your nav, it'll tell it what percentage will remain when you get there and it's always accurate. The second is true if you charge the car while it's warm. We travelled from Ottawa to Quebec City in the cold, stopping to char…

You had to stop 3 times for a 275 mile drive?!

Yes, my kids can't drive for more than 2 hours without a bathroom break, we never let the battery go below 40% in the winter in case of emergency, and the 3rd one was a charge at the end of the trip (see my answer to the second question).

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

#73

Post by _ea1k »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #69
_ea1k wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of them didn't buy them. There are a lot of Uber/Lyft drivers up there and many use the Hertz Uber rental program ( https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/vehicle-solutions/hertz/tes... ). I'd guess that most of these would use superchargers as their idle lots to top up between rides. I'd guess that this usually works pretty well, but with winter and a higher than normal number of broken chargers, those became more c…

From what I heard, a lot of those chargers weren't broken. What happened in Chicago was that Tesla drivers plugged in, and the car didn't immediately start charging because it had to warm the battery first. So they did the universal signal for a broken charger and left the cord dangling rather than hooking it. It then froze. IIRC on a Tesla the car screen displays that it's warming the battery, but the app on the pho…

I've heard of a lot of that happening too. Tesla nav was also reporting a decent number of stalls out of order, so there were some outages as well.

TBH, it sounds like a lot of things going wrong (or even just weird) at once. In every report that I saw, there were at least some cars sitting unplugged in front of stalls with noone in them. Even if those were broken, when they get fixed they might need to tow cars to make them usable again!

You are definitely right though. Someone with a cold soaked battery could easily think the charger isn't supplying current, when it is really just running the battery heater for 30+ minutes first.

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

#74

Post by 1970-01-01 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #8

Yes, because combustion engines are also great at starting in freezing temperatures. If you manage to get it going, it's fine after a few minutes. But the cold start is a pain.

Motor oil does not provide lubricity until it starts flowing into the engine. One of the worst things you can do to an ICE is consistently start it at negative temperatures.

https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/37320/is-it-tr...

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

#75

Post by itishappy »

samstave wrote: post #53
mminer237 wrote: post #11

It seems like electric cars necessitate garages. Basically all these problems seem to be caused by people leaving them outside unplugged overnight, which I don't know how they deal with during the summer even. I can't imagine driving a car I have to stop for an hour to publicly charge every week. I guess it would be fine if you could charge it on the street or whatever, but you would still be using a lot of power jus…

I wish charging stations were a bus along the row of spaces with arms that rise up from the center of a parking spot to couple with the charging port of a car on the underside. Then, if its not a EV - the arm just stays down and the spot is just a flat regular spot. If that makes sense.

As nice as that sounds, I don't think using expensive and high demand charging slots as dumb storage spaces makes much sense at the moment. At least until they're a lot more common.

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

#76

Post by tw04 »

natch wrote: post #55
brad_Saggy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the funny part I don't understand. We want EVs to become mainstream but all apartment/condo dwellers should magically have a personal charging station.

Or an electrical outlet within reach. “Charging station” makes it sound inordinately expensive. An outlet is all they need and is already hard enough that there’s no need to make it sound harder than it is.

That's not exactly accurate. Pick a car - say a Mustang Mach-e: a standard 15A outlet is going to charge at 4miles/hr. Say you get home a 6pm, never go anywhere, and leave it plugged in overnight - that's 48 miles of range. If you're talking dead of winter in Chicago in negative temps, assume half that.

Long story short: a 15A outlet really isn't going to get the job done for charging a car. Also you cannot just charge off a 15A outlet, you're going to need to run an extension cord within 15ft of the car give or take and plug in your charger there (you can't just plug a NEMA 5-15 plug into an EV).

That charger >> extension cord connection is going to need to be weatherproofed somehow. And oh, by the way, if you're in a big city good luck not getting your $500 charger stolen since there's probably no good way to secure it.

So yes, they are going to need an EV charger.

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

#77

Post by mikestew »

natch wrote: post #52
boh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only place where they provide specific examples of how things are "largely sorted" is Norway and they themselves admit: > the majority of people in Norway live in houses, not apartments, and nearly 90 percent of electric vehicle owners have their own charging stations at home, he said.

This last quote just showcases a few people’s ignorance (at a minimum the author, the editor, and the person being quoted) of the fact that nobody needs a “charging station” at home. All you need is an outlet and a charging cable.

I have to assume you either don’t drive much, or don’t actually own an electric car. Those are the only explanations I have for making such an inaccurate (I hesitate to quote the word “ignorant“) statement.

—

Owner of an EV that would take days to charge on 120V

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

#78

Post by _ea1k »

incomingpain wrote: post #31

I find myself a bit of an outcast in my social groups. My conservative friends dislike EVs, but I very much love them and will be buying an EV next. I'm holding out for a solid state battery generation. When it's -40c and you're running the video security systems. It only drains about 1% a day. Yes you have less range, but so does gasoline. About the same amount of loss. Turning it on... harder for gasoline. Better p…

> When it's -40c and you're running the video security systems. It only drains about 1% a day.

At least with Tesla, it isn't this good. Running sentry mode will cost a lot more than 1% a day. Best to leave it off if the car will be sitting at the airport for days, for example.

Otherwise, I agree. EVs in the winter work great for many (but, of course not all) use cases.

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

#79

Post by 015a »

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%. 30F+, you won't notice drain. That's manageable.

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 trim every time you open the door (unless, maybe, you kept a blowtorch around to deice the window?)

A friend with a Mach-E (long range) took a ~140 mile trip the other day. Left with 90% charge; made it to the destination with 4 miles of range left. -15F outside. IIRC that car should have something like 280 mile range. It might not have been as close if she could have stopped at the one non-Tesla DCFC (Electrify America) between the two places, but none of the stalls were functional. Just a horrible situation all around. You can't rely on Ford, Electrify America, anyone; you're sold a car on promises that did not materialize, and of the few people I know who purchased non-Tesla EVs, all of them are buying Teslas next.

That being said, I think its a grass-is-greener situation, and while Teslas are better in almost every way, we're talking about very core aspects of the technology shared between brands. Nothing has put me more in the "BEVs are a fad" camp than owning a BEV. This isn't the next generation of propulsion. At minimum, the sector needs: double the raw battery capacity standard; triple the roadside charging speed (~500kw) standard; including when its cold (supercharger @~0F won't go above 60kw; that's ~90m 20%-80%); ~20x (yes, twenty times, maybe more) the number of roadside DCFCs; and regulate/litigate the hell out of these DCFC networks who take federal clean energy funding (EA was founded by VW as part of their emissions scandal restitutions. They do not deserve even a drop of free market capitalism.)

None of that feels likely to happen at costs comparable to ICE, even with considerable technology advancements. Which is why I tend to feel that by 2035 we'll look back on BEVs as a weird little fad in automobile history; interesting for fleet vehicles and warn climate metropolitans, but a really poor choice for the rest of the country.

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

#80

Post by seanmcdirmid »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #34

Let's put things in perspective. In Calgary, and many other cold cities, every apartment's outdoor parking lot has outlets where you plug in your ICE's block heater and battery blanket. Without them, you probably won't start your car this morning. When I lived in Calgary, I sometimes had to spray a can of ether into the carburetor to get my car started.

Fairbanks in Alaska is the same. In Siberia they have huge car gloves that you can envelop your car in, also since they don’t have a lot of outlets you just leave your car running.
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