To be fair, this data doesn’t adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.
Duh.
Imagine a world where EV1 kicked off the EV revolution in the 90s and 2000s, and we were living 15 years in the future.
For 90% of driving, EVs are great in the winter. Even if it only had 100mi range, and it’s so cold that it loses 40% of that, it’s still better. You can get to work, do errands, and make it home to charge just fine.
Its going to warm up the cabin faster than an ICE. Not only that, but if you know when you’re going to leave, you can set them to warm up ahead of time while still attached to the charger. You’ll pop right in to a toasty warm cabin. Once you have that, you don’t want to go back.
If the positions were swapped and ICE was a new thing, people would be writing op-eds about how cold they are for most of the drive to work.
You can, but not in a closed garage. Granted, if you had that the cabin wouldn’t be quite as cold.
I mean… just open the garage door when you start the vehicle. It’s not like the garage will instantly ice over.
It’s not really the same. My last car with remote start would only run the car for ten minutes before shutting down, which was hardly enough to warm the engine up on cold days. Meanwhile my EV fully heats the cabin in about 5 minutes and will melt a few inches of snow off the car in ten.
Also, when I run errands I leave the heat/AC on basically the entire time. Can’t really do that with an ICE even in places where it’s not illegal to idle for extended periods of time.
Those laws stopped like four people. People warm up their ICE cars in the cold. And what kind of remote start shuts off after 10 minutes? I’ve had a few cars with remote start and never even heard of this. Even if that was the case, set a 10m timer on your phone and restart it.
Yeah but I’ve only seen start ….
I went from a ln ICE car where remote start would have been a subscription item. It only started the engine, although a warm engine is the most important part of heating the car. You had to remember to set everything
My current EV has that included among many features in the app. I can schedule when the car is warm or have dedicated buttons for on and defrost. Clicking on, I have complete control over every part of the heating system, including which seats to heat.
For me it’s a much better experience, although admittedly because the car is more computerized and the manufacturer is not trying to nickel and dime me with subscriptions, and could happen in an ICE car
I’m not sure what that has to do with one car being ice and the other electric though
TBF you can turn on an ICE car and let it warm up a bit before you drive it. Some ICE cars also allow you to remotely pre-start or there are after market options so you can use an app to do exactly that. Hell, Russian far east they simply leave the car on for the cold months.
It’s just that it’s incredibly wasteful/polluting.
Some ICE cars also allow you to remotely pre-start
But you cannot do that in the garage (unless you like huffing exhaust fumes).
And if you spend a couple hundred bucks on insulation, you don’t need to preheat anything in your garage either.
The majority of garages I’ve seen have a garage door so the fumes don’t just build up in the garage.
It’s just that it’s incredibly wasteful/polluting.
Which actually makes it illegal in some countries, too
Welcome to my morning walk with the dogs every morning where its colder then 35F. Every fucking car in my neighborhood does this bullshit and when there’s little to no wind, all that exhaust doesn’t go anywhere and just sits at ground level where I get to breathe it in for an hour. It stick at the back of my throat for the rest of the day. Add to that snowblowers after even less than an inch of snow.
I can’t fucking wait for EVs to gain market share. Its fucking disgusting what my neighbors find acceptable.
The only enjoyment I find in this situation is people that back into their garages then warm up their car while still parked in their garage, spewing that exhaust into there instead of outside. I’ll never understand what brain logic leads them to that solution but it’s the same people doing it every morning.
Edit: I should add that the other great thing about people doing this is the rise of car thefts since some of these people also just turn their car on, leave the keys in the car, leave it unlocked and go back indoors because it’s cold
IIRC you can fit an ICE vehicle with an electric engine block heater which will use mains electricity to heat the water and circulate it through the engine. So you run an extension cord out to your car, leave it plugged in and turn it on half an hour before you leave.
It’s not good for the car, either. Cars aren’t meant to idle; cars are made to have all fluids moving & the car rolling down the road.
I treat my car to a gentle warm-up when it’s cold outside; I start the car & start driving, but only 20-30 mph for the first 5-8 minutes. All the components of the car are gently being used, are slowly warming up, together. I think my car runs better for it.
The peak version of this that’s kind of sold me is you can pre-condition in the garage. Like, why wouldn’t anyone want to do that.
Even phevs have this availability. Loving our Mazda cx90 for this feature. Can program their app to have it start warming 15-20 mins before my wife leaves for work and it’s ready to go and comfortable.
The whole thing about them losing range in the cold isn’t even really true unless you can’t precondition the battery. Which might be the case for people who don’t charge at home, but at the very least it’s a statement which requires qualification.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. I have a Model 3 and use it as my daily driver but have also done at least 4 cross country trips, two of which were in summer, one in spring, and one in winter.
For daily driving I can absolutely tell a difference in my range in the winter time and I do have a charger at home and car set to precondition. Preconditioning does make a big difference but it doesn’t completely offset the cold. Furthermore when it’s time to drive home from work I either have to drive on a cold battery or try to precondition without a charger.
During the recent cold snap (single digit Fahrenheit temps) I did an experiment with this where I started trying to precondition two hours before I left work. I just wanted to see how much battery it would take to precondition and ultimately test if that would be better than driving home cold. After two hours the battery was still not preconditioned sufficiently and I had used 20% of my battery. I would definitely have been better to just drive on a cold battery.
On long distance drives I have also found that the range suffers noticeably during winter weather. On my cross country winter trip it seemed like had about 15-20% less range between charges. And since I was driving all day and supercharging, the battery was fully conditioned the whole time. Didn’t prevent decreased range in the cold though.
Preconditioning only gets it ready for charging. It does almost nothing for driving except to allow the regen to work.
