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It's so cold, Teslas are struggling to charge in Chicago
- throwitaway222 3y agoDoes Tesla have heaters on the battery packs?
- bguebert 3y agoyes
- brianwawok 3y agoYes
- roflyear 3y agoIt takes a lot of power to heat the batteries. If there is no power, can't heat them, and you can have total failure if you try and charge them when they are too cold.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoYou don't get total failure, you get an extended charging session as the car first warms the battery and then charges the car.
- Ferret7446 3y agoThe car needs enough power to warm the battery though. So what happens if the car doesn't have enough power and tries to warm the battery and runs out of power before it has warmed enough to charge?
- defrost 3y agoThis is not a new problem. Starting a Lanz Bulldog with a blow torch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHT2NE0Sukc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHT2NE0Sukc
- bryanlarsen 3y agoWhy would you need to use car power to warm the battery? If you're connected to a charger you can use charger power to warm the battery. And you can't charge if you're not connected to a charger, so charging a cold battery is impossible in that case.
- throwitaway222 3y agoThere should be a lot of power available if you're at a charger.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoMy understanding is that this particular Supercharger station is broken and either not putting out any electricity, or putting out way less than it should
- dghughes 3y agoI think battery heaters are standard and necessary on any EV battery.
- mensetmanusman 3y agonot all electric vehicles have battery heaters. Eg it's only part of the Eco pack for an Ioniq.
- Someone 3y agoThe issue at hand may be whether they keep the heaters on during charging. FTA: "A charge that should take 45 minutes is taking two hours."
- akmarinov 3y agoThey do keep the heaters during charing, unlike other manufacturers like Renault
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 3y agoBy Teslas, NPR means EVs, but Tesla is now synonymous with electric vehicles for the general public (like Kleenex is for nose improvement rectangle).
- nxm 3y agoTesla could have done better I feel in proactively informing owners of what to do/not do with this cold snap. They would have saved themselves a few bad headlines
- syntheticcdo 3y agoThe cold weather limitations and suggestions to get going are documented fairly well in the owner's manual, available both online and from within the car on the display. Don't get me wrong: I think Tesla deserves blame for a multitude of problems, but in this case blaming the manufacturer for the failure of the customer to RTFM doesn't seem fair. [1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-F907200E-A619-4A95-A0CF-94E0D03BEBEF.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-F907200...
- solardev 3y ago> It can also be tricky to open the door on the Model S with a drained battery. Under normal circumstances, the car automatically adjusts the windows to ease the process. "Always connect to an external, low voltage power supply before opening a door when the vehicle has no power," Tesla says, "to avoid breaking a window." It's such a silly situation to be in. Why couldn't they have made these with regular door handles? Edit: Oops, sorry, it's not the handles but the window design. Still, seems needlessly complicated and fragile.
- kube-system 3y agoIt's not the door handles that is the issue in that quote. It's the frameless windows. Cars with frameless windows often need to retract the window slightly when the door is opened, so that the window clears the edge of the body of the vehicle that they tuck up into when it is closed. Many other vehicles do this as well.
- voisin 3y agoFrameless windows is an example of over complicating vehicles with needless technology that inevitably breaks and really doesn’t add anything to the experience of the vehicle. I am unclear why manufacturers keep designing features like this.
- kube-system 3y agoIt is worth noting that not all vehicles with frameless windows require the glass to be retracted to clear the frame. It is mostly a cosmetic thing, but also, it is practically impossible to offer a convertible version of a car without it.
- supergeek 3y agoPretty much every car with frameless windows works the same way. The window rolls down a little bit when you open the door to clear the trim. Mini, Audi, Mercedes, Corvette, and so on. They all work the same.
- 3y ago
- charliebwrites 3y agoI have a friend who grew up in Irkutsk, Russia where, while quite a bit colder, ICE cars had to be run all night, because if they stopped running they would never start again. All machines have a failure rate at a certain (lack of) temperature. Sounds like electric is just a big higher. I hope this tech improves with time. The _real story_ here is that there appears to be a strong mismatch between supply and demand for powerful enough tesla chargers to charge cars quickly in cold temperatures. Cities/Charging companies that expect cold weather that can impact this should have a strategy to match this demand when needed, or owners should have stronger chargers to plug their cars in at home (where possible)
- nagisa 3y agoI heard the same story, but it was chiefly about equipment, and largely diesel (which is what kinda makes them okay to idle overnight as supposedly the consumption of diesel engines on idle is quite low.)
- the_third_wave 3y ago0.4 to 0.5 l/hr for a 1.6l VAG CAYC TDI as used in e.g. Škoda Octavia II. Source: one of those is currently parked in the snow in front of our house. It starts without problems and without the need for a block heater at -25°C, the coldest it has been so far this winter here. A full fuel tank (55l) will last for about 100-110 hours (4-5 days) when idling.
