How electric cars fail miserably in ordinary driving situations
Here in the Upper Midwest, our interstates are fast and our winters are cold. Speeds north of 70 miles per hour combined with near-zero (F) temperatures wreak havoc on an electric vehicle’s range.
While a typical internal combustion engine (ICE) car might suffer only a 10-15 percent reduction in highway driving range under these conditions, a typical EV currently on the market will have its range dip 30-50 percent!
Elevated power output from the motor coupled with electric heating for the cabin increase energy draw from a cold – and thus reduced-capacity – lithium battery.
This means that a 274-mile rated Kia EV6 might mange just 160 miles of range in bone-chilling cold, a 278-mile rated Mustang Mach-E might get 180, and a Tesla Model Y could optimistically go about 200. If you’re thinking about a winter road trip, maybe to visit relatives for Christmas or Thanksgiving, in a shorter-range EV like a Kona, Bolt, Leaf, or Niro, forget about it.
Compounding the problem of drastically reduced driving range is the generally inept charging infrastructure along highways in the Upper Midwest. DC fast chargers are few and far between and when you get to one there’s a decent chance it won’t be working.
Even if you do find a charger in good operational order, fast charging in cold temperatures can take twice as long at freezing (32°F) and three times longer closer to zero compared to when temperatures are in the seventies.
The reason? According to the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, “cold temperatures impact the electrochemical reactions within the cell, and onboard battery management systems limit the charging rate to avoid damage to the battery.” For most EVs, this delay translates to about an hour and a half or even a two-hour ‘fill-up’ to 80 percent battery capacity. Yikes.
Apologies to the $50,000 EVs out there, but even my pitiful 2013 Kia Rio (2022 MSRP $16,450) musters at least 350 miles of range on the interstate in winter and refuels in three minutes or less.
On a range from EV evangelist to naysayer, I’m definitely more of the former, but I’m also a realist. While EVs in winter are just fine as long as they stay close to home, when venturing out for longer trips on the interstate, they are woefully inadequate to the challenge.
Engineering more energy-dense lithium batteries, incorporating heat pumps, improving cold-weather charging, and installing more (preferably indoor) EV fast chargers will certainly help EVs catch up to ICE cars’ winter dominance, but they’re highly unlikely to close the performance gap, perhaps ever.
For the foreseeable future, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that allow drivers to operate on electricity in the city and gas on the highway may offer drivers in cold-weather states a sweet spot of efficiency and convenience.
See more here: wnd.com
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Allan Shelton
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AND!!! Do not forget the windchill factor.
An ICE vehicle has a thermostat that keeps the coolant going through your heater to heat the car in winter. Thus it is utilizing ordinarily lost heat.
An EV uses more energy because of the wind factor,
According to the formula on Google, Driving about 115kph in -20C weather the windchill factor is about -40C [-40F also]
Plus the heated seats and front and rear window heaters to factor in.
Hmmm. ????
Also, heated steering wheel and outside mirrors???
All this with a battery pack that is about 50% efficient.
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Squidly
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Windchill does not affect dry material. For example, take your thermometer and place it in a wind protected location, it will read exactly the same temperature as it does in the direct wind. Windchill is a product of evaporative cooling. If there is no moisture to evaporate, windchill does not exist.
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Allan Shelton
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So, If I Have 2 thermometers in my house reading +25C
And then I take them outside, 1 placed in the wind and 1 placed out of the wind, will they both cool down at the same rate?
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Tom O
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Just guessing here. Temperature is exchanged between the surface and the air around in in two different ways . One is radiation, the other would be by convection. If I have -20 F air sitting quiescently near a 30 degree surface, a film of air will warm and thus act as a barrier to greater convective heat loss, since the rate of loss is somewhat related to the differences in the temperatures involved.
If the air is moving past that surface, no film forms, thus the convective loss should be greater since there is only one temperature difference. It may not be evaporative cooling, but it IS greater cooling. So maybe he should have said wind cooling as opposed to windchill, but a moving surface should lose more heat than a sitting surface, I would think, thus there is a cooling effect caused by the motion of the vehicle.
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T. C. Clark
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GM produced the EV1 from 1996 to 1999. It was lease only and powered by lead acid batteries. Some of the customers were adamant that they wanted to purchase the cars after GM decided to stop the production. It was sort of a cult following. Musk came along and realized that lithium ion batteries were much more powerful than lead acid – that is the only thing Musk “invented”. Stop all government subsidies of these expensive devices…..CO2 is not warming the climate like idiot politicians claim.
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VOWG
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Anyone who buys or bought an E V with the goal of saving the planet from “climate change” is delusional. Have logic and rational critical thinking vanished from the planet? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes.
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K Kaiser
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Right on !
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bmatkin
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Don’t get me wrong, I actually think we need to add CO2 to the atmosphere, but then my profession has been all about plants so I’m a little biased in favor of greenery. ICE cars need to be retired, not because of EV cars but because the drive trains/maintenance and durability is horrendous per cost and therefore needs to go.
Suppose you had a car with an invisible, perfect extension cord and then compare the maintenance costs and life with an ICE vehicle. The electric car wins every time by a large factor.
So, I’m waiting for Hydrogen to become the standard fuel which in effect is a very long extension cord and has none of the downsides of batteries.
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T. C. Clark
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I am confident that a fuel cell vehicle with a H2 storage tank such as the new H2 “mud” would weigh hundreds of pounds less than a Tesla and require less space….maybe a smaller motor…but fuel cells require a small amount of platinum…H2 is expensive….H2 is not very available. It would be interesting to see a test vehicle with a H2 fuel cell to compare to a Tesla….I believe it would outperform but maybe cost about the same.
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K Kaiser
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@T.C. Clark,
Better become acquainted with the physical properties of hydrogen.
Even as liquid (only possible at/below MINUS 250 deg. C ) its density is only 0.08 (vs. water = 1..00)
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T. C. Clark
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H2 can be contained in a tank at room temp that is much smaller and lighter than batteries. The energy potential of the H2 is greater than the battery….BUT…the battery puts like 95% of its energy to the electric motor while a fuel cell offers only like 65% of the H2 energy. Plus, H2 is currently like 5 times the cost of electricity for comparable energy. Toyota has a fuel cell car that uses a high pressure tank for H2 but the latest tech is the H2 “mud” which offers more H2 per unit of volume of the container BUT the container mus be replaced when depleted…like a propane tank for used for home grills. The H2 Fuel Cell car will outperform the battery car but electricity is relatively cheap and available while H2 is not….plus that platinum for Fuel Cells is a problem for mass production.
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Gary Brown
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Aug 13, 2022 Driving an EV Ford F-150 Lightning to the Arctic Ocean Was HALF THE BATTLE, Now Can We Get Back?
https://youtu.be/mw21tGpRNDg
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Tom O
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Kind of an eye opener to hear them say another 8 hours to a full charge, and that they could have saved over 2 days of charging time if they had had fast chargers all the time. Hmmm. 3500 miles and a lot of help finding places to charge their truck. I won’t pretend I think this was a smart idea, but it sure makes it obvious to me that it’s nothing I want to experience.
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