That is interesting to see the difference the manufacturers bake into their battery designs as far as software control goes. Tesla seems to quite tightly control pack charge and discharge through their bms, and limit things in software rather than hitting chemical limits of the batteries like some other manufacturers seem to be allowing.
I don’t think many people are driving around in winter with a 30 degree cabin temp. IME meat bags get priority at all times except while supercharging, when the temp can go pretty wild while it focuses on the battery.
I drive a Renault Zoe which has a heat pump and air-cooled batteries, and I can tell you that the Renault engineers were very protective of the battery. I've never had a problem with the cabin temperature, but it's clear that the HVAC system is sized and optimised for the batteries. For example, when charging cold batteries, the blower revs up much higher than it would ever go for the cabin.
Looking back into the source article some of the more better performers do actually have heat pumps. It seems one of the mistakes is that some of them do not start heating the batter in advance, while others spendnpower to keep it warm while plugged in.
It's not a chemical thing, it's just temperatures. Cold batteries have lower cell voltage, so the current available drops into the non-linear ("off") range at a lower state of discharge than a hot battery. The energy is still there[1], you just can't get it out without warming it up.
Teslas[2] (and a handful of other models) have heat pumps to warm the batteries. It's as simple as that. The same system is integrated with navigation too, because even on warm days unused/empty cells will be colder, and you want those to be warm when you reach the supercharger.
[1] Which is to say this isn't strictly a change in "range", if you can drive somewhere warm you can keep going to the rated distance.
[2] Ones built over the last three years anyway -- older ones didn't have this. I think Y's and all but the oldest 3's have heat pumps, but older S/X models might not. Something to be aware of when buying on the used market.
You are absolutely correct that temperature has those effects...but that doesn't change the fact that the underlying reaction inside the batteries is a chemical in nature. That chemical reaction inside the batteries is what gets slowed down as the temperature drops.
Hitting the chemical limits of the batteries is what causes 1/ rapid aging and 2/ catastrophic cell damage and/or short failure and runaway, so if what you say is true (I don’t think it is) then the other manufacturers have implemented poor state of function control (SOF) and it would be a good idea to avoid.
Proper SOF control is loosely required for ECE R100 which most manufacturers would have, but OTOH I am convinced that it’s possible to fudge that certification.
This is right after some Electrify America co-produced/co-designed stations didn't work in the cold, with his hypothesis being the voltage leak detection system within the charger breaking and thus not allowing current to flow: https://youtu.be/fq0RAjJ1PKQ
TL;DR: This article is only about vehicle range WRT temp, not all EVs are created equal WRT range impact of cold temps. Tesla seems to be best, and Ford seems to be worst.
I think it's largely a battery management system problem, may also be pack quality. I've always felt like part of Tesla's lead in EVs has allowed them to develop some "special sauce" in the form of battery management.
Other manufacturers that have just started may be playing significant catch-up to Tesla's lead.
GM (Chevy) actually excellently engineered packs for cold weather. But what you might be seeing here is in fact the result of their attention to battery longevity. The packs in the Volt & Bolt have a lot of systems set up to maintain temperatures optimal for battery lifespan (in both cold and hot weather); one of the things that distinguishes them from the lackadaisical engineering in e.g. a Nissan Leaf.
Lessened range may have more to do with the system spending energy to keep the battery at optimal temperature.
Contrary to what others are saying here, Tesla had no "head start" or lead. The Volt came out the same year as the Model S (2011/2012) and the battery pack in there (LGChem + GM) is extremely well engineered.
(In general GM is far more cautious about many aspects of battery life than others. One of the reasons the Bolt has weaker/slower fast charging. They also have tended to focus on a lower segment of the market than others, too. Comparing a luxury vehicle Tesla against a Chevy Bolt is not exactly apples to apples)
And because of this cautious design, shouldn't used car consumers be able to better trust used Volts and Bolt E(U)Vs to have withstood their mileage and calendar years with hopefully less degradation?
Seems that the underlying study that included the Bolt was from Feb. 2019 (the AAA study cited), so their battery recall/fix and newer software may have helped.
Another couple of red flag in the AXIOS article was: "AAA found the loss in driving range could be as high as 41% with the heater on full blast." Hmmm, even with the recent Siberean cold air mass blast here in Colorado, I don't need the heater on full in my ICE cars with outside temps of -5F. Also, the recurrent.com study show some of the vehicles ratings based on verified range versus estimated range - why? Perhaps it's accurate, but mixed methodologies in the same study.
Range impact of cold weather does seem to be a real thing, I can't speak personally because I own a Tesla which has some of the lowest impact.
Another thing to keep in mind is: Charging speeds of cold temps. While the Tesla seems to do great at range, charging at cold temps is not great. When it's below freezing, home charging can be tough to impossible. A few days ago (when it was merely "cold", before the huge cold snap hit us), I drove the car and then parked it to charge for the night. It charged at a rate of 1 mile per hour. Usually it'll hit 30-40. I have it set to start charging at midnight, which meant that the battery cooled down after driving for ~6 hours, before it started charging. I could have started charging as soon as I got home, but then I'm in the 3x higher electricity pricing... I could bump that up to 9 or 10pm to help.
This also impacts road trips. If you are traveling in freezing temps, definitely charge before checking into a hotel (unless the hotel has a charger, which is fairly rare), rather than in the morning. Instead of 30m charge time, it can take 60-120 minutes to charge at a Supercharge.
As long as you have 30+ amps of 240v, you are fine charging in winter. It will spend 5-15 minutes warning the pack (and show only a little charge rate) and then kick into your full charge rate.
The only time you are screwed is in like 15-20 amp 120V, it takes nearly all the power to keep the battery warm so almost nothing left to charge. If it weren’t for winter I likely would have kept only a 120 in my garage as that is plenty for summer charging at home.
Same was true (symmetrically more it less) at summer temps north of Phoenix: all the power went to cool the battery leaving nearly uselessly slow recharge times.
These are all excellent points. If you navigate to a supercharger or a compatible fast dc charger in a Tesla, the vehicle will heat the battery pack appropriately for faster charging (based on max current capability at the charger). High level, this is a call for ubiquitous level 2 charging everywhere (and intelligent battery pack management when fast charging is available), with enough power to both charge the vehicle and keep the pack warm. We’re at the same stage with EVs as combustion vehicles were where you had to buy a can of petrol to fill it up, and gas stations weren’t ubiquitous. Make Charging Infra Ubiquitous.
Of course, within certain latitudes, more robust infrastructure is less necessary (the closer you get to the equator). Texas, Florida, and California have most of the US population and will rarely see these conditions (US centric).
No, it’s because they tend to pull energy from the charger to warm the battery. They’re also often parked indoors. And if you buy one in a cold climate, you’ll often be getting a winter package which includes a heat pump, reducing energy needed for heating the cabin and the battery by a factor of 2 to 3.
It’s strange that people’s experiences are so varied with EVs in cold weather. Here it’s 14F right now and my Model Y is charging at 30 mph (versus 32 mph in warm weather). Driving 120 miles this morning at 11F used maybe 10% more energy than normal. The doors, though, we’re quite sticky and frustrating to open.
How long did the battery sit in 14F after driving 120 miles? If I charge right after a 120 mile trip, that'd be fine. Also, are you saying the car is in 14F, or it is 14F outside and your car is in the garage? My car is outside (I use my garage as a shop).
I park outside. My garage is also a shop. I guess that I didn’t let the car soak in the cold snap, last week; I usually plug it in when I get home, since this is more convenient for me.
That being said I’ve not noticed charging issues with my Model 3, this is my 3rd winter, last week we regularly had -7 C in the night. Does seem to be a lot of variability
> When it's below freezing, home charging can be tough to impossible.
Don't mix up "home charging" with "level 1 charging". A lot of EV owners will get a NEMA 14-50 receptacle to level 2 charge, and then there's no problem at all charging while below freezing.
I live just outside of Boulder Colorado. We just had a polar vortex like a huge chunk of the country did intents were 14 below zero fahrenheit.
My Tesla model 3 actually does very well although of course there is a range reduction. This is one of the areas where Tesla shines compared to other auto manufacturers because they have always viewed themselves as a battery company first. There's not really much you can do to beat years and years of data on BMS and various battery conditions. Tesla's are collecting and transmitting data on current temperature state of the battery etc all the time.
Things like fit and finish of body panels are something that the other manufacturers have decades of experience with in Tesla doesn't. But on batteries we are now talking about 10 years of data Tesla has that they don't. And the culture in the Detroit Auto industry isn't exactly a good one when it comes to promoting competent engineering management.
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 charging a lot quicker and getting a lot more range.
Either someone is going to have to come up with an ingenious solution or electric vehicles are going to be of limited use in cold weather locations where space is not abundant enough for garages (quite a lot of European cities). Infrared heating seems quite efficient, maybe the solution lies there.
Based on the article, that Tesla is looking pretty impressive though!
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 any drop there due to slower chemistry is somewhat offset by less thermal down-ramping since everything is cold.
What we need most of all is more fast chargers between cities. There are enough in California and several other coastal states but nowhere near enough between cities in the US interior.
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?
> 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.
The entire series of Long Way Up felt like it was filmed maybe ~5 years too early. So many of the issues were caused by the bikes just being prototypes.
Also the solution is easy - when the car is plugged in, just heat the battery so it charges at optimal rate and is ready for your journey. Some cars already do this(the new BMW i4 and I guess the iX too)
> The entire series of Long Way Up felt like it was filmed maybe ~5 years too early. So many of the issues were caused by the bikes just being prototypes.
That was kind of the point though: they wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible. There's a good quote attributed to Leonard Bernstein:
> To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.
I feel like the project pushed Harley Davidson and Rivian to achieve something a lot quicker than they would have done otherwise. I hope they do another one in a few years though to see how far the technology has come along, although they've covered quite a lot of the world now so I'm not sure what route they'd choose exactly. NZ -> Aus -> SE Asia -> India -> Stans -> Turkey -> Europe would be my guess.
I remember they said a team from Rivian went ahead and installed chargers in several places along the route. And still they had a huge case of range anxiety. Instead of focusing on places and people they were harping about batteries, recharging, messing the schedule bc of that and so on. Frankly, it was a huge fail, especially compared to their previous trip through Siberia.
I 100% agree. Compared to the long way down and long way round it focused way way too much on technical issues and range anxiety, instead of the locations and people like the other two series.
Anecdotally last winter, had a Model Y up in maine for a trip home. I arrived at a backwoods house with ~60 miles left. It was around 10 farenheit the next day when I hooked up a 110 volt line to the car. Over the next 30 minutes the mileage dropped to 55 as it took more energy to heat the battery than the line could deliver.
I unhooked it and planned to drive 20 miles to the nearest charger, but after 1 mile of travel, it had dropped to 40 miles left. I turned around and drove back, now with ~20 miles left.
I parked the car in an unheated garage and plugged it back in, praying that the car would heat the garage to the point it could start charging. Maybe 2-3 hours later it started to take a charge, and 3 days later it was up to 150 miles, and I drove it to a super charger.
I realized after that, if I ever moved back to Maine and wanted a tesla I
- would need a heated garage
- I could never expect to leave my car overnight at a friends / trip during the winter.
OP should have gone by percentage of battery left, and just left the car plugged in.
Not plugging in when arriving and letting the battery freeze (cold soak) overnight, unplugging after 30 minutes of 1.5kW level 1 charging and basing his entire decisions on what the car's guess-o-meter says for remaining milage is pretty crazy IMO.
Seems like OP chose to do the worst thing possible at each juncture to ensure a bad charging experience.
It is normal for cars to use 2 or 3 kilowatts (an hour or two of charging) heating the battery up to temperature in freezing conditions, but once the pack is up to temperature it charges close to normal speed.
People have extremely high expectations of range estimates. These displays are known as Guess-O-Meters for good reason, they only account for past weather, driving conditions and style.
Perhaps that used to be a problem. The range estimates for gasoline cars that I've owned and rented in the past few years have been accurate to within a few percent, even in cold weather.
On my car (2013 mini) the range prediction is actually a more accurate indicator of how much fuel is in the tank than the (separate) fuel tank meter. Not sure why, you’d think they’d use the same input data for both, but it’s true.
By giving you a less precise fuel tank indicator (eg: 8 segment fuel display) versus xxx Miles of Range, your cajoled into trusting the estimator, and the range being so high on gas cars usually allows the estimator to end up closer to accurate thanks to bad and good economy driving and conditions averaging out.
I am all for EV, but if besides needing to take care that I plug my phone and my watch every night I must also not forget to plug in the car and if I forget, I must apologize at work for not coming in, or my kids cannot go to school... just because it easily can get to -15°C here... then it feels like a technology issue and not like me doing the worse thing possible...
