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would be very interested to know if people know what the cold-weather behavior of these batteries are: i'm in montana and battery life, especially in winter, ca
by recursivedoubts 1y ago
would be very interested to know if people know what the cold-weather behavior of these batteries are: i'm in montana and battery life, especially in winter, can be a life-or-death issue and that (+ range/recharge time) is a reason a lot of folks here look at ev's skeptically, would love to hear they handle cold better
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI understand that Teslas sell [sold?] well, in Norway.
- v0976 1y agoThey used to, but Musk's hand signal and association with Trump had a serious impact on subsequent Norwegian sales.
- breve 1y agoTesla sales are suffering from the brand damage Musk has done: https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Quarters https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Q... Swasticars don't sell well. Musk needs to leave the company to give Tesla a chance to recover.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoFrom what I understand, if he did leave, the value of the stock would plummet, so it sounds like a Faustian bargain.
- breve 1y agoTesla's board of directors certainly aren't firing Musk. They don't care. They got theirs: https://archive.md/XtUhS https://archive.md/XtUhS
- bryanlarsen 1y ago> and battery life, especially in winter, can be a life-or-death issue How so? A full battery can run your seat heaters for about a month. That's a lot better than the hours of heat you'd get out of a full tank of gasoline. Not to mention that you'll never get carbon monoxide poisoning from a gasoline engine with a tailpipe blocked with snow.
- lazide 1y agoTell me you’ve never lived in a really cold climate without telling me you’ve never lived in a cold climate before.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoI've experienced -48. You?
- lazide 1y ago-40ish for a month. And -30 around that. None of the ‘answers’ address the range issues with batteries in the cold. Or how you can be totally fucked if your pack drops below a certain temp, and you don’t have enough charge to heat the pack and get home. Probably even more fucked than if your diesel tank gelled. At least you can heat it up directly if you really need to.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoYou handle it the exact same way you do on a gasoline vehicle. You never let your tank go below 50%. If you slide off the road with a low tank or a low battery you can get in trouble, so don't do that. If I let my electric car sit overnight with at least 20% charge, I know it will start in the morning, even if it was -45 overnight. You can't say that with a gasoline vehicle. It'll take almost all of that 20% to get up to temperature, but once it's up it maintains it well. And anyplace cold has ubiquitous block heater plugs. At really cold temperatures it'll barely charge on a block heater plug because it'll use all the energy keeping the battery warm, but it means you start with a warm battery and a warm car, so the range drop is massively reduced.
- chneu 1y agoPeople in Nordic countries are fine with EVs.
- ggreer 1y agoI think people are working off of outdated information. I have a 2020 Model 3 and it's been fine in subzero temperatures. Yes, range goes down by about 20%, but if anything it's more convenient than a gas car in the cold because you don't have to wait for an engine to heat up before the cabin gets warm. Also you always wake up with a full tank (so to speak) because you don't need to go to a gas station to refill. And EVs tend to be AWD, so they're easy to drive in the winter. During one snowstorm I had to help dig out trucks that got stuck, but my car was fine. Newer models have heat pumps that greatly improve efficiency in cold weather. They also have better battery chemistries that store more energy in the same form factor. Unless you live in a very remote, very cold location (eg: rural Alaska), an EV is a fine choice.
- smeeger 1y agotheres cold and theres cold
- aaomidi 1y agoEVs are already better in climates that need separate block heaters for ICE cars.
- triceratops 1y agoIs Norway cold cold? 88% of new cars last year there were EVs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- i80and 1y agoNorway is not cold: its temperature is very heavily moderated by the ocean. Trondheim's lowest mean daily minimum is 24.6 degrees F. The coldest place I could find there is Lomen, which mininums out at around 20 degrees F. I am strongly pro-EV, and think they're broadly fine in every part of the US, and having just gotten back from Norway they're 100% on the right track, but they're nowhere near comparable to even my hometown of Minneapolis (8.8 degrees F lowest mean minimum).
- Marsymars 1y agoIMO “handle cold better” is a bit of a misnomer for EVs. ICE cars are inefficient all the time because they’re converting most of their energy into heat even when it’s warm - with an EV you’re effectively just getting bonus range when it’s warm. If you developed a hyper-efficient ICE engine that didn’t generate a pile of waste heat, you’d have to actively make it less efficient in the cold, or install heating hardware and burn extra gas to power that hardware - but nobody would criticize that hyper-efficient engine for being “worse in the cold”.
- mrWiz 1y agoI might be speaking for myself, but WRT cars I’m less concerned with “efficiency” in the technical sense than with other metrics, like how far it goes on one full tank/charge/whatever, how long it takes to fill the tank/battery/whatever, and how much filling the tank/battery/whatever costs.
- Marsymars 1y agoBut the fact that it looks at first glance like an EV “doesn’t handle cold well” is directly related to its efficiency. If you lowered the efficiency of an EV by turning half of its energy output into heat all the time, you’d greatly narrow the gap between warm-weather and cold-weather performance.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoI’m in Wyoming. The Rivians do fine in the winter.
- recursivedoubts 1y agoHow far do you drive in them?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> How far do you drive in them? I drive a gas-powered Subaru because the Volvo dealership in Montana was being insufferable when I wanted a C40. My neighbour can easily go 200+ miles in the winter. (Apparently pre-conditioning is a thing.) Works fine for road trips to Missoula and Salt Lake City, for them, from Jackson.
- plandis 1y agoHow far are you driving in a typical day? If it’s less than like 100 miles (161km) I think that the vast majority of EV batteries are going to get you where you want to go, even with 25% reductions due to cold weather. FWIW, the American average is around 36 miles/day. There is a semi famous YouTuber named Hank Green that lives in Montana and daily drives an EV. He occasionally makes videos about his experience.
- recursivedoubts 1y agoproblem isn't daily driving, but rather than everything is very spread out here and it's common to have to drive 500+miles round trip once or twice a month (especially w/youth sports) we typically have at least five 1000+ mile trips in a summer the gas/diesel infrastructure and refill times make it the most viable option for now, but i'm hoping that changes w/solid state technology