On Monday, the Canadian Automobile Association — think AAA but with maple syrup — published the results of its recent round of cold weather EV testing. The premise was fairly simple: Take 13 EVs, put them in temperatures ranging from around 20 degrees Fahrenheit to five degrees Fahrenheit, then test both their DC fast charging capabilities and real world range when temperatures get frosty. While we’ve seen plenty of cold weather range tests before, a cold weather charging test is novel, especially considering the use of portable DC fast charging equipment from the same company for each car.
As far as cold weather DC fast charging went, American EVs performed fairly well in this test. The Chevrolet Silverado EV was a dominant force, averaging 233 kW, but the Ford F-150 Lightning, Chevrolet Equinox EV, and Tesla Model 3 all performed reasonably well, averaging 128 kW, 100 kW, and 96 kW during testing. On the other hand, the Ford Mustang Mach-E with the long-range battery pack brought up the rear for America by averaging 85 kW or 56.6 percent of its peak rating of 150 kW.
European electric vehicles also performed fairly well in this test, with the Volkswagen ID.4 Pro averaging 104 kW, or 61.2 percent of its peak rating. The Polestar 2 and Volvo XC40 Recharge diverged on average charging kW despite sharing an architecture, with the former averaging 94 kW and the latter averaging 87 kW.
In contrast, a bunch of Korean EVs, notably the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia Niro Electric, and Kia EV6, floundered pretty hard in average DC fast charging speed. The Ioniq 5 averaged 80 kW in this test, the EV6 85 kW, and the Niro just 36 kW. Is this just a case of the chargers not being optimized for Hyundai and Kia’s 800-volt architecture? Not quite. See, the Niro EV runs a 400-volt architecture, and the Kia EV9, another E-GMP car with an 800-volt architecture, managed to pull an average of 136 kW. Considering the Ioniq 5 and EV6 are both capable of charging peaks north of 220 kW, and that CTV News reports that all vehicles in the test save for the Tesla Model 3 were hooked up to 350 kW chargers, these results certainly raise a few eyebrows.
However, the big losers of the cold weather DC fast charging test were the Toyota bZ4X and the Honda Prologue, albeit for very different reasons. As CAA put it, the “Honda Prologue was not included in the charge test as it encountered an error and data was unavailable.” Oh dear. On the other hand, the Toyota bZ4X averaged a measly 33 kW in this test, which isn’t particularly fast at all. CAA found it added just 11.8 miles of range in 15 minutes, and required 92 minutes to charge from 10 to 80 percent in winter conditions.
So how do these figures compare to those seen in other conditions? Well, it’s time to give a shoutout to Out Of Spec Studios, because they’ve consistently been testing DC fast charging curves for years, and their data offers up some excellent points of contrast. While we are talking about different equipment and different conditions here, the weather outside isn’t the same all year round, and contrasting these two data sets shows just how much DC fast charging performance can change depending on external factors.
Take the Hyundai Ioniq 5 for example. In Out Of Spec’s testing, it started at 93 kW with the state of charge at zero, ramped all the way up to 256 kW at 41 percent, then didn’t drop below 90 kW until state of charge reached 81 percent. Likewise, Out Of Spec’s testing of a Kia EV6 AWD showed it ripping up to north of 200 kW, not dropping below 90 kW until the state of charge reached 87 percent. As for the F-150 Lightning, apart from a weird trough at precisely 22 percent state of charge, it didn’t consistently fall off below 130 kW until 45 percent state of charge in Out Of Spec’s testing.
So what have we learned here? Well, temperature matters, EV charging equipment matters, and performance in the winter probably will see a decline over fair weather performance. As it stands, if you live in a place that gets winter and have access to Level 2 charging at home or at work, you probably don’t have to worry about DC fast charging all the time. However, if you live in a place that gets winter and can’t charge at home, consider that it might take longer to DC fast charge an EV in the winter before you sign on the dotted line.
Top graphic image: Ford
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I mean, we already knew this from the big charging backup that happened in Chicago last year (I think) when it got super cold. In that case, it was exacerbated by the fact that all of the cars pre-conditioning their batteries got tripped up when they couldn’t immediately start charging on arrival, so they sat and cooled down and then had to start over when they finally got connected.
I’m going to start explaining to Canadians, how American things are compared to Canadian things since you do the opposite.
When a Canadian will ask me what Starbucks is, I’m gonna say think Tim Hortons just more expensive and racist.
Thanks for playing the stereotype game, we will too.
Another question to ask is how much efficiency is lost on the chargers themselves in the colder weather.
Plugging in a DCFC as a destination will automatically precondition the battery. Even down below 20% SoC.
If possible, charging immediately after driving is advised to use less energy. Cleaning out the garage is also advisable. The heat loss won’t be as severe.
I wish my bolt had an option to manually precondition the battery for DCFC, the closest we can get is if we can drive 80 mph uphill for a decent stretch before plugging in…
There are aftermarket Tesla accessories like the S3XY Dial or S3XY Buttons that can be set to do that. Not sure if the Bolt has something similar.