If you plug in every night and miss a night you can almost certainly make it to work the next day, unless your a supercommuter with an older EV that had a small 24kWh pack.
But that's a thing you learn. Just like you learn to check your oil level before starting in a conventional vehicle. Everything has its own set of things you have to know
I’d estimate I have driven cars 10,000 times and I have never done that. Just take it to a mechanic every 5k miles. And nothing that touches the oil has ever gone wrong.
Regular EV user here - plugging it in is something you do every time you park, the way you lock your doors. It takes five seconds. Press the «open charge port» button on the charging cable and stick it in the charging socket. Done.
I’m cracking up that you’re making this sound so simple and matter of fact, but reading this description of how one is “supposed” to charge their EV makes me realize i’m many years from wanting one.
Honestly, it’s kind of a joke how badly people want to defend the tech despite its current shortcomings.
Not sure why "supposed" is in quotes here. You're "supposed" to fill your car with gas by waiting til you come across a gas station, driving in, parking at a pump, getting out, pressing the button to open the gas tank, plugging in the hose, pumping gas for as long as it takes to fill the tank to the desired level, paying, and so on.
Compared to plugging in an EV at night and forgetting about it and this being sufficient for 99 percent of my driving needs, getting gas sounds like it has vastly more shortcomings and that's before you look at any of the other crappy things about it.
When she got home late the last thing she wanted to do was to spend an extra 10-15 minutes or so filling up. Which frequently led to a panic the following day when she'd forgotten. She even ran out of gas a couple of times when she was really stressed the following day.
She much prefers the EV since it's always full. When she gets home it takes literally less than 10 seconds to plug it in. Next day it takes literally less than 10 seconds to unplug, and she never has to think about filling up for the rest of the day.
Filling gas and changing oil is also pretty inconvenient, it’s just habit that makes you discount it. A good EV is more convenient for everyday use. Cheaper too.
If the "guess-o-meter" is so bad that it leads reasonable people to wildly wrong conclusions, I'm hesitant to blame that on the user.
If all the factors you described are understood by humans, why aren't they factored into the display algorithm? If the car is going to drain battery for an hour getting warm before it can start to charge, then say that on the display.
But it could make a better guess than it does, or even leave the numerical guess untouched but give the driver other useful information. Specifically, the information you gave in your first comment.
Teslas have great big dashboard screens. There was no need to leave OP thinking that the car was unchargable unless it was brought into a warm place.
The guess-o-meter doesn't reflect the actual state of the battery, but rather what it has seen in the recent past, hence OP should toggle to battery percentage and trust that instead of a known inaccurate estimator.
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 expensive. That 2035 deadline is never not going to be pushed back unless the EV industry pulls a rabbit out of a hat.
With the difference that the dryer connections are usually installed when the house is built so there's easy access to run the wires to and from the breaker box. Installing them afterwards is more expensive and complicated to do because of the limited access.
It's also not something you can expect to find anywhere other than at another EV owner's place. Admittedly over time that will become less of an issue but for now it's going to be pretty rare.
No for existing construction they will be more complex because the walls are all closed in so routing the 220V cable to the outside or garage is more difficult. Electrical is done before the walls are finished for a reason...
Maybe not if you're lucky and the existing dryer connection is already in your garage but it's not going to be that simple for most people. Again dryer connections get installed at build time and have for the last couple decades so most people already have them.
I'm an opponent of EV, but bring a cable from power input to garage is really not a big problem. Done that for many things over the last 20 years, including network cabling for internet access.
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.
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?
Here in the Pacific Northwest, driving both last winter in BC and currently in the mix of snow, freezing rain and slush. I'm using the same three peaks rated all season tires as I was using in the summer, and driving the same routes as well.
No, just driving on the motorway, at a solid 140km/h. Did the exact same drive in winter and in the summer just this year and that was the difference in consumption(I want to add that I can see the difference in daily use too, but I just happened to do the exact same 700km drive where the only different factor was the season of the year, so it gave me a very good reference point for specific numbers).
It's even worse for city drivers doing short trips. The engine doesn't have time to heat up properly before you reached your goal. Fuel efficiency is abysmal and the exhaust treatment systems barely work.
Cold air is denser. Pushing it out of the way saps more energy and drops the effective work done. You're oblivious to it because a motor vehicle has so much available power on tap. It is very noticeable on a bicycle at high speeds.
Conversely. Sailboats get more efficient in cold temperatures because more energy is imparted on the sail.
> It is very noticeable on a bicycle at high speeds
Huh? I've been cycling for 15 years, many of those years doing 15k km a year, all year round. Mountain biking on mountains at -15C, down to urban cycling in 38-40C scorching summer heat. I've never noticed speed, effort, stamina changing with temperature as you suggest.
And I've done lots of road cycling at constant 35-40km/h, descents of up to 70+km/h.
I am not really contradicting you here. Just want clarification from GP. My reaction was Huh? As well.
With N=15 years of gps data and 40-70 of those days per year below zero very few below -10°C. I can say that I ride slower on cold days on avarage.
I am not fit and do not track that at all. I can barely keep my avarage above 25km/h in city traffic for 15km, very few conflict points maybe twenty but not comparable to road cycling. So a km/h decrease of avarage speed during winter is common but not a given. I do not count bad road conditions, but Stockholm has really good maintanance during winter, ice free asphalt all year.
I definitely ride slower in winter too but I always assumed that was due to my body having a harder time in the cold rather than air density changes.
That seems to be born out by using better (read more expensive) winter riding gear. I naturally run a bit cold so spending on low temperature tights, base layer and jersey/jacket has made a massive difference for me.
Interesting! I’m also a long time high volume cyclist, and I see a clear effect of slower rides in winter. I’m talking about around specific routes and training sessions where the point is to go as fast as possible. With the same power I seem to go more slowly when it’s cold.
Obviously there could be many reasons for this: less aerodynamic clothing, more cautious cornering etc etc, but the effect is very noticeable to me.
And if you don't pump up your tires to compensate, the lower pressure from cold temps will increase your rolling resistance. Not a 40% drop but enough to notice if you're tracking mpg.
>Cold air is denser. Pushing it out of the way saps more energy
ICE mpg tends to drop in cold weather, but this isn’t why. It’s usually because it takes longer to reach optimal operating temp or due to changes in fuel composition. Cold air can produce more drag but that problem exists irrespective of ICE or EV.
The pumping efficiency is unaffected as any losses on the exhaust side will be offset by increased pressure on the intake side.
Hmm, I wonder if the increased resistance is overcome by the fact that ICEs can put out more power with colder denser oxygen rich air.
This is why performance cars sport cold air intakes. This is also why your car won’t hit its quoted 0-60 time in a warmer environment — those tests are normally performed or normalized to cold air conditions + 0% humidity. Just what counts as cold depends on manufacturer / reviewer.
Anecdotally, I track efficiency and drive consistent routes, and don’t notice a diff.
I wonder if the increased resistance is overcome by the fact that ICEs can put out more power with colder denser oxygen rich air.
Not likely, as an increase in air is going to be accompanied by a corresponding increase in fuel. Unless your fuel mapping is all messed up, it will give you more power, but not likely better fuel economy.
In drag force, yes, but in this case, you are taking the 3% penalty and aren't getting the partially offsetting 1.7% increase in distance per unit time that 60 gives you over 59.
Note that it's 3% per 10°C delta so, for a 40°C swing (say 30°C/86°F summer to -10°C/14°F winter), that's a 12% difference in aero drag force.
At -10°C/14°F, with no other adjustments, in the hands of a test pilot, that aircraft will have a ground roll of around 1000' and clear a 50' obstacle and come to a stop in around 1500'.
At 30°C/86°F, with no other adjustments, in the hands of a test pilot, that aircraft will have a ground roll of around 1150' and clear a 50' obstacle and come to a stop in around 1750'.
Flying in and out of 2000'-2500' strips with trees, it's impossible to not notice the performance difference with temperature. Perhaps the pilots who can't notice those differences don't fly into anything other than very long runways, but I don't think very many pilots miss the differences.
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.
Got it. So just make sure your vehicle is constantly consuming energy and you'll never have an issue... unless the power is out for an extended period of time.
Driving with an iced over window impairing visibility is illegal in most places, you have to address this with defrosting and perhaps scraping before moving the vehicle.
Idling combustion vehicles is bad, but sometimes it's a necessary evil to ensure visibility so the driver can avoid harming other road users.
Letting the car consume a small amount of constant electricity to keep the battery above freezing is thankfully not very expensive compared to a standard space heater (usually 1.5kW at 720 hours a month, costing $150 a month in Seattle).
Defrosting and toasting the cabin to 92F in freezing conditions usually burns about 1.2kWh to 3kWh while plugged in, but that is just a few tens of cents (or free depending on the charger) to get nearly instantly toasty and ready to drive.
No, I was trying to convey that it costs significantly less than keeping a space heater running 24/7 (which would cost about $150 a month at 14 cents per kilowatt hour).
$10 to $30 a month in power use to keep your battery toasty in the dead of winter isn't too bad a price IMO
Want to see how quickly the petrol supply line breaks down in an emergency? We had severe shortages for a month after an earthquake. People hoarding fuel contributed significantly, at least you can't hoard electricity.
Also, electricity supply isn't prone to supply shocks when Russia invades Ukraine, or the Saudis want to flex their muscles.
Large SUVs with overcooked engines to meet emissions requirements (lower PM2.5 emissions at the cost of slightly worse fuel economy) get bad mileage.
Having all wheel drive or 4 wheel drive, high ground clearance, a poor aerodynamic design (driving 70mph or 80mph sounds bad in many of these cars) also hurts efficiency.
Well yes, but watching American car reviews(as European) leaves me puzzled - reviewers often describing 3.0L V6, 200bhp engine as small and low power, and discussing if it's not dangerous to merge on the highway with it, while over here you get a 1.0L 110bhp engine in a large family SUV and it isn't even brought up as an issue. In my last car the base option was 90bhp, and the "high performance" model was 160bhp. I guess in US that would be described as a horse cart. That's despite the fact that even the 90bhp model had no issue keeping up with 80mph traffic.
Something must be wrong with your vehicle. I've tracked every tank of fuel I've put in either of my vehicles, and the efficiency does drop in the winter, but nowhere near that amount.
I actually just looked at my economy graph, and I can't tell how much winter affects it. The variance is less than the variance of my driving habits. So less than 20%.
Charging EVs is easy and simple if you just plug in when arriving at a location.
Doesn't matter whether it's Level 1 charging at 1.5kW (120v) or Level 2 at 6.8kW, or if it's -11F out, just plug it in and give it time to charge.
Leaving your car unplugged in a frigid environment will cold soak the pack and cause your pack to spend an hour or two worth of energy heating up to temp on Level 1 charging, or 10 to 15 minutes on Level 2 charging. This is normal and you just need to leave the car plugged in.
With an ICE car your heating generally takes minutes to heat up, versus I can have my car ready in a minute or two with just turning on the heat to melt off the quarter inch of ice build up on my windshield and windows.
All things have defined limits; Your gasoline will stop working at like -40 F. And while ICE vehicles have reliable mileage in the winter, they are absolutely prone to issues related to extreme weather. Also, I'm curious where you get the 30 requirements from, since for the most part it's basically just having an outlet installed. Not everyone can do that, sure. Not everyone can ride a bike to work, either. What's the point of this flippant crap?
Yeah, the biggest thing EV proponents seem to miss is that you don't need to force it to be 100% for everyone. Confine any mandates to urban centers where it makes sense, you can get buy in from everyone and solve 95% of the problem. At that point there will be lower hanging fruits than the last 5% or w/e.
You think it's the proponents 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.
Costs. Complexity. You have a large battery, a gasoline engine with a transmission and 2+ electric engines in a PHEV. And they all need maintenance in the long run.
This will be hopefully mitigated when all PHEVs only run the gas engine as a generator and get rid of the transmission, but I don't think we're there yet.
> This will be hopefully mitigated when all PHEVs only run the gas engine as a generator and get rid of the transmission, but I don't think we're there yet.
If it's cheaper then they'll do it.
More generally, you can remove a chunk of the transmission in a hybrid and use a simpler engine even if it's not a generator. The complexity isn't a big deal. And the moderate cost gets offset by significant fuel savings.
Do you just assume all EVs lose massive amounts of battery state of charge while unplugged? There's a reason Tesla vehicles lose battery while parked and unplugged; they have cameras and other computer systems continuing to run, sapping power.
On the other hand, I have driven a 2018 Bolt EV for 4 years, 48k miles, and never once had an issue with the car being unplugged and returning to a car with less range than I left it.
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.
Why is it that when it comes to transportation the discussion is always talking past each other?
"Trucks don't belong in cities for personal transportation."
"I need a truck for my farm."
