3 ms·
IMO “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 wh
by Marsymars 1y ago
IMO “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.