I think it’s important to note that EVs warm up their batteries to prepare for charging which significantly helps. My Mach E is awful at charging if I don’t precondition. But in road trip conditions where the charger is plugged into the navigation, the car heats the battery up to 120F and it’s a moot point
So it’s helpful to know how slow it can be, but it’s also helpful to know that the cars have systems to mitigate it
Sloppy reporting of someone else’s results, without showing much understanding of the issues or offering anything useful. There are good data on how to manage EV charging in the cold, through to how much range is lost at cold temperatures, to anecdotes of how users manage the challenges. Why no go through a lot of it and synthesize something useful for your readers next time Tom? There’s a learning curve to operating an EV well, and one of the things to learn about is optimal charging practices during cold weather. .
I grew up in the Canadian prairies and worked in the north. Day to day people would plug in their ICE cars at home and at work, or at the hotel on a work trip. Those who didn’t plug in often weren’t able to start the car. Even some who plugged in couldn’t start on a cold morning, especially with a diesel or if the starting battery on the vehicle was less than excellent. Are we forgetting this in order to dunk on EVs?
The tests were run above 0F. If you’re trying to operate a vehicle in a climate where your ICE car won’t start without a block heater (-30F??), an EV on an L2 charger wouldn’t be able to keep itself warm enough to accept any charge. So if the ICE can work and the EV can’t in those climates, hell yea we’re dunking on EVs.
There’s a short and a long term solution to EV ownership in cold climates.
Short Term. Put heated huts around Level 3 chargers. They aren’t like gasoline pumps where the fumes would cause problems inside of a building, put them inside of something. Even an insulated tent. So drivers can pull in to a 60 deg room, hook up and get the full speed charge. Actually, this sort of thing would be good for really hot climates as well. (Some sort of environmentally controlled shelter might be a cheaper solution to charging companies than figuring out how to make the darn thing work from a cold winter day where the sun won’t actually come up, to working on a hot day in a place like the UAE where 50 deg C isn’t abnormal.)
Almost all current EV owners I know charge in their garage. So, the only time cold weather charging would be on longer trips where Level 3 charging would be used.
The long term solution is at work Level 2 chargers. Most people park a car in an employee parking lot for 7-8 hours a day when they commute. If these parking lots had Level 2 charging, then it would be basically the same for people that can’t park in a garage. It would even be an advantage for those that have garages, because the heating and defrost systems could be fired up 30 minutes before you left work while still connected to the Level 2 charger.
The heated hut idea is clever but to be a Devil’s advocate, using energy to heat a building to charge EV’s certainly negates some of the environmental benefits.
The winter EV issues in Canada has given me pause in considering one, though I do know some folks who have an EV as a DD. I do quite like the idea of an EREV and will probably go that route eventually.
EVs can condition their battery for charging, so the only time you’re stuck with slow charging is if you aren’t expecting to need to charge. So there’s no reason you couldn’t still DD one in a cold climate
Sorta. the conditioning uses battery and reduces range. A close friend just drove up to see me and complained that he had to stop his tesla from conditioning the battery so he would actually have enough range to get to the charger. Also, it can get cold enough that the conditioning can’t keep up. That’s what bricked a bunch of Teslas when it got real cold last year.
So there are still challenges.
That’s surprising his car did that. My Mach E tends to be spot on with its range predictions when preconditioning since the heater uses a predictable draw of electricity, I would have thought Tesla would have been the same way
oh, it’s predictable that’s why he turned it off. He wanted to get to a certain charger and not 10 miles short in the middle of nowhere.
His case is an interesting one. If he doesn’t condition, then he can make it to my house with one charge stop in the middle. If he lets it condition he will have to stop and charge twice. The last time just for like 20 miles worth of range.
But that’s the kind of stuff you still need to deal with sometimes in the cold.
What “bricked” a bunch of EVs last year was Uber drivers renting vehicles they didn’t understand.
They didn’t precondition so when they plug in the car doesn’t show that it is charging because it is warming the battery first to allow the charge. So the driver moves to another and throws the plug of the first charger in the snow bank ….. And then finds the same issue.
The issue is battery temp. A heated hut would take ages to get the batter up to temp after coming in out of the cold. Rather than heat a hut 24hrs a day it would be more efficient and more effective to heat the individual batteries prior to charging.
Is it only the battery? Regardless, I would think that huts in the heat would be useful as well. I know power distribution has problems with heat in almost any setting, so having an Air Conditioned place would help it.
Actually, given that the hottest places tend to be dry areas, I wouldn’t go with an AC. I go with evaporative heat if a water source could be located. Just a roof and some misters that turn on when a car pulls in can drop the temp by a LOT.
Yeah it’s basically just the battery. It’s slow because it’s cold sunk. Warm air outside won’t really make a dent in it and the charger itself doesn’t care about air temp
If there’s anything I’ve learned from living in a rental once with electric heat (never again), is that it’s wildly inefficient and massively expensive to heat an interior with electric heat.
I had a rental with electric heat as a grad student. Kept it at 10°C when I was home alone. Good wool socks and a sweater came in handy.
I’ve learned a lot more than I want to about heat pumps in the last couple years. One of the surprises is that my new tech heat pumps don’t use strip heaters to heat the air in the house. They heat up the air around the coils. The heat pump efficiency is high enough that the cost of running a heat pump during a cold snap with 10-20 deg F weather wasn’t anything nearly as expensive as the old heat pumps trying to use electric heat strips to keep the house warm. Oh, and the big surprise was that we could keep the house in the 70s (again F) with the temperature below 10 deg F.