"Vehicle transportation is a huge chunk of global warming contributing fuel consumption, so we need to reduce car usage in cities towards more and better public transport, and EVs when possible."
"I don't live in a city and the bus only comes twice every day and I have to drive 30 miles to work."
These are not mutually exclusive statements!
EVs aren't great for long distance transportation. Particularly ill suited for long haul trucking in winter. But that's not what most people do. Most vehicles drive short distances in fair weather. Many American families have more than one car. That second car doesn't need to be able to drive cross country in the winter. I don't complain that my sneakers are not snow shoes so they are useless to me and anyone else. No one is talking about making ICE vehicles illegal. At most there might be restrictions on usage in cities, no different to how some european cities keep private cars outside of historical city centers.
Which doesn't make them illegal to own, just impossible to register new ones. And that's ok, especially since all major car makers are in on it.
Diesel cars are an issue due to dust emissions. Most modern, read Euro 6 temp, and above, engines should be more or less fine. How the latter will be controlled and enforced so, excluding older cars from certain places, is trickey.
I have to point out so, this will be a social issue. Well off people will most switch to EVs, one of the reasons I guess why VW and others are diverting marketing budgets from EVs (read Diesel) to EVs. Those that cannot afford EVs will face issues, since it either used petrol cars, with higher consumption, or used diesels, with issues going to some places due to emissions.
I heard stories about Russians in the red army setting a pan of fuel on fire under the engine block of their trucks to warm them up sufficiently to turn over and start.
Apparently some truck models over there have a built-in metal tray for this purpose.
A long time ago, in a land far far away, I drop a fire engine. Big monster, 37 tons, with a giant v16 Rolls Royce diesel moter.
It didn't like starting in the cold, and it didn't have battery enough to crank it for long. And failure-to-start was, um, not good.
The solution was a built-in electric heater and charger. Basically it was permanently plugged in so the battery was 100%,and the engine block was "not freezing cold" (I wouldn't go as far as "warm").
Had a push button start that fired up instantly, at the cost of an extra 3 seconds unplugging it it an emergency.
My point I guess is that you don't really have to heat the garage, you just need to warm the battery up a little.
you can buy heaters that you stick into your engine where the dipstick goes for checking the oil. plug em in overnight. I'm not sure at what temperature you would also need to heat the battery; maybe the residual heat is generally enough, but the warmed engine will crank a lot easier so less strain on the battery that way.
How many people in the US do really not have 220V in the garage? I bet a lot of homes have either a sub-panel (and thus could add 220V very easily) or a laundry (dryer socket, 220V).
My guess is that older homes in the northeast will have an issue not with adding the outlet but upgrading from 100amp to 200amp service. I was quoted $10k for that upgrade. I had to decide between getting an EV and getting a heat pump. Decided on the heat pump, which I’m very happy with — it’s saving me thousands on heating oil.
Can confirm. I have an 1898 house in the Northeast. Just upgraded from 100A service to 200A service for $3900. I didn’t own the house at the time, but I believe it went from 40A to 100A in 1985.
I don’t right now in my detached garage (though I buried conduits during recent landscaping to permit me to pull them later). Right now, I have a 120V, 15A circuit out there that powers everything.
Regardless, my cheap LEAF turned 8 just a bit ago and I’ve driven it in New England year-round for 8 years without issue, even with only level 1 charging at home. It’s fine for an around-town daily driver (which is what the LEAF is well-matched to).
Probably $500-1000 if you hire an electrician. I did it myself fairly easily (largest cost is the copper wire if it's not a short run; GFCI breaker can also add a little cost if you have to have one - it's code in some states)
Many states or municipalities require conduit for >=110V. Some require licensed electricians to perform all work, along with permits and building inspector approvals. Yes, even for pulling a new circuit from an existing panel.
I'm in Canada in a house built in 2012. Attached garage - my living room is above it.
The breaker panel is in the garage so it'd be easy to add, but my only 220V devices, the dryer and stove (along with their outlets), are inside the house.
I've never heard of a dryer in the garage before. It isn't heated, and in winter months, it's cold enough that snow doesn't melt. Would that have an effect on drying my clothes?
They'd probably still dry, it just may take more energy, depending on your dryer.
Funny enough my internal dryer can cause my clothes to be damp, as the exhaust runs to the attic instead of directly outside, and the moisture can come back into the dryer. (can be overcome by installing an active exhaust fan)
you can dry clothing by hanging it on a line outside in winter, the vapor pressure of ice is a positive number. So, yes, your dryer will work in the garage.
New house built this year. No 220V in the garage (utility room is inside the house - I used to connect my charger there and run it to garage). However, I was able to easily add 220V, even as a first time DIYer.
I dont have 220 in the garage. Of course 220 is coming into the panel but there is no circuit breaker, wiring or outlet. In my experience this is common. 220 is only provided for washers, stoves, and HVAC. Can a 220 outlet be added, certainly, but it is not default.
the 220 circuit to your dryer and the 220 circuit to your electric stove do not have the capacity to add more items to the wiring (the stove is a much higher capacity circuit btw). Yes, it's true that you wouldn't need to use your car charger while you use your appliances, but that's not how residential building code circuits work. I suppose there must be or at least could be a solution to switch the power over? But you can't just go plugging it in and remain within code.
my brother does a lot of stuff with power tools, and whenever he moves he has to have extra lines brought in by the power company. While houses frequently have 220 coming in, they don't have 3-phase.
Land lines are 400 V 3 phase in Germany, as you need those for the elecrric ovens and that is what utilities deliver. Standard plugs and wiring are 240 V. So every garage would at least have 240 V, if there is a plug, and 400 V can be installed.
I'm curious, is 220V (or 230V) more than twice as fast/twice as good as 110V? The discussion here makes it sound like it. All I know is that you'll need higher amperage with lower voltage, but it can compensate proportionally. I guess heat losses and other problems are significant, if it's a problem at 110V?
At the same amperage, it's exactly twice as good, but if you're going to get a 220V outlet installed, you're also going to get a higher amperage circuit installed at the same time, so you can charge at 220V/50A instead of 110V/12A, which is 8x faster.
But you need also the electric company to be able to deliver that power, roughly 10kW, in addition to all your other electric appliances.
Common contracts - at least here (Italy) - are for 3 or 4.5kW, a few are 6 kW, 10 kW or more are rare, and you probably need to get to 15kW to be able to have those 10kW available for charging.
Anything less than 48kw is essentially unheard of in new construction in the US, and even old houses with 24kw service are getting upgraded. Less than 24 is considered essentially unsellable.
Same thing. If your house was built after WW2 it will usually have 200a service if you're all electric, and maybe 150 if your heat is non-electric. Most older houses have also been upgraded at this point too. It's not uncommon for larger houses to have 400a (96kw) service.
> All I know is that you'll need higher amperage with lower voltage, but it can compensate proportionally.
This discussion is assuming that the amperage is the same. The common "default" AC socket in the USA is AFAIK the NEMA 5-15, which is a 15A socket; the common "default" AC socket in other countries is AFAIK usually either 16A, 15A, or 10A, so at most you'd have one extra ampere.
Of course, if you're adding a dedicated socket where you'd expect to plug a car (or other high-power devices like a large air conditioner), you'd put a higher-power socket like a 20A one. But this discussion is, as far as I understand, about what you could find on a random garage; I believe it would be unexpected to not have at least one common "default" AC socket on am enclosed garage, but finding a higher-power AC socket would be less likely.
The battery heater is a fixed overhead, so even at the same amperage (and twice the power), if the weather conditions are such that the heater was taking 80% of the available power on a 15A/110V circuit, it'll only be taking 40% of the available power on a 15A/220V circuit, meaning the charging power is 6 times greater.
I don’t know about US but here in Northern Europe the utility outlets we use for stoves and such are not just higher voltage but also distributed over 3 phases rather than just one. This translates into sqrt(3)=1.7 times more of the cable can be used. For a 3x16A outlet you get 400V x 16A x 1.7 = 10kW.
Compared to a normal 220V 10A outlet where your max is 2kW.
Higher voltage also means you get more power for less current, less heat loss in the cables.
If you have an electric car, the example above should explain why you want to get a proper charger with proper wiring installed. Don’t use the ones which plug straight into a shuko.
> What about the millions of people who live in apartments and rowhouses?
If they have cars, they have a place to park them, and this place can host a charger. Outdoor parking without access controls may have security issues, but that's true without a charging point, too.
And where does the electricity come for those chargers? Huge swaths of the USA are experiencing rolling blackouts right now because there isn't enough electrical capacity.
I hope that doesn't mean I plug in my car at 80%, hoping to top it off for a long trip, but since everyone else is averaging 60% and there's peak demand, it decides to drain the battery and generously put a dollar in my account.
It would most likely be opt-in, as a form of this is already a thing in some place - you can choose to have the power company reduce the power of your cooling/heating during peaks in demand in return for a discount on your power bill.
Try building some generators? Renewable energy is cheap and a perfect match for charging cars, just adjust the charging current to match current generation.
Rolling blackouts are being experienced because the delta between high day usage and low night usage is too great to invest in upgraded peak-capable infrastructure. Charging vehicles at night will actually _improve_ the situation.
Well, if they're smart, they've built their cities in such a way that cars are only something you hire for your vacation, rest of the time, a bike and/or a train pass is sufficient.
It's more the circular reasoning that frustrates me - we built our cities for ICE cars, therefore EVs aren't suitable, because we built our cities for ICE cars.
At least some of those people will continue to rely exclusively on public transportation, the same as they do today. In our urban areas, public transportation + car sharing / rental services make a whole lot more sense than continuing to incentivize everyone to own a car (electric or otherwise)
Just got back from the UK. The neighborhood I was in had charge sockets on every 3rd or 4th parking post. You wouldn't even know they were there if not for the tiny little LED.
In some ways the UK is a view into the future of the US.
But this is not it.
Wealthy neighborhoods in the US are going to get these on the streets eventually. Places where poor folks live don't have the ROI needed to justify it. Wealthier folks tend to be older and have more time on their hands to do things like go complain at city council meetings.
You're going to get these chargers in the richest neighborhoods first (of course), and eventually to the decent middle class neighborhoods. The poorer areas where blue collar workers live (apartment complexes) will get it approximately never - the city won't invest in those areas because fuck them, and the apartment complexes won't invest in them, because fuck them.
I can confirm as someone who lives in the uk, that is not normal.
There are a significant proportion of residential developments where it wouldn’t even be possible to install such infrastructure due to the legal framework around how the properties are owned and maintained.
Legislative changes are needed here to make this happen, but alas our government has had its mind on “other things” for quite a few years now and doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.
This isn't representative of the UK as a whole though and, likely, never will be. Providing charging points for middle-class homeowners at the expense of basic infrastructure and countless other spending 'priorities' would be considered political suicide in most high-density locations outside of London.
Not everybody has a garage. Cities are full of parked cars in front of residential buildings. It did park my car in a street when I was living in a city.
By 2035 those streets must be refitted with chargers, one per parking slot and somehow replace the energy distributed as gasoline and diesel with electrical energy. If that doesn't happen people will have to leave their car at a charging station for far more time than what it takes to fill a tank with gas. And that doesn't solve the problem of the energy.
Or having a car will get so expensive that only a few people will afford it and that will solve all those problems, but create others.
Cars should be more expensive to cover their externalities but considering that cars spend 95% of the day parked and most people are not driving hundreds of miles per day, it seems likely that the combination of charging points at parking garages and similar structures, homes, streetlights, etc. is going to reach a level where most people can charge more than they need to. In fact, since solar has such massive daylight spikes we probably should be thinking about what we can do to get people to charge their cars at work instead of overnight.
If someone actually believes in democracy, they should try to get politicians to agree with the statement "cars should be more expensive to cover their externalities" on the record. In the US, almost every single one would dodge the question or outright disagree. Even the ones not running for re-election don't want to ruin their and their party's reputation.
Believing in democracy as the least-worst way to set public policy has nothing to do with your own priorities.
I personally think urban development should be more expensive to cover its externalities (i.e. forcing people to buy cars because of landowner-enriching sprawl).
Many (surely the majority of) Americans like and/or are dependent on cars. They are happy to be able to vote to shrug that externality off to the overall population.
When the majority of Americans dislike and/or are unhappy with 100° Thanksgiving, beepocalypse, aging out of being able to drive, or whatever else “cars” wreck, then they will start voting to push the externalities off to heavier users.
Eventually, the resulting ghost sprawl of empty suburban neighborhoods will provide enough recyclable building materials to rehome us all nicely in subterranean hive cities. Our eyes will evolve larger to gather the dim light. Our ears will shrink to muffle the incessant hum. Our useless teeth will disappear after a few centuries of microbial food paste consumption. Clothing will become an affectation.
