Generally you get a big drop in efficiency on short trips, but once the car heats up it's not such a big difference. This means that in practice, cold is not us

Generally you get a big drop in efficiency on short trips, but once the car heats up it's not such a big difference. This means that in practice, cold is not usually a big problem: if you're going on short trips you have plenty of extra battery capacity anyway since you're not driving that far, so the efficiency drop doesn't matter so much, and if you're going on a long trip then most of your driving time will happen after the car has warmed up, so the average loss in efficiency over the total duration of the trip is not that big.