Heat pumps are far, far more efficient than your typical electric baseboards, yes. And my understanding is that some EVs use heat pumps in an attempt to limit the drain associated with running heat. Though that obviously drives the price up.
I was looking at the Volvo EX30 yesterday, The base model uses regular resistive heating while higher trims use a heat pump. I think my Ioniq 5 uses a heat pump, but winter weather still kills the range between defrosters, wipers, lights, seat and steering wheel heaters, etc.
There’s never anything like a free lunch. If it’s icy out and you don’t want it to be icy inside the vehicle as well, it takes so energy. And that energy has to come from somewhere. On an ICE vehicle, you have waste heat being generated to heat the car. But for an EV, that heat has to come from electricity stored in the battery.
Engineers can make it more efficient to heat up the interior, but it still is going to impact range.
I’m fine with it, but the hit is significant in my case. In the summer the estimated range is close to 300 miles, in winter it is almost 100 miles less. Both ranges are perfectly suitable for our use and leave plenty of headroom for getting stuck in a snow storm and crawling slowly home.
A lot of the range hit is that batteries are just plain inefficient when they’re cold, so it may heat them efficiently, but for the half hour that takes, you’ve already driven a long distance and killed your range. If you have a pre heat function with a heat pump it’s not bad at all
Modern heat pumps for homes are dramatically more efficient than older ones. My house was built in the early 80s. In 2020, the heat pump died and the repairs required was almost the cost of a new unit.
My electricity bill was $500-600/month with the old unit. The new unit has dropped my bill down to $150-250/month. I’ve freed up a 40A 240V circuit it draws so much less power. Honestly, I wasn’t interested in EVs before then, but now I have a circuit doing nothing that would be really easy to connect to an EV.
Now, if only someone made an EV that fit my needs… I can see the Buzz as a potential, but it needs a bit more range and I want to see if VW reliability with EVs is good or not before spending that sort of money.
Electric heat strips aren’t heat pumps, they’re resistive heaters. It’s a completely different technology. Heat pumps work like air conditioners in reverse, using an evaporation and condensation cycle to move heat from one place to another. Resistive heaters just pump a bunch of current through a wire to make it hot.
Basically a resistive heater is generating heat, a heat pump is just moving it around, which is why it’s so much more efficient. It’s definitely unintuitive that you can move heat from a colder area to a warmer one, but that’s also what an air conditioner does. Physics is cool. 🙂
Years ago, if it got too cold, emergency heat would kick in. This was heat strips that would go back to old school electric heat. My old unit had 60A for the strip heaters and 40A for the heat pump. During the winter when it dropped below something like 30 deg F, that 60A draw would kick in.
My new unit draws 30A for the heat pump and only 25A for the strip heaters. It’s more efficient to heat up the air around the coils a bit to bring the air around the coils up to above 30 deg F so the heat pump becomes efficient enough to work again. It almost sounds like magic.
Ah, I see. So you had both types before and after the replacement, but the new one uses the resistive heating less often.
uses it differently. Heat pumps don’t work when the outside air is below something like 40 degrees. My old system would try to heat the house from say 20 to 65 degrees. My new system tries to heat the heat pump air from 20 to 40 degrees. It does some stuff with the fan speed and other tricks to keep the heat pump thinking it’s in a 40 deg day rather than a 20 deg day.
Feels like some sort of magic, but it works.
There are some new heat pumps that will heat in lower temperatures. I think there’s a line of mini-splits from Mitsubishi that will heat to well below zero.
Only inefficient if you use resistive heat. Almost all new EVs use heat pumps now, even the new Mach E. Though some are using very inefficient heat pumps but that’ll work itself out in a few years
The charge speed isn’t from the air temperature at the charger being slow, it’s from the battery itself being cold. EVs have a precondition function where they heat the battery up on the way to the charger and then they pull normal speeds, so the issue is already addressed by manufacturers. This test was just saying what happens when you don’t precondition
These huts sound like a great idea.
I’m sure homeless won’t move into them and sell the charging cables for scrap.
If it’s cold enough or hot enough that an EV needs to be climate controlled to charge, I don’t mind if the Homeless use them. Just as long as the don’t pee in it.
Question. How do the Homeless get so much Asparagus? I can tell where they are setup by the smell of their pee. Which reeks in a way that mine only does when I ate a pound of asparagus.
They tell me there are bands of tariff-dodging homeless migrants stealing Asparagus. They had been stealing eggs, which is why the prices have shot up. Very bad. Very bad.
The eggs explain a secondary smell that I can detect by the homeless shelters.
It’s a mess. It’s a smelly, smelly mess in our liberal-run cities. Very smelly. Very bad.
This, and other cold weather related issues are the major barrier to EV adoption up this way. If any of these manufacturers actually want to sell in cold climates (not sure they actually do) they need to get out ahead of the current sentiment that EVs don’t work in cold weather, pronto. I know many people who are interested, but won’t touch an EV until someone thoughtfully addresses some of the issues that come with operating an EV in a real winter. But even if progress is made to mitigate these issues, public perception may be too hard to overcome.
People keep saying that EV’s don’t work in Winter, but Norway has something like 85% of all vehicles as EV’s. Little colder there than here.
Norway isn’t that cold. Bergen has an average January daytime temp of 3°C. Going further up the coastline Bodo has an average daytime high of 1°C. The warm current keeps Norway pretty mild. Certainly warmer that most of Canada outside of B.C.