There’s an entire urbanism movement trying to shift things here, but the focus tends to be on removing the hidden subsidies[1] so costs are more visible and making alternatives better. The entire state of California just made density easier to build, which is really important.
Alternatives are important here since while most Americans drive that doesn’t mean that they love everything about it and won’t consider alternatives. There are a ton of people who would love not to pay thousands of dollars to sit in traffic and make their health worse, but they don’t see a good alternative. The activists getting bike infrastructure, improved buses, and density are giving them that option and climate change is causing a lot of younger people to realize that the timing has to be stepped a lot since even EVs produce more CO2 than any other form of ground transportation.
There’s big generational component here, too. Most drivers aren’t old enough to think of roads without traffic as normal, and economic trends mean that a lot of younger people are faced with even longer commutes in cars, not to mention that transit is more appealing when you have smartphones.
1. In addition ti the obvious one of pollution, housing & retail prices are high due to requirements to provide subsidized parking to drivers. Removing that allows owners to make different decisions.
I don't totally agree with the magnitude of how much more work needs to be done- we don't have one gas pump per ICE car, and electric cars don't need to be charged every day.
It's fair to say that people hogging chargers even when they're done charging is a problem, there's a public charger on my street that is near 100% utilization. However this seems pretty solvable- companies can just charge per minute as long as the spot is occupied and let the free market sort it out.
Adding public chargers is also a great way for places like malls, grocery stores, offices, etc to stay relevant, since my weekly shopping trips would probably be enough to keep a car topped off
>It's fair to say that people hogging chargers even when they're done charging is a problem, there's a public charger on my street that is near 100% utilization.
Makes sense to charge a penalty every minute a charger is connected but not drawing power (full battery).
Does the street already have street lights? If so, then presumably there already is an electrical distribution network running alongside the street. If it was designed with sodium vapor lamps in mind, but has been upgraded to LEDs, then EV charging infrastructure is withing its capabilities.
Yes, the line was designed for 250W sodium vapour lamps, you replace them with 60W led lamps AND you use some 20% original overprovision and you can have 250x1.2-60=240W per post.
In a city you’re not likely to be farther than a mile away from a high speed charger. It’s perfectly reasonable for a small city car to “fill up” occasionally to cover the short mileage they’re likely to see between charges anyways.
I don’t have an EV or a car at all, but if I did my charging regimen would be “plug it in at the fast charger at the grocery store and charge it while I shop”. It’s just not a big deal.
We certainly don’t need to make our residential streets more ugly than having a bunch of cars parked on it already does by stringing up charging infrastructure all over it.
In Finland we have 220v outlets at every parking spot, since the batteries of ICEs just die during the -20C winter nights without being hooked up.
We all charge our EVs on those same outlets, and I never heard of anybody not having a full charge the next morning.
The main reason why we have so many EVs here -> they are more reliable in the cold. People stopped freezing to death in their Diesels that got stranded on the roadside.
In 2035 I will most likely be living in the same home I am now, and putting a 220v outlet in my garage is a lot more expensive than buying a microwave.
I suspect it will get cheaper, esp for the common case where you don't need to upgrade the service to your home, and there's already a panel/subpanel present. The cost is mostly labor, and in that case it can be installed in a couple hours or less.
Also, 30% of the cost is already subsidized as part of the IRA. As EV prices become more competitive, such that having the outlet/charger installed in their garage is an actual burden for the ppl buying EVs, I wouldn't be surprised to see this subsidy increase
This is super ridiculous. How do you think this will happen? The buyer of the 2022 Toyota Corolla will just be banned from driving it in 2035? In the US they can't even ban guns, you expect individual driving of owned cars to be banned? :-)))
Not banned. The car shape is probably the most inefficient form factor posssible for an electric vehicle, and economic and market forces will do their thing.
What will change between now and 2035 that will enable "economic and market forces [to] do their thing" that isn't already true today? Can you explain why the "most inefficient form factor possible" is still the norm today?
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 of EV tech being only 80 years (or 30 years of "modern tech hard push") behind ICE infra.
This is how every conversation about EV goes.
Person A: "look how awesome EV is!"
Person B: "yeah, but it won't work for me based on where I live and the needs I have from a car. It seems foolish to push a mandate for a technology that can't be proven to work how the vast majority of people need it to work."
Person A: "you are being unfair in your comparison!" or "no, you are only imagining those problems!"
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.
> I suspect the same is true for other locations in the world.
Well, FWiW the Australian (and New Zealand) standard across the entire country is 240v with (most) internal circuits rated for 10 A .. but a call to an electrician gets you a { 15 | 20 | 25 | 32 } amp circuit pulled from the household breaker box (if high amp circuits weren't added at build time) [1]
In other EV news an Australian state (South Australia) had a net 104.1 per cent wind and solar over seven days (ie produced more renewable energy than total energy used and exported the excess) [2], and in my state "Renewables reach 84 pct share of world’s biggest isolated grid" [3]
So, uhh, we have the infrastructure to charge EV's in isolated rural parts of the country and have had for decades .. increased generation is an issue but we have plans to significantly increase global green hydrogen production and export excess over local demand.
Right, so because your state and country is ahead in this area, everyone else is "a hut in Siberia?"
My comment specifically mentioned a 2030 or 2035 mandate, which is a US mandate. Why would you argue against a US mandate by talking about Australia? You're not doing the EV group any favors by ignoring the problems people describe that prevent them from buying one, and there is currently no US legislation to enable a mandate in the timeframe it would be required.
> because your state and country is ahead in this area, everyone else is "a hut in Siberia?"
No.
How did arrive at that conclusion?
Did you misread the user names and assume I made that comment?
> Why would you argue against a US mandate by talking about Australia?
You made a statement about other places in the world which was false, I gave an example of why it was false.
You are now better informed, you're welcome.
yes, I misread (or more accurately didn't read) user names. Apologies for that.
But no, what I said was not false. I said that I suspect there are other locations in the world where this is true (meaning northern US isn't the only one), and the reply was that there are locations where it isn't true (Australia).
As often happens what we say doesn't always clearly convey what we mean to others, we've perhaps both fallen foul from this.
A few points of note;
* like or not Australia as a country is an interesting case study wrt "how do other countries fare?" .. we have charging capabilities .. but hellish distances between towns outside of cities. On the plus side the vast bulk of the population is urban | near urban .. so it's only the actual outback | rural | FiFo types that may be left with ICE down the timeline.
* Future mandates are aspiration and exert a pressure to change; come crunch day it may have come to pass that sufficient recharge capability has been pushed out to Backwater Dale in Banjo County .. or not. When the reality comes to pass there is the option to modify policy in the face of some areas being better suited for mandated EVs than others.
I have zero problems with how Australia plans to meet its transportation needs. I do not live there.
In the US, I also do not care much about whether cars are EV or not (my only actual hangup about EV as a technology is the raw material sourcing. It is perhaps as immoral as how we obtain oil, and we do not have a story on what to do with the waste). I may even buy one in a couple years (I run all my cars to the point where they need constant repair, and only buy used cars, so the average age of my cars when they are retired is about 12 years). But that is different than the fantasy that EV as a primary form of personal transportation will work for the vast majority of the northern US.
I think the opposite of the intended effect will actually happen. We are forcing a mandate without a means for it to work.
This is also a mandate in Canada for 2035, and I feel like you are being unfair and a little bit snarky to the other commenter (who didn't make the comment about Siberia).
This is actually a larger problem in Canada than the US, and most of the political and policy discussion is in favour of this change.
I am discussing the mentality of the opposition in the US and the reasons they cite where the EV solution does not work for them. If your government is committed to making it work by 2035, that's a different matter. The US government has made no such commitment, they only discuss mandates. All of the pain, none of the gain.
> 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.
Yep,but I'm assuming that nearly everyone in the Northern US is on the grid. And yep, economic concerns dominate, I get that.
This is where I'd hope a government looking to encourage EVs would step in and help, if they're trying to make things happen before 2035.
E.g., in my area, the regional council has a scheme where home owners can get a very low interest (or even no interest) loan to install good insulation, and you can also get another one to install a heat-pump.
They're run through banks, but backed by the regional (and maybe central?) government.
But, doing something like this will, initially, only subsidise the people who can already afford to buy an electric vehicle.
TL;DR - it used to be that you couldn't refuel your car unless the servants brought more on horses, as the only service stations focused on oats. But we invested in infrastructure.
In a little under half the US. We get at least a couple days a year where the wind-chill brings the temp below -40F with a thermometer temp of -5 or less as a high for the day. My gas car hasn't been happy about starting the last week. Two years ago, I was working 2nd shift and only had the diesel truck. Got to work fine, got off at 2 PM and even with winter blend and a bottle of Heat in the tank, the fuel gelled and tore up the fuel filters.
This is not an artic circle problem. This is a problem that affects way more of the world than you seem to realize. Sorry that we don't all live in mild climates.
I'm unsure why wind-chill is relevant to a car being charged in a garage?
> This is a problem that affects way more of the world than you seem to realize.
The original commenter was stating that EVs were entirely unsuitable for a hypothetical person.
The only way that it I can envisage it being entirely unsuitable is if they had no access to grid electricity.
My comment about a hut in Siberia is based on that.
Yes, some Americans might need to upgrade certain circuits, but that's not an blocker, it's just an implementation detail.
I'm very well aware of how cold it can get in the USA, but that doesn't prevent EV use, it just requires investment in infrastructure, and that's an investment I'd hope a smart government would subsidise if it's serious about reducing emissions.
Everyone doesn't have a garage. If your infrastructure has the chargers on the street, we're back to the original issue where they don't charge well in the cold.
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.
Is that something that actually happens to diesel engines? I have multiple diesels and while they are difficult to _start_ in the cold they are fine once started for me. But yes, cold enough and combustion engines are hard to get going. My Subaru hates cold days, it'll go a few seconds on a below freezing day before ignition. My diesel tractors actually have electric plugs to keep the manifold hot.
Mostly it's the start battery that have problems in the cold. The diesel sold in Norway have anti-gelling substances added; cars run fine in -20 degC/-4 degF.
I live in the southern USA. So it makes sense that I have never heard of this. We had a -6°F night the other night but usually it'll freeze at night and be back above freezing by noon.
It is an can be a pain for non diesel drivers if large trucks grind to a halt and block the motorway. That's happened in the UK in unusual cold spells.
Yes that'd be quite a problem. Our cold lasts so little here that I've never had a need to start any of my tractors in the freezing, just wait a day and it's back to warm.
The reason diesel doesn't usually gel is that, starting in the fall, fuel stations/refineries start adding anti-gelling agents to the diesel.
If you have "summer diesel" in your tractor during a cold spell, it will gel. And a block heater won't help, since the fuel gels in the fuel lines and tank too. And trying to start the engine pulls in that gel into the fuel filter and sort of strains the chunks out, causing your fuel filter to need to be replaced even once it's warmed up.
I'm not sure at exactly what temperature it happens, but a Kansas winter will typically gel summer diesel at least a couple of times.
number 2 diesel fuel will turn to jelly at a bit over 40f. That is warmer than water freezes. Number 1 diesel will be fine to well below zero, and you can mix them to get different gel points. There are also anti gel additives you can add to prevent gelling. Number 2 diesel has significantly more energy than number 1, and is also cheaper, so you want to run number 2 if possible.
Not anymore, at least in milder “extreme cold”. We live in northern New Hampshire, and never have an issue with our 328d wagon parked outside in -25F. It has a heater for the fuel line, and they add anti-gelling agents to diesel in winter.
>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.
I don't know where you live, but here in Germany my diesel car had no big problems with -19°C around 10 years ago. Biggest problem was heating the interior that the windows remain ice free during driving. I want to see your new electric car driving in this circumstances the 100km I had to drive.
And please note, 2035 means 13 years in the future. I don't doubt that the infrastructure for electric cars can work in 100 years...but what's with 13?
Just yesterday I drove 75km in -22C, parked outside all day, then back home the same distance in -19C. Took my Model Y from 80% to 12%. No problem with heat either (that's part of why it used so much charge). I was a lot more worried about sliding off the road than running out of battery...
I believe you that it's no problem for a diesel. But it's no problem for electric either.
When I left for the second drive, the car's navigation app estimated I'd have 13% left when I arrived, and the estimates have been impressively good so I just went for it.
But I also was in a good sized metro area with a couple Tesla superchargers not far off my route, so my backup plan was to stop at one for 15 minutes if it ever looked like I might not make it.
20km is less than what he has left of charge. If the detour is earlier in the drive. He could have gone to a supercharger. If he gets stuck in a jam for hours, it makes no difference. The car hardly uses any power when standing still, it will heat the cabin but other than that it uses no power. I've tried this myself, I once got stuck in double digit cold for around an hour in a model 3 outside Hamar. It made no difference to my range.
