eg Oslo this January was above freezing every day, and only below freezing a few nights. https://www.accuweather.com/en/no/oslo/254946/january-weathe.... Compare that to Chicago https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/chicago/60608/january-weat...
Oslo is colder than like 90% of the inhabited parts of the planet...it's probably fine to use it as an example when talking about cold weather performance of EVs
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hottest-c...
Average Low (°C) || Record Low (°C)
| Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar || Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar
Oslo | -3.9 | -4.7 | -4.7 | -2.1 || -19.7 | -20.5 | -20.7 | -16.9
Toronto | -3.1 | -6.7 | -5.6 | -1.9 || -30.0 | -32.8 | -31.7 | -26.7
The record low for Feb in Oslo (1991 - 2020 data) is -5.3°F. That's an average winter night for me. https://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/clim-history/stations/msn/msn-...
Another way of looking at this... heating degree days.
https://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weatherall-print.php3?s=... vs https://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weatherall-print.php3?s=...
Oslo has 6286.8 heating degree days. Toronto, Ontario has 7342.8.
Toronto is substantially colder than Oslo (edit...) when it comes to the extremes of weather.
(edit: correction) - Oslo's is https://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weatherall.php3?s=88410&...
which has the heating degree days as 7787.8 which is now comparable to Toronto.
It is very difficult to get it colder than the water. Note also that Oslo is on a warm current - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Corrient... - the Norwegian current is a continuation of the Gulf Stream (compare the California current which is a cold one)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo
> Oslo has a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification: Dfb)[48] or, if the original Köppen winter threshold −3 °C (27 °F) is used, an oceanic climate (Cfb) in the 1991–2020 base period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_climate
> Examples of oceanic climates are found in Glasgow, London, Bergen, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Bilbao, Oviedo, Biarritz, A Coruña, Bayonne, Zürich, Copenhagen, Prague, Skagen, and Paris. With decreasing distance to the Mediterranean Sea, the oceanic climate of northwest Europe gradually changes to the subtropical dry-summer or Mediterranean climate of southern Europe
> The oceanic climate exists in an arc spreading across the north-western coast of North America from the Alaskan panhandle to northern California, in general the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest. It includes the western parts of Washington and Oregon, the Alaskan panhandle, western portions of British Columbia, and north-western California.
Compare this to the continental climates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis#Climate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado#Climate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis#Climate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago#Climate (has the population of 1/2 of all of Norway)
With no large bodies of open water, the air temperature is not moderated by the release of heat from the water and can go further to extremes on both ends.
Oslo, Norway:
Average low, coldest month: -5.3 C
Record low, all time: -26 C
versus
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States:
Average low, coldest month: -6.2 C
Record low, all time: -33 C
Crazy thing is this January there looks to be only one night where it went below zero.
Why not Minneapolis, or Cheyenne, or some other North American city that is also away from the coasts? Why not Regina?
I think part of the problem is that because EVs are still new, people are going to expect or demand reliability. It's only better if it's better in every way.
When I worked in a cold city, you would occasionally hear people say, "Sorry I'm late for work, boss. Car wouldn't start, and I had to get a jump."
Because it's new, saying, "Sorry I'm late for work, boss. It's cold, so my car had less range and I had to stop at the Slurp-n-Burp to recharge" isn't going to be met with the same level of sympathy.
The Gulf Stream really works.
e.g. https://cms.accuweather.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/stati...
ICE are way less affected by cold than battery vehicles. It's been 2 decades since I even had a block heater for any of my cars or pickups - modern electronic fuel injected engines are very good at properly metering and vaporizing fuel to start at low temps. And yes, they do get reduced mpg, but it's not that much, and given the ubiquity of gas stations, hardly can be talked about as a range limitation.
And for the record, they keep the cabin much more comfortable than a lot of electrics can afford to do. Turning those precious kWHs in your battery into heat is brutal on the battery.