Yeah, while I wouldn’t say Norway is a warm place, their weather is far more consistent; they don’t see the typical extremes of the continental climates we have in much of North America.
Honestly it’s a pretty solid place for EV adoption, especially in places like Oslo and Bergen.
This is true, but most of the population in Norway is in the south around Oslo and Bergen, cities that don’t see temperatures as low as the Midwest or Northeast. Not to mention most of Canada.
And for the northern regions, I can’t imagine it would be too impossible to build out the infrastructure, as there’s basically one main highway (E6) that cuts through most of that region. We’re not talking endless expanses of plains or mountains here. And even there the temps are warmer than in much of upstate NY. Tromso is practically at the 70th parallel and it’s still warmer than it is here. Hell, it’s raining there right now.
EVs can precondition their batteries for charging which renders this moot. This test is simply seeing what happens when you don’t condition the battery for charging, and they really should have noted that in the article
I’m hoping someone brings sodium ion batteries to the US as an option for cold weather spots- https://insideevs.com/news/741405/catl-sodium-ion-battery-temp/. I don’t care to have any more range than the 200 some miles from our bolt, just faster charging and more spots to charge, but having a battery that works well in the cold would be huge. The bolt will start and drive without issue after sitting out all night, unplugged in -20F temps, but certainly burns through the battery once the battery heater kicks on below about 15F. It doesn’t matter too much for driving locally, but longer trips in the winter could certainly be improved.
If manufacturers are serious about capturing more than warm climates, they’ll have to attempt to offer something like that. An EV would make for a great second car for our family at some point, but as it stands I’m not accepting the compromises that are mostly a result of our seemingly endless winters.
I don’t know your circumstances, but you might be surprised that the EV limitations aren’t that bad if you don’t treat it like in ICE vehicle, I certainly was. I initially got the Bolt as a commuter several years ago, and now it’s our 4th winter since we moved up into the mountains, and it is our primary vehicle. Our other vehicle, an old Jeep, generally is used only a handful of times a winter to pull stuck vehicles out the snow, and this winter hasn’t moved since before Thanksgiving at this point. Our avg temps for this time of year are below 0F lows, and below freezing highs, and we only have avg lows above freezing for 3 months in the summer, 10-15 feet of snow from sept/oct to may, and we’ve done just fine with the Bolt parked outside in the driveway, charging off a normal 110V outlet. There’s certainly a learning curve and adjustments, but as a 2nd vehicle, it could be just fine, especially if you have a garage that stays above freezing. I certainly wouldn’t recommend a Bolt to anyone driving long distances across the northern tier in winter regularly, but for local use in the cold, we haven’t had any major issues.
“Learning Curve” and “Adjustments” are charitable ways of saying “PITA” and “Inconvenient”. The bottom line is you’re asking consumers to adopt a product that can’t do what the previous model did with ease. Going backwards performance-wise is a real hard sell for most people.
No, it just means it’s a different product, that 95% of the time is more convenient to use, at least for us. There’s nothing wrong with a learning curve, unless people are complete against doing anything new, but that’s a problem with the people who are unwilling to learn.
We have this issue where I work our trucks will refuse to charge if they have been sitting all night in the cold and the battery is to high of a charge. This also causes issue because the batteries won’t warm up enough to start running. Thought this winter they have had the trucks up in a cold room between the US and Canada border that gets to below -32C so maybe they will learn to fix these issues but then again they won’t be using that battery supplier after these paper release trucks as it was bought out by a competitor.
I wonder if those Hyundai/Kia were sitting in the cold unplugged before hitting the road or did not have a DC Fast Charger as destination in the native maps to warm the battery. I noticed a big difference in my mi/kWh consumption if I have the car plugged overnight and remote start before leaving vs just sitting in the cold (Even regen does not work the same way).
The Silverado EV I have as loaner is insane, that battery takes very long to charge in a Level 2 charger. I just arrived to work with 70% at 7AM and it will reach 85% by 1PM
What? Silverado EV has a 205 kWh battery. 15% should be 30.75 kWh (assuming linearly charging, which in that 70-85% range should be close enough). I’ll round it down to 30 kWh for easier numbers. That means you are getting ~5kW from that level 2 charger, which is garbage. Level 2 “should” be somewhere between 7kW and 19kW.
It depends on the temp. There is a temp at which the battery won’t even charge. If the onboard battery heating can’t warm it up enough to get to a charging level that meets the demand of the heating system you will actually drain the battery trying to charge it. It’s what bricked a bunch of Teslas last year when we had 2-3 days with highs in the negatives (f).
Yeah they definitely should have noted the ability to condition the battery in the article and that this was testing what happens when you don’t condition
Eh if you’re charging overnight at home does this really matter at all?
A lot of us travel to family, then stay with said family where plug-ins may not be an option.
YES.
Most people want a vehicle that can do it all (thus one of the reasons that SUVs are popular now). Part of “doing it all” is trips.
For example, Like a lot of people, dogs are part of the family. If we went on a beach vacation at a dog friendly beach, our Black Lab would have more fun than the entire rest of the family combined and I expect a major part of our fun would be watching him. Which is better than not having him along and knowing he’s depressed wondering where his family is.