It depends on the formulation of your diesel. If you had a tank of "summer diesel" it would be gel at that temperature. Generally the supply chain starts changing the formulation as the weather gets colder and everything is good until you get to arctic temperatures. But if you fill up at a station that doesn't sell a lot of diesel and they still have summer diesel and its an early cold spell, or you are driving a vehicle you don't fill often, you can be in trouble. There are also additives you can add on your own if you know you have summer diesel.
And then you're replacing the fuel filters when it's below 0 F out because they got destroyed by the gelled diesel. And then you learn your lesson and keep a bottle of Power Service on hand if it's going to get cold and it's never a problem again.
It's literally as easy as having the right fuel additives on hand before it gets too cold. It's not even an infrastructure problem.
I will say that you left out the most fun part of a good winter driving a diesel, which is when you can't fill up even at a station with diesel on account of the fuel gelled in the pump hose. Luckily the gas station on the way home from work is a truck stop and the pumps for the tractor-trailers were still working.
On a related note, it's not unusual for us to lose power here for a couple hours to a couple days at a time either in the worst of winter, or during summer storm season. What do you do with an electric car when the electricity is out in the neighborhood?
>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.
> 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.
You have a garage. Those who don’t have a garage freeze their asses off in howling winds every second day while plugging the car into an outdoor charger.
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.
'all kind of chaos that can happen if your engine freezes and you try to drive it immediately.' the coolant in ICE vehicles is called antifreeze, only an idiot would substitute H20 for that in cold weather, or any other time for that matter as it is designed to help protect the interior of the engine.
> Remember that a lot of people have to spend 10-15 minutes warming up their cars before they drive them in cold weather.
People choose to do this. This isn’t required and it’s recommended against in modern vehicles.
> 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.
Engines do not freeze in the conditions common in most of the US, even with winter like we’re currently having. The engine coolant is a mixture of anti-freeze and water.
You need N joules to heat up the 300kg of the engine. It doesn't matter if you sit there for 15 minutes freezing your ass with an engine running at 1500rpm (and all other car parts still freezing) or 5 minutes actually driving at 3000rpm - you still spent N joules on heating, difference is the time. And the car heater runs on the engine heat, not on the electricity, so the sooner you would warm the engine the sooner your car interior start to warm and stops seeping the heat from engine.
It's actually more importantly to have enough viscosity in ATF, but again, the sooner you would go the sooner it would warm.
For the good of the engine maybe. For the good of the driver... when you're finished scraping off it's better inside. Plus the windows kinda warmed up so it's easier to scrape.
Depends on the weather. There were a multiple times when the running engine heating up the windshield was the necessary prerequisite to scrape the ice off.
I've definitely had a serious enough layer of ice on the windshield that my nice scraper was an exercise in futility. Maybe 2-3 times a year, but it's a thing.
> I’m curious about that recommendation, do you know why that is?
I was always told (since the 90s, anyway) that it's better to drive off slowly with a cold engine and let all the components come up to operating temperature together than to drive off with a hot engine, and cold gearbox, driveshafts, tyres, etc.
I generally let a cold engine (i.e. overnight) idle for maybe 30s before driving off slowly, and it reaches operating temperature in about 5m or less.
> your car can fail randomly for an obscure reason
Your electric car can fail randomly for an obscure reason too, and good luck getting anyone at all that can fix it.
> Remember that a lot of people have to spend 10-15 minutes warming up their cars before they drive them in cold weather.
Only because they're idiots. No-one needs to leave a vehicle for 10 minutes to "warm up", even in the coldest of weather. Drive gently until the temperature gauge is a bit off the end stop, and then drive a bit less gently until it's at its proper operating temperature.
Alternatively, start the engine from stone cold and immediately drive off at full throttle taking it up to 70mph before there's even a sniff of warm air from the heater. This is *still* better for it than letting it sit for a long time to "warm up".
Even if we ignore the "heard bad advice" versus "idiot" issue, that's still untrue because there are other reasons besides what's best for the machine.
Maybe they aren't in the car, and they're warming it up to be comfortable.
Use deicing spray to get the ice off the car. If it's too cold for you in the car, then just sack up and get on with it. You're not going to come to any harm being a wee bit cold for a couple of minutes, and the heater will actually start working quicker if you drive. If the weather is as cold as it gets here in Scotland in winter, the car will *never* warm up sitting idling.
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.
The majority of the country doesn't live in an area that regularly gets extremely cold and even fewer people drive 100 miles every other day. EVs are always getting better, and they’re already good enough for most people.
I live in an area that does get below freezing, and my car preheats the battery before I unplug it to go somewhere while the cabin warms.
There’s often not-very-visible differences between Canadian and US car models, even base models.
Canadian BMWs will all have the “cold weather package”, which for me means heated seats and an H8 battery instead of a smaller H6.
For my mom’s old Corolla, it means a 1.6kw starter instead of the 1.4 in the US models (which became a sorta problem when I bought a refurb at a Canadian parts store…)
I lived in the south and moved to Denver for a period. I had a RWD 4-runner at the time and got stuck in snow. The people I knew in Denver had no idea they even sold non-4wd 4-runners...
I'm guessing only FWD/4WD version of vehicles are also sold in Canada.
>> I can pull up to any gas station and fill my tank in 2 minutes.
But you don't have a gas station at home, don't you? So you have to worry about gas stations and how far they are. And your car makes you and other people sick(i.e cancer and various diseases due polution)! That's so 2020!
On a more serious note you are comparing the shortcommings of an emerging technology with a mature technology. Saying that the old tech is better makes no sense to me.
Eh. I’ve found with modern cars they can still start at -30f just fine. At least, mine can.
My first car? I had to constantly give it gas for a while even once it started. People gave me funny looks when I was essentially revving my engine like I was showing off in my ‘88 Grand Marquis at stop signs in the year 2005.
A gasoline powered car will struggle in the cold because:
- the battery used to spin the engine is going to have less capacity in the cold
- the engine oil is thicker and requiring more energy to spin the engine
- gasoline won't atomize as well when it's being sprayed into a cold environment (this is why your engine runs richer right after a cold start)
A diesel powered car will struggle because:
- the temperature of the engine may be too low to allow ignition
- the battery used to spin the engine is going to have less capacity in the cold
- the engine oil is thicker and requiring more energy to spin the engine
- the devices used to heat the engine (glow plugs or intake heaters) require plenty of electricity
- the fuel itself may turn into gel (although I think most places in the US only ever sell #2 diesel year-round)
- the engine itself may not stay warm enough to run especially if you're also trying to pull heat out into the cabin
None of that's changed dramatically in the past 40 years although engine management has gotten better.
I don't disagree, but I can only tell you my experience. My car (a freakin' Camaro that I drive year round) has yet to fail to start, and it's 11 years old at this point too. The radio doesn't work when it's below 10 degrees though, so that's fun.
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-off.
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.
I have much the same question -- it seems like PHEVs would be perfect for the next 10 years or so, while we improve batteries and build out charging infrastructure. And yet there are relatively few PHEVs on the market, and most of them have <40 miles of electric range, whereas I think you'd really want something like double that number (especially in the context of this article!).
I'm really curious to see what Mazda will do with the MX-30 next year. It's an dismal failure as a pure EV, but apparently they're planning to add a rotary engine as a pure generator to it (i.e., not driving the wheels). If the car keeps the current version's 100 mile electric range that could be a very interesting combo.
ICE cars were built without thinking about efficiency in a way, there were plenty of heat to go around due to the nature of combustion. The EV seem fragile but it is because it's so efficient so anything that affects the efficiency becomes quite noticeable... nothing wrong with being a bit more efficient everywhere we can.
My ICE vehicle would like a heated garage. At -10F -23C she gets upset with me. At -25F -31C she tells me where to stick the key. I work around the issue with an oil pan heater and a couple of heat lamps but I do need to build a garage and stop waiting for wood/steel prices to come back down.
As for EV's I am going to wait and see how the UPS trucks manage here. That should be some time in early 2023, hopefully before spring time.
Check their post again their car lost loads of charge over a very short range because of the cold so in effect it was losing range overnight. It lost 15 miles over 1 mile of driving and another ~15-20 on the next mile driving back.
But it was on level one charging (110v). A level two charger, even a slow one, should be able provide enough current to heat the battery and still charge the battery at the same time.
Most of the time if you're not at your own home you'll be on 110V chargers. To get 220V charging at someone else's you're likely either at another EV owners house who's gone through the trouble of installing a 220V port or you're lucky and they have a conveniently placed dryer in the garage you can steal 220V power from.
That’s only a warm climate thing. Plumbing (of the associated washing machine) that’s prone to freezing is unlikely to be in the garage in cooler climates.
There’s no particular reason that a dryer and washer have to go in the same room. I have my dryer in my garage, because it’s a hybrid heat-pump model that is very efficient when the garage is warmed up from the afternoon sun, but can provide its own heat in winter. It captures all the water in a tank, so doesn’t put any moisture into the room. Modern dryers are really quite neat :)
> There’s no particular reason that a dryer and washer have to go in the same room
Uhhhh convenience? People prefer them right next to each other so that clothes washing isn’t a long journey. At least that’s why the plumbing and electrical/gas connections are usually built close to each other.
Serious question, do Americans use clotheslines? Our dryer is only really used for towels/sheets in wet weather.
The rotary clothesline [0] was standard in Australia and New Zealand for decades, although with the move to smaller sections, people tend to install compact linear lines instead.
Some do but it was considered a poor thing for much of the 20th century to the point where many cities and HOAs had rules against them. This is changing but it amazed me when I lived in California where in the summer you could line dry in similar times at zero cost.
Generally no. Line drying has a connotation of poverty in the US and many cities have ordinances like this that make it tough to do. Also houses being generally larger and detached in the US we have an easier time installing them compared to row houses in Europe. They're also just built more recently so they have accommodations for them built in already.
"No person shall place or allow to remain exposed to the elements laundry, clothing, rags, or other cloth items hung or stored on a front porch or front or other street yard of a dwelling."
I haven't had much trouble with that personally. Sometimes the first wash will shrink clothes slightly but afaik a lot of clothing manufacturers these days put clothes through a 'pre-shrinking' process that compacts them down simulating the shrinking process so they won't shrink appreciably.
In the US "220V" refers to a high current outlet normally, in a country where household outlets are 220V, you still need a high current outlet and, for safety reasons, most outlets are not high current, just like in the US.
True, but in the US most 240v outlets are 30-50A, whereas in countries that use 240v for their normal household outlets, the current limit is usually 13-15A. Still double the wattage of a typical US outlet but not up to the standards of a “Level 2” charger.
The Volt is a unit of electric potential. The SI unit of current is the Ampere. You can have very large potential differences (in V) with very small current (in A). The unit of power is the Watt, and 1 W = 1 A*1 V.
So, a given power can be obtained using any voltage, with the proper current. In practice, high currents are unsafe so we tend to avoid that in unprotected sockets. Different norms correspond to different tradeoffs.
The voltage and current combined is the actually important number which is the total wattage available on that circuit. The US standard 220/240V outlet will provide ~30A of current usually while a UK outlet usually has a 13A fuse in the plug matching the circuit's rough availability.
In the US it's 30A minimum for an average "220v" (it's actually 240 V) outlet such as a dryer or AC, that's more than double what 13A 220V gives in the UK.
It depends on what you call "specific installations", in my house I have two 240V 30A outlets for the dryer hookup and for an electric oven and one 240V 40A for the air conditioner.
We are talking of an outlet for a car in winter. It is much more common to have a common outlet outside than to have a 240v outlet. Even if there were a 240, it would be in the nema format that electric vehicles don't accept directly.
This is also the same problem with electric kettles in the U.S. they boil much faster in the u.k. because almost double the power for a common outlet.
If having 240V in an outlet was sufficient to charge a car, we could have installed a transformer and inverter in a car and charge it from a 1.5V AAA battery by pulling up the voltage to 240V. Plugging a car to a 240V outlet with a 13A breaker will only give you 2650 Watt charging power (provided there is the same code that requires 85% of maximum draw in continuous application), which is just 1 kW more than plugging into a 120V 15A outlet. Not a huge difference that would make charging bearable when the car uses more than 1.5 kW just to keep the battery warm.
An extra 1KW would actually charge the car given time. Not just keep the battery warm. 1kwh is supposedly about 4 miles. Charge for 12 hours overnight, you have enough to get to the supercharger.
In the OP story, the car was losing charge while plugged into 110V outlet, that means that 1.5 kW was not enough to keep the battery warm. An extra 1kWh might or might not get it into actually charging and even if it's been charging at 1kW it would not get 4 miles per hour, the car driving in these conditions would still use energy to keep the battery pack at the working temperature.