- bryanlarsen 3y agodupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39015954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39015954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39027696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39027696 and probably more
- anovikov 3y agoSomehow in Norway where EVs make up more than 1/3 if entire vehicle stock on the road, it's not a problem. That's a seriously cold ass country.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoIsn't most of norway's population concentrated in the southernmost part, around oslo? I would guess that electric car ownership is even more disproportionately concentrated there too. Checking wikipedia quickly it looks like oslo and chicago have similar winter temperatures, so chicago's cold snap would be an outlier for most norwegians too.
- piva00 3y agoIt's concentrated in the south, yes, but people in Trondheim, Tromsø, Narvik, etc. also have EVs, they are everywhere in the country.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoOK, I probably should have left that part out then because at a quick look it seems like they still have comparable winter temps to chicago, and chicago's recent weather would be extreme in those places as well. Norway has much milder weather than I had assumed!
- piva00 3y ago> Norway has much milder weather than I had assumed! Due to Earth's rotation affecting winds the western coasts of continents usually have much milder climate than the eastern coasts, most of Scandinavia has much milder climates than the same latitude on eastern North America. Except for the northern parts of Fenno-Scandia most places here have a quite mild temperature range during winter (I'd guess the southern 70% of Fenno-Scandia will vary between -15C to 0C throughout winter).
- stonemetal12 3y ago
- shmatt 3y agoThe media seems to be hyperfocused on one specific supercharger station in Chicago. When in reality * There are lots of other EVs and EV charging companies in Chicago * There are lots of other cold places in the US * Hell Stockholm looks colder than Chicago this week and there are plenty of electric Volvos driving around It seems that a single local news story grew into a monster for no good reason
- greenie_beans 3y agosounds like you have a problem with the way the news cycle works. i read the entire article because i thought it was interesting. never would've known about it if it stayed in the local news. also, you clearly didn't read the article, otherwise you would've read the counterpoints, like the section titled "Other Tesla drivers report no issues" love it when people complain about the media and don't read and/or apply news literacy to the article that prompts their complaint.
- soupfordummies 3y agoNow HERE'S a good local Chicago story that grew into a monster for no good reason: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/us/chicago-rat-hole.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/us/chicago-rat-hole.html
- greenie_beans 3y agothis is nice and odd, a great candidate for national coverage.
- Sanzig 3y agoI live in Quebec. A lot of people here own Teslas, but a common complaint I hear from Tesla owners is the sub-par winter reliability. It's not even the range reduction - EV owners here are prepared for that - it's the fact that the car seems to have been designed by someone in California who has never seen a winter storm in their life. A colleague had her windshield crack when the defrost was running in her driveway. Another broke the driver's side window because the window was iced shut after freezing rain and Tesla for some reason requires the window to automatically retract an inch when opening the door, which it can't do when frozen. There have been numerous reports in the media of paint peeling on brand new Teslas when exposed to winter road salt. Notably, other EV manufacturers don't seem to suffer from these issues, but Tesla is currently the only game in town for reasonable delivery times - everyone else is 12 months plus.
- alphabettsy 3y agoWindshields cracking happens on all cars, but whether or not, it happens more with Tesla I don’t know.
- voisin 3y agoCracking simply when running defrost after having parked outside overnight? I have never experienced this or heard of anyone who has experienced this.
- alphabettsy 3y agoYea. Talk to someone in glass repair or who’s worked at a dealership. Has never happened to me but did to at least one person I know.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoThe "window cracks when you open it" is very common in most frameless-window cars and not a Tesla-specific thing. Most people never notice it. How are none of these problems affecting people in Norway, where electric cars have skyrocketed to become 80% of new cars sales? This seems like just more of the old windows-breaking-in-US-built-Telsas nonsense; Norwegian Teslas are built in China.
- 303uru 3y agoThis is certainly a media frenzy and it appears to be all about a single charging station. My ICE vehicles have also struggled or refused to start in this cold.
- greenie_beans 3y agoif you read the article then you'll come across the section titled "Other Tesla drivers report no issues"
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- kaonashi 3y agoMy dad had to use some warm water in a sealed bag to get his charger to engage and disengage, seemed to work well tho.
- simonblack 3y agoIf you keep the car warm, then you'll have no problems. Temperature has a great effect on chemical reactions. Charging a car battery relies on a chemical reaction.* Cold weather -> poor charging. Just another environmental/infrastructure shortcoming that requires attention before EVs can become common enough to give economies of scale. They didn't warn you when you bought that EV that you'd need to garage it protectively enough in an insulated space to enable proper charging, did they? * Discharging a battery also relies on a chemical reaction. So same problem of poor chemical reaction arises when using that battery in cold weather to drive with.
- 99catmaster 3y agoTesla cars are live in a weird space where their tech under the hood is massively overengineered but the parts of the car you interact with are designed around an extremely minimalist borderline reductionist dogma with random capacitive touch button inconveniences sprinkled on top