I can take MY car and have a wet dog pile into it covered in sand. It will make a mess and it will be a pain to clean, but that’s part of the price of admission to a beach anyway, just now with fur. But tell a rental car agency that you packed a 90 lb pile of happy fur in their vehicle and you are in trouble.
You can precondition batteries for charging, the article should have mentioned it
Not sure how that effects a wet dog at the beach, but ok.
I meant to reply to the other guy
Might be the same guy, different thread. It’s all good.
Most US households have 2 or more vehicles. Every car doesn’t have to do everything. My wife and I have been pairing an EV with hybrid or other gas car since 2016 with no issues with weather.
The EV does the most miles per year and has the lowest cost per mile
Yeah, but it still doesn’t make much sense to me.
Instead of paying for an ICE vehicle and an EV, get a PHEV. Drive around town in an EV and drive distances with an ICE. One car payment instead of two.
People have 2 cars for a reason. An EV for the second vehicle might work for them, but if they rarely have a vehicle they only drive on the weekends for trips and the primary vehicle also is driven regularly during the week.
Most US households have more than 2 cars because they have a car for every adult. Two people = two cars. So you aren’t buying 2 cars instead of 1.
It is 2 PHEVs or 1 EV + 1 ICE.
Why would I choose an 1 EV + an 1 ICE instead of 2 PHEVs? PHEVs are less efficient in EV mode than a pure EV because they are carrying around an engine and all the systems that go with it. A PHEV is less efficient than a regular hybrid because it is carrying around a bigger battery. It is a jack of all trades but master of none. They also have the maintenance costs and complications of a gas car.
A PHEV could be a good choice for a single person that only has one car- but again – most families have more than one car.
Not every car has to do everything. People that tow a 5th wheel generally don’t have every vehicle in their household a dually truck because they tow. They buy a vehicle for towing and other vehicles that fill other needs.
Same with EVs. I don’t need every car we own to be able to easily drive 500 miles and then fill up in 5 minutes. It works just fine for us for me to drive our Bolt back and forth to work and my wife drives the Acura back and forth to work. On a typical work day our vehicles combined average about 75 mpg – 30 mpg for her Acura and 120 mpge for my Bolt. For local and regional trips we drive the Bolt. For long trips we drive her Acura. We pick to car to match the trip. We drive the EV more because it is far cheaper to operate per mile vs a gas car or even a hybrid. The Bolt costs 2.25 cents per mile for electricity. The Prius we had before cost 7 cents per mile for gasoline.
As to purchase cost we can look at the Kia Niro where it is available in 3 powertrains:
$27K = Hybrid
$35K = PHEV
$40K = EV
It is cheaper to buy the Hybrid + the EV ($67K) vs two of the PHEVs ($70K)
I also personally also don’t like the idea of cycling a PHEV battery every day. I would rather use 15% of an EV battery in a day than 90% of a PHEV battery to go the same 30 miles.
Each family is different with different situations. Thinking of two classic cases that I have lived both as a kid and an adult.
In either case, for daily life, two EVs would be the most efficient. But without a good charging network, this means that they lack a long range vehicle.
But wait, there’s more. One of those two vehicles is likely the better vehicle for trips (larger, more comfortable whatever). Since it is used for trips AND around town, it goes significantly more distance than the other. For me, the split has always been about 60/40 to 70/30 between 2 vehicles.
That higher usage vehicle that is used more should be the focus for efficiency upgrades. Since it has to be used for around town AND highway, a PHEV is a perfect fit*. While as for the lower usage vehicle, efficiency upgrades aren’t critical and it would be better to spend more money on the primary vehicle to improve the efficiency. But an EV would be a great fit here if budget allows.
* TODAY, a PHEV is a perfect fit. However, we aren’t far from an EV working well for both applications.
The only time I’ve seen what you describe were one or the vehicle could be used based on application would be when my parents retired. They drove all over the place together. In this case, an EV for around town and a Hybrid for trips would have made sense for them as a pair. Except they realized they only needed one car pretty quickly. And in this case, a PHEV would have made more sense for them (but both stopped driving before EVs and PHEVs became common.)
It all comes down to your life and your lifestyle. IFor, me, I can see going EV for one vehicle (the primary, since we are really close to that being practical) and not for the other. In my case, it’s my house that is the limiting factor. Long story short, I can park one vehicle in a garage and the other in a gully that fills with water during heavy rain storms (in the Spring that happens twice a week). I don’t want to be ankle deep in water playing with electrical cords. I’m sure it is safe if done right, but I don’t want to find out it was done wrong the hard way.
I don’t know about you but I do a lot more driving in the 0 – 300 mile range than over that. Even when we had a 2016 Spark EV with an 82 mile range we were driving it 8,500 miles per year just commuting and running errands around town. It never left the city limits. Meanwhile the gas car was driven about the same mileage.
Now with the Bolt with a 200 – 300 mile range (depending on season) that EV mileage has jumped to 12,000 per year while the gas car has dropped to 6000. Simply – if the trip is within the EV range we drive the EV. The Acura is only used for my wife’s commute and rare trips over about 300 miles. If we had an EV that charged faster than 50 kW we would driving the EV even more.
One thing that seems a bit different with my wife and I is that we are not emotionally attached to one car or another. We don’t have “my” car and “her” car. We each drive the car that makes the most sense for the trip and we maximize miles driven in the EV because it cost so much less per mile.