On a side note, I find it amusing when Brits try to brag about their superior electricity due to the progressive 240V. People living in the houses wired in a ring [1], which set themselves ablaze when they try to turn on AC, in my imagination would be more reserved ;)
I guarantee that you don’t own a all Electric V. I own 2018 model S and I concur with the Op of this thread that’s the case. Charging is a huge pain in cold weather. I have insulated my garage doors and am able to keep the temp at around 45 in cold winters ( I am in Redmond).
A 240V charger, as parent commenter said, more than makes up for whatever losses are inherent in heating the car and battery.
I have an uncovered space and it’s fine. Yeah, the battery sucks in the cold, and it takes longer to charge, but realistically it’s not like you need to use your car 24/7. Leaving it for a few hours overnight charges it to full, and you can schedule defrosting or do it from the app so the car is warm when you get in.
Surely depends on how cold it is? As well as amperage...
In Sweden there were lot of reports of people being unable to charge with 230V 10A.
Sure, you'd make sure to install a more powerful charger if necessary. But that requires you and everywhere else to be adapted for EVs. Which is a pain.
Is 10A common in Sweden? Around here, every basic socket is rated 230V 16A and even apartments typically have each phase 230V 25A. And then you can go to multiple phases.
(Funny thing, this is kind oversized for domestic applications and the driver behind it is that the law says you pay fee based on maximum amperage of your connection, so electricity companies refuse to install anything smaller than 25A and give everyone they can three-phase so they make more money.)
Also, how adapting to EVs is a huge pain but LITERALLY DESTROYING THE WORLD THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE is not, I don't get it.
> Also, how adapting to EVs is a huge pain but LITERALLY DESTROYING THE WORLD THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE is not, I don't get it.
That's a very "you-centric" view of the world. Convenience is convenience, regardless of whether it destroys the world or not, and more money is expected to bring more convenience. So very few people say "I'll suffer this winter so the world is destroyed just a little bit less". That's why they have EVs but can still have a "factory sized" carbon footprint due to their huge houses, multiple cars, etc.
Case in point, you probably get how adapting to public transport is a huge pain but LITERALLY DESTROYING THE WORLD THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE because you want a personal car is not.
> Case in point, you probably get how adapting to public transport is a huge pain but LITERALLY DESTROYING THE WORLD THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE because you want a personal car is not.
Oh for sure. That is why people saying "what about people living in apartments? checkmate, EVs!" annoy me so much - if you live in an apartment you probably don't need a car.
But people are used to their comforts, so saying that doesn't win any favors or votes. Nor does saying "it's good that EVs are more expensive, since fewer people will be able to afford cars".
> Oh for sure. That is why people saying "what about people living in apartments? checkmate, EVs!" annoy me so much - if you live in an apartment you probably don't need a car.
There are a ton of valid reasons for someone living in an apartment to still need a car. And rentals are not a solution. Rental companies are a nightmare and rental cars suck.
At least in Norway cars will limit the charging to 10A when using a normal wall socket instead of a dedicated car charger on a connection with extra protection, I think there are some Eu regulations around that to.
10A circuits was the norm in houses years ago, but now the normal is changed to 16A and one 25A for the stove. We do not have any fee based on the maximum amperage of the circuit, the changes are only demand driven. If you want to put the kettle on and vacuum at the same time you need 16A
Usually it's 13A from a Shucko plug. They're rated for 16A but you're not supposed to run that continuously so it's 13A to be at 80% of maximum for a continuous load.
Mining all that crap that goes into any EV destroys our planet properly.
If you want to actually help environment, you need to live in cold through the winter by using heating at minimum, you need to use public transport, do adequate sustainable shopping of everything and so on and on. Which hits the general consumerism and comfort western society is so used to like a concrete wall of WWII bunker.
I get why prople want to feel they are not passive when global catastrophe is coming, but just buying EV and saying you have done your part is a fucking bad joke, sorry cant put it in milder terms. Kids in african cobalt, lithium etc mines would object, at least if they could.
You're hand waving away a lot of things here. People have the expectation of convenience and the current standard is whatever any regular car can do. When things fall short it can be a major inconvenience or even a deal breaker.
> It’s far from “a huge pain”.
You name "a huge pain" and someone will disagree. Not having a car at all is far from a huge pain but you still have one, even at a significant price.
What, exactly, is being hand woven away? I’m describing the realities of EV ownership.
My car is always plugged in and therefore always at 80%. It takes a few hours after returning from a trip to charge it back up, regardless of the weather or other conditions, and the car is warmed up by the time I get into it using remote defrosting. In fact, during this snowstorm, my car always was consistently completely defrosted every time.
None of this sounds anywhere even remotely in the same ballpark as “a huge pain”.
I drive a 1972 Toyota Conora in the winter of 1990. One time it stopped and I had to walk to school. I got there late with MY HAIR FROZEN. That was a huge pain. Using a few extra amp hours of green electricity for 3 months a year to charge my 2019 Zoe is not a huge pain.
Do you use your car 24/7? No, you don’t. Nobody does. And if you did, there are charging systems outside of home charging.
Did you miss scheduled defrosting, where the car does it automatically so it’s ready in the morning? Does your car even have the ability to do that without you in the car? I didn’t think so.
Be realistic about what is a pain and what isn’t. None of your rebuttals are much of anything except “woe is me I have to take out an app to do something I couldn’t even dream of doing on my car and that’s scary”.
The HN system just refused an edit, I will have to reply instead:
I am reading the words of former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis,
> Every year, the number of devices connected to the internet grows rapidly. By some estimates, the count is up to more than 50 billion devices, from around 7 million a decade ago. The benefits are real and obvious. (Hooray, I can close my garage door from a thousand miles away on my household Nest!) But so is the fact that each of those devices is a unique point of attack for hackers. We have created a vast, undefendable threat surface
You simply do not put unrequired attack surfaces on critical devices - it is cretinous -, and you do not encourage the practice - it is criminal.
I wouldn't buy one anyway, but first thing that comes to mind is not the convenience but the energy waste in battling the cold to keep the battery charged
I wonder when batteries will come with better thermal insulation to work during cold weather. A battery which is not near-dead has enough energy to heat itself to the point where its capacity increases a lot, given adequate thermal insulation.
(But, of course, that would require even better cooling for a battery on a summer +95F day. OTOH ICEs have a similar problem.)
You can also leave it overnight just fine. I think plugging a 110v during the cold is kind of an edge case, the car tries to charge but it makes thing worse. Maybe a software update would cure that.
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 ripped off during the inevitable extraction from above mentioned snow bank, expect to wait 6-9 months for the most basic of body work.
The self driving is an absolute clown show in anything but perfect conditions (mounting evidence it sucks in perfect conditions too~)
Nothing in the world excites me more than expensive nerd toys with electric power trains, but as a Minnesota native I'll take a $900 rolling trash can beater car over a top of the line Tesla six months out of the year. There is a very valuable lesson in observing the legacy auto industry existing in Michigan where the winters get very cold and cars need to perform with snow or ice on the roads. Meanwhile Tesla mostly engineers their cars to be good at driving from LA to SF and back.
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!
Yes it is. I don't have a large dataset of exact temp conditions and charging curves (Elon certainly does though, someone go ask him!) I can tell you if the outdoor temps are below 15F a standard outlet has negative net energy input.
A heat pump solution would certainly be more efficient, knowing Tesla I can only assume it's peltier junctions.
All the hype about the efficiency of an EV goes out the window when it's blowing 16kwh+ a day just keeping the battery above freezing.
From what I can find in a quick search: On a normal plug, drawing 12 amps, older Teslas without heat pumps would start losing the battery heat fight around -15C.
A heat pump should be able to do a lot better.
Also you're probably only going to get 16 amps of actual draw on a 20 amp circuit.
> 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 distance than your car.
My BMW came with a 6/10 amp (software selectable) emergency use charger.
I bought a 16 amp 110V charger from Amazon, and it is more than enough to keep up with my daily commute. (It is equivalent to an 8 amp 220V charge cable.)
You could also just make sure to have a L2 charger. There’s some guy on HN who barges into these threads and insists that no one ever needs an L2 charger, but after I had mine installed there’s no way I could live without it.
That’s a lesson EV drivers in Norway learn very quickly. If you can’t charge at your destination, plan to visit a quick charger nearby, before arrival while the battery is warm from driving. Even using a quick charger, charging is very slow when the battery is really cold.
Admittedly, I don’t have personal experience below –20 °C (–4 °F). If it drops down to –40 °(C or F), I am not so sure what will happen. But the strategy should remain the same.
It could have been much worse. A battery that froze solid can develop some interesting issues when used after it thawed, such as thermal run-away (or interesting exothermic episodes, as we call it, but funnier to watch in a reinforced calorimeter than in your driveway), or short-circuits (lots of smoke if you are lucky, otherwise a fireball). Batteries have operating range for a reason, and that operating range is exceeded routinely in winter and summer, even in nominally temperate regions.
This is also why claims of round trip energy efficiency for BEVs need a disclaimer. You need to put energy in to heat the battery, so under certain conditions, your roundtrip efficiency can hit 0%; i.e. all input energy going towards heating the battery, and none going towards charging the vehicle.
The Wrangler 4XE has a temp controlled battery. Not sure about other vehicles, but it works.
TBH, I think mankind just needs better energy storage. Lithium ion, and lithium iron phosphate are great, but I do not believe these are going to work for us in the long term. I do believe, however, that within 30 years electric vehicles will be more practical than ICE if some kind of better battery is made at a low enough price point.
I bet if you had just left it plugged in, it would’ve started charging after the battery warmed up. You freaked out because in cold weather the battery won’t start charging right away, energy will be used to heat up the battery first.
Question: As a consumer, had you done any research or calculations before the trip? Were your expectations realistic?
What strikes me is that people in some markets have unrealistic assumptions about the current battery technology. Spending more money does not change physics.
EV technology is rather good. But there are bad products in the EV market.
My father in laws truck wouldn’t start this winter in texas because the diesel froze. My EV worked great and thanks to the low temps the battery will be degrading a bit slower with age for a few days.
Are you suggesting to use flywheels as an energy source in EVs??? There is a heap of issues with this idea, the main ones:
- They are VERY heavy. Typical energy density for flywheels is 10-40 kJ/kg (if you account for the whole flywheel), while Li-ion batteries and gasoline store 300-1000 kJ/kg and 46700 kJ/kg respectively (the latter does not account for ICE efficiency).
- They are relatively big, since you can store more energy with a bigger diameter (limited by material's strength-to-weight ratio).
- Flywheel is a big gyroscope. You do not want to rotate it around while it spins.
Yes, I understand the issues.
They've used them in busses. Higher speed means more energy storage and ness necessary weight. Gyroscopic action can be handled with gimbals. Etc.
It’s interesting that nobody in this thread has yet mentioned the numerous range tests showing that Teslas achieve less than EPA range in many “real world” (warm weather) tests.
Part of the EPA methodology is to penalize EV range using either a fixed constant or measurements of performance at reduced temperatures. Because Tesla cars perform better in the cold, they use the measurement method when calculating EPA range.
That results in the perceived under-performance of Teslas compared to the competition in the so-called “real world” tests. But when cars are tested at low ambient temperatures, we see the results…
I saw a similar discussion about Gas Mileage. The point was to allow us to compare the differences between different models under similar conditions, not to get real world results.
Perhaps, but I think they just need more relevant tests. The EPA tests were meant to be challenging for ICE cars, but happen to be easy for hybrids and EVs.
I would like to see a 75 mph constant-speed test at 0F, 50F and 100F
I wonder how much of this can be addressed with active versus passive cooling of the batteries.
One of the folk tricks with cold starting regular vehicles is to run the radio for a little bit, in order to warm the battery up just a little to help with cranking the engine. If you conserve the waste heat in the battery banks until the batteries hit 50ºC for instance, then they would spend less time at ambient temperatures once you start moving. Some of that could offset/be offset by the cabin heating system, if you did it right.
But I think the math comes down to the question of whether cooling a battery to freezing reduces the potential energy in the battery, or just the recoverable energy. I think it's the latter, and if so then how much recoverable energy can you increase by converting a given amount of that energy into BTUs to warm the battery?
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.
Tesla claims to have 90..94% motor efficiency. With model Y using 13kW per hour, even if you count all 6-10% of this as heat, and manage to capture it, it'll still be hardly enough to keep the car at a comfortable temperature without additional heating.
Norway is a particularly bad example here because, despite its northern location, the climate is very mild, with the average winter temperature of just -6°C, while we here regularly see temperatures below -20°C and up to (or down to?) -35°C.
We’re just still in the early days of EV maturity.
I’ve driven in Canada for 40 years. Until modern low-viscosity oil capable engines — cars were required to be plugged in to block heaters for hours before attempting to start, at -20C and lower.
I didn’t expect EVs to perform better than gas vehicles; why would I, at this level of their maturity?
