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Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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What nonsense. One Tesla charging station goes down, and suddenly it’s the “hard truth about EVs”. Did you know that gas pumps froze up in this weather as well? I don’t see The Register running a story about the “hard truths” about driving combustion engines in the same weather.
It's not that one charging location was down. It's that the current battery tech can't charge in cold conditions without using some of its own power to heat the battery cells. This means people need to anticipate the cold and charge earlier and more often than they typically do.
Those who didn't were stranded.
This is a real limitation of the current technology. Not a deal breaker for most people, but it's a learning curve and a potential inconvenience.
That's also true of ICE (heh) cars. I know modern ones don't need to be warmed up like the old ones did, but they absolutely use more gas in the cold.
https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/fuel-economy-cold-weather
It's probably worse for EV's though.
It’s strange because most people don’t need to charge at a public charger unless they’re on road trip. And it would be really stupid to take a road trip in a -40 degree blizzard.
And if the charger isn’t down, I’d expect it to power the car’s battery heating/cooling system for a bit before starting the charge. Is this not the case?
Edit: After reading two more articles on this and thinking about this some more — is this “traffic jam” at the charger caused by the design of the heat pump used by Tesla to warm the battery? Can it not exchange enough heat in -40 weather?