It seems a lot of couples I know aren’t like that. They only drive “their” car and pay for cars out of separate budgets or even buy cars without consultation with each other. They act like they are single but just happen to be living together instead of married.
It has little to do with her and my vehicle. It has to do with need.
I NEED two vehicles. One can be optimized for commuting so a low range EV could do that service. But the other needs to have more room in addition to having range and easy refueling/ recharging.
Normally, 5 days a week, my wife goes one way and I go the other. She needs a vehicle and I need one at the exact same time, which is why ultimately we have two cars. As such, the roomier vehicle is also being used for short distance driving most of the time.
However, the last 3 months have been weird. I had significant surgery in December and wasn’t cleared to drive until mid January. I was just cleared to go back to work.
So, for a month, both my wife and I have been driving but I haven’t been going to work. During this time, only one vehicle has been driven at the same time. If my wife needs to do something, I stay home and visa versa or we go together..
I am looking at retiring in about 10 years. Until this month, I assumed we would need two reliable vehicles, one for each of us. But now I know a SINGLE vehicle would do everything we need.
Of course, 10 years is a long time from now and a ton will likely change. But if I was retiring now, I would be looking at replacing my two current older ICE vehicles with a SINGLE PHEV vehicle, since the PHEV would do both around town trips and long trips well and I wouldn’t want to have the expense of having two vehicles since we would only NEED one.
(although I would want a second vehicle as a toy.)
My wife and I retire in 130 days. 10 years goes faster than you think
Congrats. I HOPE to retire in 10 years. But I’ve seen a lot of companies force early retirement, and I’ve also seen times of the market crapping out delaying a retirement. We will see what we will see.
One interesting thing is that this might make me change who I buy a car from. My current fleet is a 21 and 18 year old Toyota. Both are starting to show their age, but still good vehicles. My wife wants to replace them with Toyotas when they drop for obvious reasons.
But I’m not too sure. I expect that in 10 years or so, there will be a major change in my life due to retirement. It is likely that my vehicle needs/wants will change as well. As a result, I don’t know if I need to have a vehicle that lasts 20+ years. Why not get a vehicle that fits my life/budget/desires better? Even if I fear it won’t last much more than 10 years.
Am I talking myself into a Land Rover? Not yet…
ASE certified hybrid/EV tech, some notes for nerds (most of you reading this article are nerds, admit it…)
1. Batteries have a C rating that expresses their charge and discharge rate (1C is equal to the battery’s capacity in kw per hour.) there is a rate for discharge (power output) and charge (regen braking or plugging in). The rating is based on a standardized temperature and atmospheric pressure.
A. Cold batteries flow slower. Think of maple syrup, when it’s hot it’s less viscous and easier to stir. Electrons have a hard time “stirring up” when cold.
B. When charging a cold battery, some of the energy use actually diverts to the battery thermal management system to pump more heat in until the battery reaches a temperature where it’s self-heating due to charging losses. (Losses are minimal in terms of the actual efficiency or watts stuffed in to watts stored).
2. If you set a charging station as your destination or stop along your route, *most* EVs will preheat or precool the battery for optimal fast charging. Some (mainly AAOS cars) will not do this unless the charging stop was automatically calculated on your route when navigating with google maps built in. But charging speed ramps up quickly even if the car isn’t “ready”.
3. Most cars fast charger at 100kw or more at a bare minimum, with most hitting 170-200kw. With average efficiency and pack size, this gets your battery from 20% to 80% in under 20 minutes.
4. Any high courage battery will charge substantially slower when below 15% or over 80% state of charge. This is intentionally managed by the car’s battery management module to ensure the safety and longevity of the battery. The slower charge rate gives additional time for the electrons to flow and balance between the battery’s individual cells and even within the film of the cells themselves. At low % this prevents “hot spots” in the whole assembly with localized areas of high charge. At high % this limits the thermal losses and keeps any significant safety overhead to prevent thermal runaway.
So modern EVs will pre-warm the battery to improve charge speeds when they know they’re heading to a fast charger. In a road trip situation that should maintain charging speeds at near-optimal, less the additional energy needed to heat the pack. Going to a DC fast charger immediately after a long cold soak is definitely not ideal and hopefully not a usual use case.
How much heat is generated during normal highway use? Might that be enough with better insulation?
Not enough to make much difference. My Mach E heats the battery up to 120F for charging. Highway driving by itself only warms it up to 60F and that makes a big difference on super cold days. Thankfully I’ve only ever had to charge once in the cold where I wasn’t able to precondition
And if the charger was inside of a heated building, then the entire problem with that end would be solved as well.
Dummy question, but a lot of Canadian ICE cars are outfitted with block heaters. In terms of inconvenience, isn’t slower charging of EVs basically an analogy to that? Just part of dealing with the hassles of the climate. Similarly, if the batteries aren’t “smart self-heating” prior to use, then there’s a good case for something like a Nest thermostat or something.
Sure but being cold in the car vs not driving the car. Our lyriq definitely loses range and slows down in the colder weather, if I had to take it somewhere to charge I would absolutely not bother but charging in our parking garage means it’s a minor inconvenience for daily use at best.
I don’t think the conditions of the test, 5 to 20 deg F, are really block heater territory. We see those kinds of morning temps in central Mass all through Jan and Feb.
