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 know that remote start is a thing for ICE vehicles too right?
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.
Sure, but if you had the option to do it without opening the garage door wouldn’t you like that more?
Definitely. I was just pointing that out.
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.
There are vehicles that have those features. Back before I retired as a medic, the new ambulance we got had that feature from Ford, (Ford makes 90% of all certified ambulance chassis in the US). It was quite disconcerting to hear the engine shutdown and restart by itself.
I was less than impressed by it because of all the electrical devices and lights we constantly run. If it fails to restart and the batteries are dead, someone else might be also.
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
Exhaust fumes. Remote heating an ICE requires starting the engine, which is a dangerous thing to do unsupervised particularly when many cars are stored in garages attached to homes.
While that’s true (you’d have to open the garage door with the rear facing out minimum) that’s not what we’re talking about in this corner of the thread. The person I’m replying to is bringing up subscription models for some reason? I’m asking what do subscription models have to do with whether a car is ice or ev?
Probably because ICE cars can’t heat when scheduled because they can kill you while EV can heat on schedule.
They brought up how the feature is a subscription to their displeasure but ICE app integration would likely also be a subscription.
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.
In Sweden every vehicle has had this as standard since the 1980s.
Cars have had remote start for a long time. But you can’t just leave a gas car running in a closed garage. That’s a good way to accidentally take the forever nap.
Not talking about remote start but about heating the car before starting it. It’s powered by electricity not gasoline. The garage has an outlet that you plug the car into.
Yeah I have actually been kind of baffled no one else mentioned these, are conventional engine heaters not a thing outside scandinavia?
Are engine block heaters being confused for pre-heating the cabin? Because we have block heaters too.
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Besides diesels, they’re almost unheard of in the US. At least in the continental states; they might have them in the nastier parts of Alaska. Even there, a lot of the places where people actually live don’t get that cold. Anchorage has an average low of -10C in January, which is cold, but not crazy cold.
They are. It’s just most urban people don’t bother with them anymore because the electronic ignitions and fuel injectors make ICE engines very reliable starters even in quite cold weather. My, now eight year old vehicles, still start reliably at -40F even parked outside because I know I will be faced with those temperatures every year and I keep them well repaired to handle that.
Mostly you will see block heaters on diesels and older unreliable cars. And yes, they do work very well and are a cheap insurance policy for getting your car started.
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.
I mean I do the same 100 mile trip every 2-3 weeks and I get almost exactly the same WH/mi year round as long as I’m not cranking the heat.
It’s very hard to compare range on separate trips, since elevation change is by far the biggest factor.
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.
The issue is you have a Tesla
Which EV maker has a model whose range doesn’t diminish in cold weather?
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.
Only if you didn’t get the extra gasoline heater that mounted under trunk hood, I owned a 1965 Beetle in my youth. Those would cook you well done in minutes in the coldest temperatures. Turns out it’s hard to get good heat from an air cooled engine.
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.
There’s been “new” battery technology in the works since we starting using lithium ion and nothing so far has come anywhere near close enough to replace it. Sodium just like all the other “exciting” failed ideas in the past decade isn’t gonna go anywhere either.
Sodium batteries on the infrastructure level would work wonderfully but you’ll never see them in your phone or even a car. The energy density just is shit. There would need to be some unexpected advance in the technology to gain ~50% energy density just to meet lower end lithium ion.
But really electric cars aren’t the future anyway what we need to invest in is public transportation. Electric busses, trains, trams, hell why not self driving scooters that’s way more practical than a whole ass car.
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
Windows dont roll down either, phones dont ring, and that weird square for my save icon means nothing to me.
Linguistic artifacts are weird
Zing!
I love this reply.
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)
That, and it’s hard to record customers with LIDAR.
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.
There’s a 12volt battery in every EV for starting and accessories like heat and a/C.
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.
And I’m not too certain what hardware is in cars but if its not setup to charge the li-ions just how they like, they tend to explode
I’m guessing the batteries advertised as drop-in replacements have BMSs built in.
Yeah, that’s a fantastic way to start a fire. Lithium really doesn’t like being treated like lead acid…
I’ve been told there are addon charge controllers available for such situations. But as I said, it’s stupidly expensive.
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’d rather a vehicle that can actually move, but has a lower range vs one that wont start to move at all.
Uhh, yes. You generally have it plugged in when it’s in the garage. And there are lots of programs for getting a 240V circuit to your garage by either manufacutuers or your local power utility.