Diesel vehicles are even more brittle; oilfield workers simply don’t shut off their diesel trucks for days at a time, at low temperatures.
There's two main challenges for EVs in cold weather that cause extra use of energy vs warm weather; warming up the battery pack and warming up the cabin.
ICE vehicles also run less efficiently when the engine is cold, so this part is roughly analogous even if there is more extra energy required to heat the battery pack.
The main difference is that once the engine is warm, ICE vehicles can then heat the cabin "for free" using waste heat because an ICE is so incredibly inefficient. This waste heat is useless when it is warm but a nice bonus when it is cold. EVs must expressly spend energy to create warmth for the cabin.
But this is also why most EV owners know to schedule your vehicle to warm up while it is still plugged in before you depart. One advantage is that you can do this in a closed garage with an EV and not worry about fumes.
Cold weather reduces range on all vehicles, it's just more noticeable on EVs due to having less excess range and the aforementioned heating concerns.
But I drove a 2014 Leaf for 8 years here in Michigan, without issue. That's a low range vehicle in a very cold climate. It's totally fine.
speaking as a professional diesel engine mechanic --and in the midst of this midwest snowstorm-- winter is hard on everything.
-electrics with proper planning work well, but there is a nasty wives tale in the service industry that batteries are safer to work on in a cold garage and that you can skip the safety gear. a tesla battery still has easily enough juice to send you to jesus even at -50c.
-gas engines need block heaters or its like starting an engine in a tar pit, and the mileage takes a 20-30% haircut.
-diesel engines are finnicky beasts in the cold. most of your environmental reclamation stuff has to be heated along with the block, and anti gelling agents are hell on them. mileage and waxy soot particulate from stacks are equally bad. california has special requirements and bans on certain gel agents as well.
in colder places like nunavut or the northern territories, heavy truck drivers without reliable electrical power light a small fire under their engine to warm it. not for the faint hearted.
For most day-to-day trips it's absolutely not a problem the periods I've rented an electric car. And even the outdoor public/slow chargers at parking spots work fine in even cold weather.
A bit annoying for longer trips. Typically "going to the cabin" type trips. Normally I wouldn't need to stop, or perhaps stop once. With a Peugeot e208 I had to stop twice, and the charging was a bit slow. Still, only turned a 4 hour trip to a <5 hour trip, and since it's not exactly something I do every week the consequence is basically zero.
When there was fewer chargers it was more of a problem. Had to time it so that from the last charger you could reach the cabin and back. But later years with longer ranges and chargers everywhere I don't really plan anything. Except when going to Sweden...
The Kia e-soul I've been using lately feels like it holds it charge much better than the e208, so probably even less of a problem.
And never had troubles getting an EV to start during winter. But may be a bit unfair comparison as the ICEs I've had troubles with are all older generations.
We've had an EV for almost 5 years now. We first had a BMW i3 94Ah model. It had decent battery thermal management, so it performed fine for us. Yes effective range was down quite a bit, IIRC ~150km in -15C vs ~230km in summer, but it was quite manageable.
It got totaled thanks to someone hitting us, and we ended up with a 24kWh Leaf. It doesn't have much in terms of thermal management, so with that we really notice the winter. Like, to and from work is just fine, but any significant trip in sub-zero (Celsius) conditions ain't fun. We knew it wouldn't be great, and we're looking to replace it.
I'd say for our kind of weather, which have many days below -5C during winter, and living in a city or suburbs like we do, the Leaf is fine as a second car. The i3 was good enough since we didn't do lots of long trips during winter, just a few to the cabin and such. Both the i3 and the Leaf (and others) have climate timers, so you can get the car nice and warm in preparation for a trip, using power from the grid. This helps a fair bit both in comfort and in range.
More modern cars are even better though, obviously more range to start with but also with things like battery preheating which sacrifices some of the battery energy to heat it up in preparation for proper fast charging.
I admit I do get a bit of range anxiety during winter from time to time, mostly because the consequences of running out with -10C or so outside isn't fun. If I was living more on the countryside, there's few competitors to Tesla I think just due to the range and thermal management.
All in all, we're definitely not gonna get another ICE. There's just too many things we like about the EVs.
Thanks, I figured this was the case - was kind of a tongue-in-cheek question as it's pretty obvious that if a place like Norway can have such huge EV penetration, then they can't be all that of a struggle in the cold!
Interesting to read some real world reports on how modern EV owners are coping with the extreme cold weather. Judging from various comments here it seems mostly fine albeit with a bit of range reduction.
I don't think this is very surprising. This is not the first winter for many EV manufacturers, or owners. And of course EVs are pretty popular far into the arctic circle. E.g. there are super chargers in Northern Norway, people use them throughout the year, and it seems fine there.
I think at this point there are very few surprises for manufacturers and they are pretty well aware how their vehicles perform under different conditions.
I'd be interested to know in how those shiny new F 150s are holding up providing power to people who are in areas with power outages. It seems that these are exactly the type of conditions that justify owning such a vehicle. Presumably, Ford did a lot of testing in cold conditions to make sure they work fine there.
> The company analyzed the real-world winter driving range of thousands of electric vehicles and found the Tesla Model Y retained most of its EPA-rated range in winter.
This Axios article is from March, 2022 and has incorrect data. In particular it's wrong about the Tesla results.
The Axios chart claims the Model Y achieves 97% of its EPA range in 70°F and 98% of its EPA range in 20-30°F. They're claiming the Model Y does better in cold weather.
Here is updated data from Recurrent as of December 2022:
What's new in the updated data is that Recurrent has included verified real world winter range tests. Previously they were relying on dashboard data and Teslas don't give you good information. Recurrent says, "As evidenced below, it appears in the Model 3 dashboard data that there is almost no change in available range in cold or hot conditions."
But now, "New to 2022, we have added observed, real-world range fluctuations to our Tesla data. The dotted line below shows the range as observed from on-board devices and energy usage. This shows a more expected decrease in winter range, although Tesla's thermal management is still great at controlling cold weather range loss."
What Recurrent now says for the Tesla Model Y Long Range AWD is:
> Observed Range at 20-30F: 49% of Original EPA Range
> Observed Range at 70F: 64% of Original EPA Range
So even at 70°F the Model Y only attains 64% of its rated EPA range in their data.
Tesla inflates their EPA numbers. You always need to do real world testing.
Yet another reason why EVs won’t save us from the inefficiencies of car centric transportation.
Americans, can we stop this failed experiment and let’s (re)build our cities with public transportation and alternative forms of transportation (ie, biking, walking, micro-mobility). Return the spaces occupied by parking lots, parking garages and use that space to house people. End these implied subsidies on “car housing”.
100%. Someone who beats the drum on this regularly and effectively is Brent Toderian, @BrentToderian@mastodon.online. He's a city planner and strong advocate for precisely this position. Another resource is strongtowns.org. But yes, just speaking up, getting involved at the local level, is something that every citizen should get involved with if they can.
Kind of. Any problem is easier with a much smaller number and commercial vehicles are more likely to be stored in places where they have power available.
I'm traveling in Taiwan right now and it's just night and day. Outside of NY and small areas of Boston/Chicago/Phili/SF proper it's just a disaster in the US.
I like living in suburbs better than cities, so I choose to live in a suburb, but I don't try to keep other people from being able to live in cities. You like cities and not suburbs. Why can't you be content to just live in a city yourself? Why do you need to make it your mission to destroy my neighborhood?
Are they trying to destroy your neighborhood or simply stop subsidizing it? Suburban living costs more and a lot of those costs are paid by the cities they’re near but don’t contribute much to economically.
That's the basic premise made by StongTowns.org. It's hard to pick a single post to start but the one about Layfayette, Louisiana is a good case study and a good place to dive in, imo.
Re: costs to cities, mostly focused on the extensive roadworks to serve solo car commuters - those are expensive and converted a lot of neighborhoods into something which consumes but does not generate tax income, and things like parking don’t generate much income, and all of that comes at a hefty cost to health & quality of life.
Without taking sides about the actual suburbs vs. cities here (you may be right that suburbs are great), the tone of the comment is very "I have this now, thus I must be allowed to have it forever regardless of the consequences". If you had slaves, and other people didn't have slaves, it wouldn't be very 21st-century to be arguing that "so I choose to have slaves, but I don't try to make other people have slaves. You don't like slaves and not slavery. Why can't you be content to just not have slaves yourself? Why must we all be able to live on this planet happily?" You didn't put forth any substantive argument and I don't see how suburbs are incompatible with GP's proposal for more public transportation. I can't say that you (and everyone) can't have a suburb if you want it, it's just that the whole comment does nothing but appeal to "leave me alone, leave the status quo".
Fair point regarding the last line. Overlooked that somehow.
> Land doesn't have any rights, so suburbs can't infringe upon them.
Slaves didn't have rights back then either, as I understand it. Can't infringe upon those!
More seriously, I haven't done the math myself but given concepts like "earth day" it doesn't seem like we're doing too well in providing for everyone, and that's with a large majority of people not living in the usa suburb style. It only seems fair if everyone (eight billion people) were given the opportunity to achieve an equal standard of living if they are willing to work for it; the kind of thing one would ideally codify in a binding human rights statement (e.g., ECHR). Under the ideal of giving everyone equal opportunities, freely taking however much land you fancy would almost certainly infringe on others' basic rights.
But anyway that's just about land use. I don't know that the amount of land taken is the restrictive factor here, it's probably more about how you get to and from your daily needs (transportation and heating being big factors in personal energy use). The fundamental limitation usually boils down to energy in the end (could live in the Sahara if you build a lot of AC and desalination and pipes to get it there -- spaceship earth style). Currently, we don't have a lot of energy available in a way that maximizes total happiness, considering global warming. We might have to take it easy with personal consumption rates until we do have the energy.
Because the vast swaths of suburbs around cities actively contribute to a lower quality of life for those who live in the city themselves. Not only do cities have to provide car infrastructure for those who commute into the city, which contributes to traffic, noise pollution, emissions, and particulates that fly into the air or run off into the rivers, but the cities also subsidize the cost the suburbs incur.
Counterpoint: moved to the burbs after 40 years of city life (Europe and NYC) and I absolutely love it. Cars work absolutely great and with the decreased need to be physically in the office, suburban life is better and more convenient than ever.
I feel like every post that shits on the suburbs should include how many kids do you have, for transparency. No family or kids, of course the city is better for you.
I think you're missing the bigger problem here - climate change. We cannot drive in ICE cars forever if we want our environment to remain livable. Your car-based lifestyle might be fine for you, right now, but it's still unsustainable and contributing to a worse world for your kids and their kids. If EVs aren't going to to be a drop in solution, then we really do need to talk about reorganizing society away from cars, so that we can have a society at all in the future.
The only other option is some kind of technological silver bullet for carbon capture that manages to arrive in time.
Personally I'm fairly pessimistic about this problem. I don't see a political path to widespread mass transit in the US, and I don't know how you remove the incentive that developing economies have to pollute. It feels like a prisoners' dilemma.
I think I am less stressed about this than you are. I remember someone ranting at me in the 90s about peak oil and how our kids will live in the stone ages because we'll run out (their thesis of course was that ppl shouldn't have kids)
Science evolves as does technology, and inevitably both factors will change over the coming decades. To base your life around the worst case predictions of models (where the disaster moment keeps pushing back as time progresses) is not logical.
And then specifically. I work from home as does my wife. Most of my driving (in a hybrid btw) is 2 miles to drop our kid at school or go to the grocery store. Really hard to connect this lifestyle to dooming the plannet honestly.
> Science evolves as does technology, and inevitably both factors will change over the coming decades. To base your life around the worst case predictions of models (where the disaster moment keeps pushing back as time progresses) is not logical.
Operating on the basis of the most extremist "worst case" scenarios that are very unlikely (like your "peak oil" example) probably doesn't make too much sense, but it's probably not a bad thing to be rather pessimistic about these sort of things when making policy.
We can take no thought for the morrow and trust that future technology will sort it all out. Maybe it will, but what if it doesn't? There are no guarantees and hard constraints on our physical universe and planet. It certainly wouldn't be the first time in history human-made ecological changes caused large problems.
Or we can be more pessimistic today. Maybe it will later turn out that won't have been necessary, but it still would have been the smart thing to do as a matter of risk management, since we couldn't have known in the past how things would work out in the future.
As with all things, you can of course exaggerate, but it's a mistake to throw our the baby with the bathwater because some extremist said something extreme.
I am in favor of a risk-based approach as you're describing. Some certain sacrifice today is worth some unclear reduction in an uncertain future event. The question is - how much?
If you wanted to be extreme in CO2 reduction, I guess your best bet is to kill every living human and animal on the planet (to be clear, not advocating this!) Clearly that's "too high" a price to pay.