I’m always thinking about getting a used low range EV for little trips, like driving the kids to the bus stop that’s a mile or so away but wonder just how much the battery would drain down on a winter morning just doing that trip.
EVs definitely rely more on preheating than gas cars. With the preheat function, it really limits range loss in winter to a manageable amount, and if you precondition the battery before charging you get normal charge speeds
What is this cold you people speak of? It was cold today. 63 here in San Jose. Freezing? That’s why you drive to the mountains so you can experience it.
Hey now! Sometimes there’s a frost!
“Tested them from 20 degrees F to five degrees F”
OK, enough with the summer testing, let’s bring on the cold!
Disclaimer: I don’t feel like I can make cliche Canada jokes anymore without the disclaimer that we love you guys and are really sorry for the hassles lately.
One day soon we’ll all be sitting around in an igloo together, hiding our Timbits, Molsons, and first-pressing Rush vinyls from the polar bears attacking us.
What, no Tim Horton’s Maple Poutine surprise?
I’m out!
Native Minnesotan here. 20 F to 5 F may not be summer, but it sure isn’t the worst of winter. What happens at -20F?
The mass transfer of lithium from cathode to anode and vice versa comes nearly to a halt and the car is bricked. That is unless it has enough juice to keep itself warm or is plugged in. In some cases, even Level 2 charging doesn’t have enough energy to keep the battery from cooling off. So if you go on a trip for a few weeks in the winter and leave your EV in the Fargo airport parking lot unplugged, you could be in for a rotten homecoming.
Thanks for the details. And LOL on the Fargo airport reference, I flew out of there quite often years ago.
I have an EV, and I deal with this… but it just goes to show how far they really are from being truly market ready. I own my house and installed a charger in it, which is great, but it would be completely unusable if I didn’t. I’m willing to put up with things, and I’m happy I am, but it’s also not my only car…
The truth. I love my ioniq 5, but if you can’t home charge, evs don’t make sense.
What EV do you have? Almost all of them warm the battery up for charging if you put the charger into the navigation so this isn’t an issue
It’s a Model 3, and yes, we do that when we need to charge, but the battery warming process saps up a good amount of power that further diminishes your already diminished range in the cold. Like yeah, it helps charge time, but it’s another strike on the range, so there’s still these inherent issues
That’s where my Wife and I are. We have an EV and an ICE. We have a garage with a level 2 charger. If we didn’t have all those things then I’m not sure we would be willing to deal with the hassle. But with all those things it’s really no issue at all.
It does increase charge time. If the battery is cold soaked all night under 30 degrees and you immediately go to charge it will just warm the battery when you plug in and can take a while to even begin charging. That is not a likely scenario though.
When I fast charge after a shorter drive it adds like 5 minutes to charge time. Obviously for other cars it can vary quite a bit.
Modern EVs have thermal management so it can be an issue in some scenarios and undoubtedly extends charging times, but this is another likely overstated issue. If you need a charge for a trip after the car sits for a long time, then its better to just charge the night before so you can warm up the vehicle in the morning for the drive and then charge.
One plausible situation would be when a driver spends the night at a limited-service hotel that doesn’t have an available charger might very well leave the car uncharged until they’re ready to hit the road in the morning.
Of course, the solution in such cases is to never go anywhere that’s cold. Ever. If very low temperatures are infrequent, stay home and subsist on ICE-powered delivery services. If you live where winter is longer and more intense, move.
You can charge it on the way beck to the hotel. It may be inconvenient, but it’s probably worth it.
Nope. Migrate. Birds do; why can’t you?
I hibernate instead.
Solid State Batteries can’t come soon enough.
What benefit will replacing the electrolyte with a polymer mat have on charging time? The speed of the thermochemical reactions in the cells are function of temperature. Whether the electrolyte is solid or liquid or gel has no impact. The only benefit “solid state” batteries offer is a reduced tendency toward violent combustion when the cell is ruptured.
Oh Jesus, it’s going to be one of those conversations. I thought I knew what I was saying, but please elucidate me. My thinking was based upon logic like this:
“Solid electrolytes possess a much higher thermal stability, making the solid-state battery one of the best choices for the next generation of batteries. Inorganic solid electrolytes can work in hostile environments — such as in the temperature range from −50 to 200°C or even higher — in which organic electrolytes fail due to freezing, boiling or decomposition. Theoretically, solid-state batteries can replace lithium-ion batteries in EVs”
The price you pay for that stability in extreme temperature environments is a hit to power density and cell longevity. Two areas that already make EVs a hard sell for people that care about resale value and expect their vehicle to have some flexibility. I’m assuming that’s why the text you quoted says “Theoretically”, meaning they can replace current battery tech, but there are other problems.
Do you just like to argue or something? I mean, you keep making moot points. The speed of a thermochemical reaction is dependent on the chemicals reacting, not the type of reaction. Do you actually think the only rate factor in such a reaction is temperature? That’s incredibly simplistic and naive. They keep coming up with news chemistries every day.
Now I ask, if my original seven word comment were so silly, why are all these scientists and manufacturers chasing such a stupid thing? And did you not see the news just yesterday about Mercedes Benz? You shouldn’t be correcting my dumbassery, but instead sounding the alarm about all these wasted efforts.
