I (still) don’t own an EV for various reasons, but I’m still interested. One question that keeps popping up in my mind is this one:
Where I live way up north, many people drive EVs - mostly Teslas apparently. A solid third of the parking lot at work is filled with EVs. The one thing that always strikes me when I leave work around the same time as everybody else is the sheer amount of noise of all those Teslas warming up their batteries before their owners come out to drive home make in the winter: it’s like dozens of heating cannons running at the same time.
Each time, I wonder how much juice is used just to prime the battery before use vs. actual miles traveled.
If you leave in a cold country, have you worked out how much energy you burn simply keeping the battery alive in the winter? Is your EV still more energy efficient than an ICE in the winter for your particular use pattern?
They’d almost certainly still be more efficient.
EVs are 75-80% efficient at using their electrical power.
ICEs are 15-30% efficient at using their chemical power.
Until the battery looses 45% of it’s capacity due to cold, it’s not even close.
Not to mention extremely cold climates gas doesn’t work well either. People use diseals which require electronic heaters.
It’s a niche market, but not impossible to engineer an EV with something like that.
If we’re doing that using cabin heat to heat the battery while in use would help too.
It really wouldn’t be hard to mitigate the effects of cold. There just isn’t a market to justify it yet
Gasoline works better in cold climates than diesel. But once you get around -20 to -30°C and colder all vehicles will need an engine block heater to start reliably. The oil gets too thick.
And the batteries start to freeze if they have a slight drain. So lots of the time if you don’t run your vehicle for a week or two you’ll need a new battery because the lead acids freeze and are ruined when their voltage drops.
I think it will be tricky but not impossible to mitigate the effects of extreme cold on battery life. All the cabin heat is made by the EV battery anyways right?
Your coworkers are remotely heating their interiors, so they can be more comfortable as they start driving home.
If they didn’t do this, the car would still work but they would have to sit on cold seats, like savages.
Obviously and massively.
Yes, even if the electricity was generated using a gas turbine. Running a gigantic engine at a constant RPM is always going to be more efficient than running a lot of small ones at variable RPMs. You’d have to lose a lot of energy over the wire to cause this to stop being true.
Your range will suffer due to heating the cabin though
Which country is that? I live inn Norway. Remember that ICE cars burn gasoline to heat themselves, winter and summer. Less than half of the gasoline is used for movement.
Also, you don’t have to preheat the car. The preheating is for the cabin.