What happens if you aren’t at home? How much extra planning is needed to check possible hotels along a long distance route to see if they offer overnight chargers? And knowing the lack of commercial charge points outside of metro areas, or even in metro areas that might not even be working when you get there, what do you do then? People don’t just never travel long distances. And traveling by plane, train, or bus is not always an option.
And yes, I know about the charging programs, I would love to buy an EV, but the sad hard facts are they will not work for me. Even a Hybrid is kind of iffy. And I will probably be well dead before they will be viable choices for where I live.
"But sometimes . . . "
90% of what 90% of people do can be served fine with an EV with everything as it exists right now. In fact, I find it’s better. Maybe it can’t be your only car. Your personal issues with the technology for your case is no reason to hold back the rest of society.
So, you are fine doubling the cost of ownership for those people can’t use EVs all the time for everything? Nor did I say that my, and a noticeable number of other people, want to hold society back on EVs. Only that’s it NOT the clear cut solution for everyone 90% of the time. But you would seem to want to “force a square peg into the round hole solution”.
Thank god your day to day presumably isn’t filled with driving to hotels in the cold eh?
Realistically if this tiny pint actually matters you could probably just rent a car with all the money saved on gas
I try very hard to not need to make those types of trips. But I have often have a need to several times of the year whether I like it or not. But this fall I made two 1000 mile round trips to go pheasant hunting with my one Son in Law’s family and friends. It was a kind of bucket list thing. More often, I need to make 300 mile round trips to see a medical specialist every 3 months. And it’s below freezing here 6+ months a year where I live.
The nearest airport that I could fly from is an easy 50 miles away. But, transporting 2 dogs, a shotgun, cooler, and a 5 gallon buck of wild rice as gifts plus clothes wasn’t going to work. There is no bus or train service to be had either. And I’m pretty sure Hertz wouldn’t be real happy about dirty, wet, and muddy dogs being transported, (and yes, I own travel kennels), in their rentals nor would they be very impressed by the variety of grasses, weeds and mud hanging from the underside of the car either.
The point of the story is, lots of people make these kinds of trips to go camping and hiking, boating, fishing, skiing, hunting, or Christmas trips to Grandma’s house loaded with food and gifts. And the places they are going to are often pretty much barren of support for EVs. And renting a car to get there and back would be prohibitively expensive. And people do these types of travel regularly.
I hope more and more people switch to EVs. They DO make a lot of sense in a metropolitan area. Personally, I think electric bikes would even better for most urbaine urbanites. But not everyone lives in such places. And there is a noticeable number of people who can’t afford to buy an EV either - even if they wanted to.
I really, really wanted to buy a Chevy Bolt because I thought it would work for me. But, my one Daughter, (who has a PhD in engineering and is a research engineer doing long term studies on HVac systems and EV charging in real world installations), talked me out of it because of lack of infrastructure support. local conditions, the logistics, and total costs of ownership, (it still costs money to not use an asset also). Even buying a Hybrid really doesn’t make a lot of sense where I live since it would be simply running the ICE engine 95%+ of the time anyway. And again, the total cost of ownership is pretty break even at best. Sadly, it’s going to take decades longer to get EVs affordably usable for everyone. (That does NOT mean we should to stop all development and traveling that path).
TL:DR - There is a non-zero number of people for whom EVs just don’t work out, whether from lack of access to them, non-existent infrastructure, or lack of financial ability to even afford ownership or use case. And it seems a very large number of EV enthusiasts I have interacted with simply ignore those issues when making the flat statement “EVs good. ICE bad” and imply that “No one should ever need to own an ICE powered car”. Which is just as poor of logic as those who keep saying EVs are stupid and should go away. So go buy your EV if you can. Or at least buy an electric bike if you can’t. But for me, they just don’t work yet.
Oh, yeah.
If your point is that ICE car batteries have problems in the cold, so cold batteries is a problem for everyone and worse for ICE cars, that’s fair.
If your point is that ICE car batteries suck therefore EVs suck, that’s not really valid logic.
… battery heaters and block heaters are a thing for ICE too though?
How many cars have them? They come by default in EVs, and to use it, you’d plug it in like you do all the time.
I can pull my 12V out and bring it inside to warm up though
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
That is correct, and EV’s are equally dependant on the 12V battery as ICE vehicles
It does, but that’s because the 12v starter battery was already present. The electric starter predates any electronics. This just made an easy and available source of power for anything else that came later.