BTW, I don’t yet own an EV precisely because of longevity and resale, however, solid state batteries are the thing for which I’ve been waiting.
Mostly just about EV misconceptions with it being my bread and butter.
Not the only factor. But in the case of mass transfer of lithium, it is a primary factor. So no, it’s not simplistic or naïve. In fact, with a solid electrolyte, the internal resistance of the cell will increase because the electrolyte can no longer achieve uniform contact with the anode and cathode at a molecular level (grain boundary losses). So if anything, from a charge/discharge efficiency and durability standpoint, “solid state” configurations are starting out on the back foot. Basically it’s mediocre across a broad temperature range, compared to pretty good in a narrow temp range and ass everywhere else.
I read the article. My takeaway was that MB is partnered up with a very young battery company (~5 years old??) that has some very aggressive targets. The verbiage of the article makes it plain that they haven’t achieved any of those targets and are only just now attempting real world testing. Startup tech companies have a habit of flouting amazing things without the hardware to back it up (see Tesla FSD, Theranos blood test, etc) to keep the investors on board and the money taps flowing. I hope they have found some breakthrough as that would be very interesting. But there’s no free lunch so I have much doubt about the claims. If they have hit that kind of mileage there will absolutely be a catch.
It’s not stupid to try to improve the thermal stability of a consumer product. Battery technology has a shit load of money being thrown at it right now because it’s been marketed as “the way of the future”, and people like getting paid, so yea they’re going to work on it. But we are well into the realm of diminishing returns in terms of battery tech. There will be incremental advancements in some areas that will come at the expense of other characteristics, but you aren’t going to be doing a 15 minute DCFC on your 650mi range Ioniq any time in the next few decades.
So, yes to my first question.
It seems you believe that perfect is always better then good enough. The entire point of solid state batts is to permit more Good Enough. That’s the reason they can’t come soon enough. Christ, internal combustion has been at the point of diminishing returns for decades, but as with any system large enough, any diminished gains in efficiency are multiplied massively by the size of the system thereby justifying virtually any return, no matter how diminished. Hence, my original seven word comment which you found so inane.
And to your final point, of course their won’t be DCFC in 15 any time soon, but 80% in eight minutes sure seems possible. And if the BMS is set to range twenty to eighty as zero to one hundred, then yeah, you’ll be able to DCFC quite soon.
The data is all well and good, but one thing left out here is WHY charging rates drop when temperatures are cold.
Lithium batteries charge best when they are fairly warm, so if the car has been sitting all night in sub-freezing temperatures, a fair amount of power is needed just to warm the batteries up to temperature. How that’s done depends entirely on battery design, but since most battery packs are liquid-cooled, it means heating the coolant (either directly with resistive heat or via a heat pump) and circulating that coolant.
However, if the car has been driving a while in the cold, and its batteries are already up to temperature when it reaches the charger, much less power and time is needed for that pre-conditioning.
I experienced this with my Mach-E trying to use a level 1 (120V charger) at a cabin while on a trip in the mountains. Basically, with the car sitting cold, it needs nearly all of the 1500W draw just to keep the batteries warm, so the actual amount of power put into the batteries is almost zero. The car gave an estimate of like 4.5 DAYS to charge, lol. It was effectively just setting a space heater out in a blizzard.
Also note that DC chargers have internal coolant lines around the cord to cool it down. I’m curious what the current draw is on the station cord cooling system when it’s in freezing weather.
I solved the Mach-E charge issue by driving a few miles to a DC fast charger, where 30minutes on the charger was plenty of charge to get me home. It was a total non-issue, but it was interesting to see how much power it takes to condition batteries for charging.
Sounds like the solution is better thermal insulation around the battery pack. Maybe that’s something you could do? Perhaps placing a fitted block of Styrofoam under the battery and blankets inside.
Haha, well most of the battery pack is exposed to the bottom of the vehicle, so blankets inside the car won’t do anything. I’m not about to modify the design intent of a nearly 100kWh battery pack.
The best solution is simply charge in an insulated garage, which when I’m at home, that’s exactly what I do.
My homebuilt EVs all require the battery to be above 32F in order to charge, or they will be destroyed.
In the case of the LiIon packs in my ebikes, dendrites will form on the anode if they are charged below 32F.
In the case of the CALB CA100FI LiFePO4 pack in my Triumph GT6 conversion, I can charge below freezing at a trickle of 0.1C without damage. Any faster, and I will destroy one of the terminals and the battery will have so much resistance that it won’t function. I have not tried this, mind you, but have read about it when researching just how robust these batteries are. People have found that this particular LiFePO4 battery will accept a slow charge blow 32F without damage, but that is at roughly 1/5th the rate they can actually charge without a shortened lifespan according to the spec sheet(0.5C rate according to spec sheet, but the spec she was overly conservative and these batteries can handle about twice the charge and discharge rate than the spec sheet recommends). That pack was way too expensive for me to experiment on it in that manner. I plan to implement a battery heating system in it before completing the car.
A properly designed battery pack will have resistive heating elements and standardized sensors that can send data to a charger. The battery heaters could come on if the battery/charger senses that the temperature is too low to charge. This doesn’t require complex software-driven electronics to implement, and can be done with off-the-shelf inexpensive golf cart parts.
Waiting for thee batteries to heat up before charging will increase the duration of the charge cycle.