Lithium delivers fine below freezing, but it needs to be above freezing to accept a charge.
When you preconditioned at work for 2 hours all it did was waste battery.
XC trips when you put a supercharger as destination, it will automatically precondition to get ready to charge. And preconditioning takes away from your range.
This is just plain wrong.
We have two EV’s in Norway (cold as fuck at times) and there is no way to manage the same range in winter as in summer.
Sure you can mitigate some of it by preheating both the cabin and the battery, but the heater working harder to maintain the temperature when it’s cold outside and the added friction of driving on snow is always going to be there
The 60s era vws were notorious for never managing to produce any cabin heat.
That’s because of the design of the heater the heater actually blew air across the exhaust manifolds and then into the cabin it was frequent for that plumbing to end up with holes in it letting all that heat Escape but also letting exhaust gases into your cabin So Not only would it freeze you out but it tried to kill you and asphyxiate you with carbon monoxide
Yeah, which made them just fabulous for our favorite use for them at the time: driving around drinking. Pack that bug full of teen agers smoking and drinking and freezing and basically getting CO poisoning until somebody got sick and we all had to do an emergency exit drill.
That ain’t getting me to town for groceries at that rate.
I wanted to buy an EV, but after doing a serious evaluation of where I live and what I need to drive for distances and road conditions plus the temperatures I need it to work in, a pure EV is a no go for me. I could get by with a hybrid most of the time. But winter time road conditions can make it pretty iffy for winter and spring and uncomfortable number of times to make even that choice dicey.
Then you are truly a margin case and need to stop shoveling your irrelevant opinion into a greater conversation.
These people that come along and go “EV’s are no good cos I live 50 + miles from the nearest shop and I’m not willing to pause and let my vehicle charge for 20 mins when I am there.” They are taking the piss out of everyone by butting into conversation and making their demands.
There is a noticeable non-zero number of people who fall into that category. And you cannot simply handwave them away or the fact that for many the cost of purchase an EV simply isn’t possible yet or the infrastructure isn’t there to support such a purchase.
And YOU willfully choose to ignore those people and situations. You are no better than the clowns that state “EVs are stupid”.
First: It’s a site dedicated to electric vehicle promotion. So it might be a tiny bit biased.
Second: Their criteria was for their claim was, “13 percent of the cases with starting difficulties are electric cars”. Well, golly gosh gee, how surprising that an electric car would be easier to start in cold weather, since as long as you have any juice left in your battery, it’s gonna go. You don’t have problems like diesel fuel gelling, or oil turning into molasses. (If it gets cold enough, your battery might freeze solid, and then you have real problems.)
Finally: “[…] electric vehicles are involved in roughly 21% of all its cases so far in 2024” Given that Norway is roughly 25% electric vehicles–they don’t give the exact percentage in the article–that’s… Pretty much in line with overall percentages. It might even be high, given that EVs are more likely to be new than ICE vehicles.
If we’re going to do cars–and I don’t think that there’s a reasonable alternative that can be brought to bear in a reasonable time–then I’m all for electric. But this isn’t a great way to promote them.
Your second point is basically agreeing that electric cars are better at starting in the cold, where all you’re doing is explaining why. Maybe I missed what your second point of disagreement was.
Because the problem with ev is that the battery drains charge faster in the cold, charges slower in the cold, and struggles to charge at all if its too cold.
So if you have juice, starting is fine. But the cold problems for ev is that the cold is functionally drinking your gas for you, not that the engine cant turn over.
Fair points. I heard somewhere (probably here) that they were working on sodium solid state batteries or something. I look forward to new developments.
not that the engine cant turn over.
Funny you use this phrase, when the actual action of “turning over” isn’t something electric vehicles can even do :D
I think your second point is the point of the article, as much hate as electric cars are getting from some hick mechanics - they have a shit load less moving parts and so will generally be more reliable
The problem–aside from the god-awful build quality of Tesla in particular–has usually been software. Too much shit being done by a single central system. Yes, they should be much simpler. But instead they’ve been made much more complex.
Oh god yeah idek if a cooperation could ever properly build a car in this day, bit the raw concept should be better (Tesla’s don’t even have lidar cause elon doesnt believe in it lmao)
People seem to forget that gas cars have a battery in them too and that fails in cold weather.
Lead-acid batteries aren’t lithium ion? And the car starter battery isn’t equivalent to that of an EV?
You might as well say that I have trouble starting my gas weed wacker, therefore cars are hard to start.
You can buy a lithium car battery these days. Expensive as all get out, but you can get one.
You shouldn’t replace a different type of battery with another. The vehicle will be set up with a different charging profile and you’d need to change that as well.
All chemical reactions slow down in cold weather, including lead-acid cells. In extreme cold, everything is going to have issues. At least EVs have internal heaters that let you warm them up.
And unless you keep that EV plugged in and charging during frigid temperatures, that warming will cost you in usable mileage. And you might need a better charging system than a simple 110/120V circuit. Because that might not be enough to prevent some loss of charge.
The point is, there ain’t no free lunch here. Batteries, at the current tech, just tend to suck at low and high temps outside of their intended operating range.
I think you missed the point. EVs also have a 12v, for the same basic reason of starting the vehicle. But the bigger factor is that EVs are often plugged in, which will automatically warm the battery.
I was under the impression that the 12v also runs all the standard car electronics
Bullshit.
Tesla forums and my own experience call bullshit on this.
The 12v battery of my own M3 died less than 3 years in from sale in moderate to low cold temps in Canada (Only like -30c max)
Also, this is definitely a “…but sometimes!”: https://piped.video/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8