There’s actually a movement to switch to a higher voltage, such as 48v, but there is a ton of inertia to overcome with that.
Everyone is arguing about how they should fuel their cars, but I just want to see more electric powered transit.
Number eleven fail at lower rate that any car
👌👍
Never once in 25 years of living in northern Maine have I had an ICE engine not start in the cold. Fuck I can’t remember even diesel engines falling because of glow plugs.
Yet on the first 0 day I can recall in a few years I have three friends stuck.
I’ll believe this shit when I see some actual data that isn’t a random company in Norway.
A random company in Norway is probably the best equipped to do this kinda testing.
Cold? Check. ICEs on the road? Check. A buunch of electric vehicles on the road? Check.
Well, frankly, Northern Maine isn’t very much north and not enough inland to get the extremes?
Most of Scandinavia has been below -15F for a good part of the new year and being relatively dense (for Scandinavia) in EV coverage I’d say Norway is the best example of EV very cold weather performance.
We’ve had this same “debate” here as well with ice-owners lamenting the perceived loss of range and EV-owners responding “I know, don’t care. Always works, always warm and always topped up”.
I’ve lived in Minnesota for decades and I’ve never had an ICE not start in the winter.
That said, the cold weather performance isn’t enough to stop me from getting an EV. The same general rules apply for all vehicles in cold weather climates, which is to always have an emergency kit just in case.
There was a time though when I commuted 35 miles one way to work and the charging parking spots were always full when I got there. Range loss would worry me a bit there but in that case I’d buy a hybrid and plan for full EV on the next go round.
I live in Chicago and both my relatively new cars wouldn’t start without a jump last week…
Sorry to hear that! You might benefit from a battery tender or one of those jump starter devices like the Halo.
I had to jump my mother in law last week and we might get her one as a birthday present. Her situation wasn’t directly cold related though, her negative terminal was super corroded. Ended up needing a battery and the terminal cable replaced.
Got a pair of devices a bit like the halo to keep in the cars going forward. Car went in the shop a few days later for something unrelated but they tested the battery and there was nothing wrong with it, the engine was just too cold.
I can only imagine. You guys get that lake effect cold and wind. I’ve seen it a little in Duluth, I can only imagine what it’s like in a city nicknamed the “Windy City”.
Believe it or not windy city has nothing to do with actual wind, the phrase was from our politicians being blow-hards
Really, never?
AFAIK Minnesota does get proper winter cold, so it’s just a bit surprising.I’ve had both petrol and diesel cars not start on me when it’s cold enough.
Diesel probably didn’t want to go because of old glow plugs and on the petrol I had somehow managed to get a bit of water in the tank that froze in the line.Never. I have had some hard starts when I’ve owned older cars but I’ve never had it not start.
My biggest issue was actually my first car with the headlights. It didn’t chime to remind you they were on and those didn’t turn off automatically. I had to tape a reminder to turn them off on the steering wheel because I killed the battery a couple times.
Still, winter performance wouldn’t stop me from getting an EV. It’s probably be a bonus because when it’s super cold out who wants to go anywhere? Good excuse to stay home.
Living in Quebec for the past 18 years, I’ve seen plenty of ICE cars dead in parking lots and driveways when the temperature drops. It’s usually the battery. But the car, when it starts, it makes a really strange noise.
Whereas I, who lives somewhere where it gets below -40 every year, before wind chill, had 2 co-workers late for work or missing it entirely because their cars wouldn’t start. It’s also happened to me. Want to know the cool thing about anecdotes?
Hah, I’ve helped plenty of friends over the years with ICE cars that won’t start in the cold but have yet to see a BEV refuse to start just because of cold.
Maybe it’s different here in Southern ……. New England
Southern New England gets cold, but last I was there, few people if any seemed to need battery warmers, and definitely not regularly. I’d expect most cars that are as new as basically any consumer EV to be able to start as fine there.
You’re not wrong. Where I live, we just had an entire week where the highest temp we got to was 5°F and the coldest without wind chill was -20°F. My ICE started fine every time without issue. Like the article says itself, this is only really applicable to older ICE cars sometimes having issues in the winter. Give it another decade and then we can get a more accurate picture on reliability (note: I do hope that EVs continue to be reliable en masse after that much time, I’m not anti-EV or anything).
Batteries last longer in cold climates