On the other hand, you can be very practical and look for CO2 reduction in ways that don't harm people's current lives. Increasing vehicle mileage is an example of this - mileage has doubled and emissions per vehicles halved since 1975.[1] In fact, I suspect this is going to get even better very quickly. My Highlander Hybrid, which is a large vehicle, gets roughly 50% more MPG than in this chart.
So we can say we're already doing a lot (and that's just one thing.) The idea that somehow the line between acceptable and unacceptable just happens to be right between suburban and city living feels a little too convenient for me.
> Increasing vehicle mileage is an example of this - mileage has doubled and emissions per vehicles halved since 1975.
A fantastic point!
Unfortuneately undercut by absolute truth (rather than per vehicle comparisons) that
* the number of vehicles (both in the US and globally) has substantially increased in number since the 1970s,
* many of the older vehicles with the poor performance are still active on roads somewhere,
* the nature of vehicle use in western countries has changed - while the efficiences for both cars and SUVs may have improved, the proprtion of SUV usage (with lesser efficiencies) has significantly increased.
I wouldn't advocate killing all humans and animals, but there's much to be said for halving the number of high consumption humans ...
Unlikely - I literally grew up cheek by jowl with traditional hunter gathers in the Kimberleys, on a personal level my consumption is well below the Australian mean, which itself is well below the central north american norm.
I'm comfortable getting by for months on end sans most things - global field geophysics was an extended jolly.
Climate Change, even if it's as bad as the aggressive models predict, is an intractable problem.
1) There are trillions of dollars in petroleum reserves in the ground. This is money in the pockets of people, e.g. Putin. They aren't going to let go of that easily.
2) China and India have no realistic pathway to zero carbon and will buy the oil that isn't bought by the G7 sustainable nations. Most of the world's population will follow them.
The only valid response is mitigation. Amsterdam is below sea level. It is far easier to detect and solve real problems than try to predict massive problems in the distant future.
In a bike-friendly country, you'd do that by bike, not by car.
Of course, if your whole world is built around owning and using a car, then doing this by bike becomes dangerous and doing this by car becomes less insane.
Then you find our you're dedicating a very large portion of the ground to those machines you use twice a day for 10 minutes - making them unfit for other purposes the remaining 23 hours and 40 minutes.
I really like driving - but I really like the outside to be fit for other things than driving as well. American suburbia falls way too far short of that.
Well, you've got to do the experiment. Move to a major European city center, with kids, without a car, and see how you like it. I tried this in Berlin, and it was quite good! Getting around on the U-Bahn with kids is so nice. You get to hang out with your kids as you travel! Having a free, walkable Kita (daycare/school) is incredible. Being able to walk to useful things like groceries, or a coffee shop, was great. Also, in Berlin they have some of the best playgrounds, and lots of them! Plus on "going out nights" you can get anywhere and back and never worry about finding a designated driver.
But yeah, would I try this in downtown LA? No, never. (Although you could argue that LA is weird because it's neighborhoods are like suburbs. Would I try this in k-town? No. You need a car, for everything.) Of course I have to admit that there is some circularity with the LA situation - no-one wants to live in the city center, so only the destitute live there, which makes it less desirable. In many places in the world, this situation doesn't apply. Would I try it in Manhattan? Maybe.
I'm the person you're replying to. My original plan was to raise kids in Manhattan. Luckily my wife talked me out of it and we moved to the suburbs.
Stories like yours are great but unsaid are things like: do your kids have a back yard to play in? How fresh is the air? Do they get to watch dad take care of a house and yard so they learn skills like that? Are they dodging shit on the street as they walk to school ( always was the case in NYC but extra bad now). Are their neighbors families with minimum two kids, or are they a much less family friendly demographic? Etc.
I used to not think about these things until I experienced the better version of these things in the burbs. The self-selection of neighbors who made the move to a family friendly location alone is a game changer
I don’t understand what EVs have to do with the need for better public transports and better alternatives.
Maybe I’m missing something but that was never my understanding for the need for EVs to replace ICE, a need based in lowering reliance on fossil fuel and decreasing air pollution.
These are still required, whatever urban policy we end up with.
I see the urgent need for improved public transports to be paramount in these goals too, so both EV to replace the billions of ICE cars and better urban transportation alternatives are needed.
I have a bold proposal for solving the streets in city crisis:
Between buildings, build an elevated walkway above the roads. With ventilation these walkways could cover a large part if not all of the area above roads. Promote social spaces, commerce areas, and open areas between buildings without sacrificing cars. Just build above them.
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 cars/roads in cities, which we’ll still need to cart the enormous amount of products and raw materials a city needs.
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.
> public transportation and alternative forms of transportation (ie, biking, walking, micro-mobility)
In the kind of cold weather that cuts EV range, per the OP? I've been there, and thanks but no thanks -- I'm too old for that shit. I'll stick to my car even if its range is reduced.
> Return the spaces occupied by parking lots, parking garages and use that space to house people.
This I heartily agree with, but it can be compatible with cars if we can get self-driving finally sorted out. Just have your car drop you off, then go out of the city to wait for you (and perhaps charge itself at the same time).
> Death to the suburban experiment.
Suburbs have different problems than cities do, but I'm not convinced they're particularly worse or more plentiful, and there are certainly other (dare I say better?) ways to solve them than abolishing suburbs outright.
Give people a way to live without constantly hearing their neighbors through the walls. Give people transit options where they don't need to fear for their physical safety. Give people a place to raise children without worrying about them picking up used needles on the street.
Give people space to be something other than interchangeable sardines in boxes in high-rise apartment buildings -- what about people who want to do woodworking, or welding, or work on cars, or hunt?
City live is only one of the valid lifestyles available to humans, and arguably it is the most unnatural, the most harmful, and the least tolerable. Change that before you call for the death of the lifestyles that other people enjoy. Otherwise, don't be surprised if "death to cities" is the response you get.
If that was true, the transit situation in SF and NYC would not be as bad as it is — and the crime in NYC in particular has been increasing noticeably, despite that city being one of the wealthiest in the world. And yes, in NYC people of all social classes take the subway.
You also betray your true intentions with words like “force”. You want to force an urban transit-based lifestyle on everyone. You don’t want people to have a choice. It’s like you want to prove all the suburban NIMBYS right in their suspicions that new housing is an intentional attempt to destroy suburbs…
MG MQ4 has an option to preheat the battery, so if you know you are going to be charging in the next 30 minutes you can turn it on to be the optimal temperature. It does drain battery faster though so best make your calculations correct.
Mass-produced consumer EVs are a relatively new tech and they will have problems for another few decades and get better because technology gets better over time (see: the past 1000 years). And I'm not a fanboy by ANY stretch of the imagination (I utterly loathe the CEO of Tesla.)
You can't judge today what an EV will be like in 50 years the same way you couldn't judge what would happen from the first Model T (1908) to the best selling car of 1958, the VW bug. I mean, safety and mileage weren't even primary concerns in `58. It was still novelty. You have to jump almost 100 years for mileage to finally get significantly better in automobiles! As well as airbags, antilock breaks, shatterproof glass, seatbelts, crumple zones, etc. EVs are nowhere near internalizing all of the issues, let alone solving them.
I think this is an opportunity to work on the problems, and not say EVs are dead because they aren't perfect. Maybe they only fill a niche in the future, and don't take over, but that's still a big deal for emissions. Hopefully the issues with lithium mining & recycling, and infrastructure, and chargers, and battery tech improves. It doesn't mean don't try to make it better. I'm glad more companies are exploring the tech.
The one area I would think is a justified complaint would be if companies were getting unfair tax-funded subsidies to produce inferior products to make their shareholders rich rather than improving their technology for society.
If companies and government doesn't want people making judgments based on their experiences then they shouldn't overhype the vehicles and charge such high premiums unless they are going to be realistic that people are essentially spending 40k or more to beta test a city commuter car.
> technology gets better over time (see: the past 1000 years)
> can't judge today what an EV will be like in 50 years
i can't wait for 50 yrs to have EV be better than ICE cars. If they aren't better _today_, i cannot switch. I would assume the majority of consumers have this attitude.
Therefore, in order to transition to EVs for environmental reasons, you either force consumers to have a lesser product by legislation, or improve EVs so that they are the natural choice to purchase.
I don't believe consumers would be willing to suck up a legislated rule that forces them to consume an inferior product, and so they would choose not to elect someone that stand for such.
Therefore, the only realistic way is to have EVs be _better_ than ICE. I think they are on the cusp today though, and soon will surpass ICE.
Musk's big win was making EVs luxury cars and having rich people subsidize his research (along with billions from the gov't). That gave him a lot of space to collect real-time research data for years.
It is interesting that you managed to use three logical fallacies in one post: a strawman, a false dichotomy, and a no true scotsman.
A strawman because you invented "legislation to have a lesser product." This is a deadly product we are talking about. It is a public safety issue. You should probably clarify what you mean by this because I only assume you referring to banning misleading labeling of dangerous products, like calling something ADAS5 that really isn't.
A false dichotomy because there are more than two choices. You can have competing products that excel at different areas in and some cases are better, depending on the context. In this space you can have "inferior" EVs (I'm imagining cases where they are inferioir, like mileage and ease of use) to ICEs and still be a choice for short commuters. You don't offer that choice, and that's just one alt, hence the fallacy.
No true scotsman because you made up the term "natural choice" to imply the answer is obvious without giving and justification: basically set it up so that whatever you decide as "natural" is the correct answer, and anything else is not a correct answer, and that can move based on your argument. This undermines the choice you give.
I can go further: consumers will absolutely "suck up" (putting aside the issues with your framing). For example I'm fine with legislation that delegates the size, speed, and efficiency of cars, and so are hundreds of millions of Americans that vote for things like this. In fact I wish there were more laws to shrink the size of vanity trucks that are simply monstrous for no reason. There are decades of evidence showing the damage that fast, huge, inefficient cars inflict on society.
EVs are a wonderful technology for a specific set of use cases, but there are many for which it is not economically or technically efficient.
You cannot beat the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels. Thermodynamic efficiency of an ICE actually increases in cold weather because you can reuse the engine heat for the passengers. In an EV you have to channel your motive fuel into electric heaters which are far less efficient than the drive motors themselves.
The current policy movements towards EV only are suicidal. We are nowhere near ready to support it. It's also discriminatory because EVs cost much more than ICEs and do not have the lifespan of ICEs. Economically disadvantaged peoples of color often depend on older used vehicles.
Yesterday, I drove my M3 from Nashville to Chicago in the sub-zero wind. Yes, range was slightly down, but not nearly enough to frustrate me.
I imagine today's battery chemistry won't be viable for mass adoption further North, but other than that, I wouldn't let it stop you. Anecdotally, every other aspect of owning the car is wonderful.
eGolf looks great with 88-111% on this chart, but it has a small battery. This car's range of 125 or 135 in warm weather is lower than the other cars', which start at 176 in freezing temperatures.
I live in a multi-unit residential coop community, and we have managed to install a 240v outlet in each of our 90 carports, and are adding more outlets in open parking areas by mounting them on simple fence-like structures. We use 240v chargers that plug in rather than being hardwired so that we can easily move them around.
We have found that a 100 AMP service can effectively serve up to about 20 EVs, so long as the chargers can communicate among themselves to manage peaks. We use all EnelX Juicebox 40A networked chargers and they have that capability.
So how can you charge so many cars effectively with a small service? It is based on load factors.
The average commute length in the US is around 15 miles one way. So most nights for most cars they only need to replenish 30 miles worth of charge overnight. So there are plenty of hours and plenty of amps to cover that.
Of course, some folks come home from a long trip and need a full 300 mile charge, while some didn’t even drive that day and need no charge—basically it all comes out in the wash.
There are other considerations, but the takeaway is that you CAN support a lot of EVs charging for modest investments if you do it smart.
The people posting here about all the aspects of EV car charging that are just so easy and convenient and present in their region, or easily applicable with a bit of effort have clearly not traveled to the other 80% of the planet that isn't the highly developed nations.
I know that technology can make surprisingly rapid inroads even into far and poorly developed corners, but this applies most of all to either easily or centrally scalable things. The requirements around EV cars are neither. I can't even imagine how quickly or easily much of this stuff will be in any way practical for hundreds of millions of people living in places where EV charging conveniences and personal garages or etc simply aren't the case at all or possible.
These péople won't give a shit about going EV "for the sake of the planet" until they can do it without being screwed in so many ways.
Some of you truly do live in pleasant little bubbles that simply don't consider the wider human world.
The truth about my EV?
In summer it gets me to work, and back, without me overheating.
In winter it gets me to work, and back, without me freezing my ass off.
The later is something my Diesel never could manage, taking about 20 miles to get temperatures above the freezing point. While my EV is nice and cozy after about half a mile.
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