I think electric vehicles are the future, and I like ours. But no way the article here is wrong: most are not really yet as ready for cold climates as modern ICE are. You get trade-offs).
(For the record: I drive (drove, actually, don't drive much at since I retired) mostly in Minnesota. Subzero driving has been part of my life for 50 years.)
For people who use their EV solely for commuting, it’s not a big deal, since a commute distance is still well below the reduced range in cold temperatures.
It is a huge deal for people who take winter road trips. The range reductions cited in the article could easily spell the difference between getting to the destination in one shot, versus having to take a >30 minute stop to recharge midway. 30 minutes is an absolute minimum figure that assumes there’s an available fast charger conveniently close to the route. If not, detours+slow charging could easily add an hour or more to travel time.
It depends on how long your "commute" is.
A dozen miles across San Francisco? Not a big deal.
There are plenty of people who commute long distances every day. There are thousands of people who commute to New York City every day from Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, no such method of travel ever has or ever will be invented, so I guess we'll just have to rely on internal combustion engines for the rest of eternity.
There used to be a private ski bus charter service on weekends but that shut down due to the pandemic.
Some places say the fluid doesn't actually freeze but becomes too viscous to function properly. Others say it's condensation in the vacuum booster line, effectively making them non-power brakes. And still others say the fluid itself won't freeze, but the water it absorbed will.
Road salt is our big problem here, but that's true for everyone who has winter.
FWIW my neighbor has a Tesla and loves it...
Edit: and also, some areas are not using salt for environmental reasons, like Portland.
Road salt problems always makes me wonder how much the vehicle plays into that.
I've driven 20+ year old cars without a spot of rust while there are vehicles that are 5 years old with rust problems.
I think the real variable when it comes to road salt issue is vehicle quality.
It depends on how much the OEM wants to spend on fancy paint and coatings, how much the vehicle's use degrades that coating, how much salt the vehicle is exposed to, what kind of salt (liquid stuff gets everywhere much more effectively) and what if any steps the owner takes to mitigate the salt.
You can make generalizations like "Volvo loves to galvanize stuff and Toyota DGAF" but without controlling for the life the vehicle will have that doesn't really let you make predictions about a specific vehicle.
Not if your municipality uses grit instead of salt.
The classic, pro: works well even under high temperatures resulting from prolonged braking. Con: absorbs water over time and must be replaced fairly often even if not stressed.
New kind, pro: does not absorb water and does not degrade as much on its own. Con: braking action gets "spongy" when the fluid heats up from prolonged braking.
Unless you actively mix it with water (like you do antifreeze) you are going to have a hell of a time getting glycol based brake fluid to absorb enough water to freeze at any earthly temperature. Maybe if you ran a system without the cap on the reservoir for decades in a very humid climate you could do it but even then I think the odds are long at best.
I vote condensation.
I know power steering fluid gets too viscous and can blow out the hoses on a Dodge Avenger because it can’t get through the cooler.
> In Norway — where half of all new cars are plug-ins — tests show that EVs lose about 20% of their driving range and take longer to charge in cold temperatures, according to the Norwegian Automobile Federation.
Naturally people who don't like EVs are going to cherry-pick these problems, but the mixed results suggest to me that it's down to a deficiency in the design and testing process at some companies. I had a 2009 Prius where the rubber pad on the metal hatchback handle melted, fell off, and left a thick streak of rubber adhered to my license plate. It was a known issue in that model of Prius and affected a lot of people in the southwestern US. Was it a great engineering challenge to create a handle that could handle such heat? Did they consciously decide to sell something that would fail in an ugly and embarrassing way right below their brand logo? I doubt it; I suspect it was a new design that they failed to test rigorously enough.
There's none of that with ICE vehicles.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/coldweather.shtml
Also cars in general as they age gradually get worse mileage.
From the link you linked, city driving 15% and "as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips". That is not really similarly bad or worse.
Literally no one is doing this, unless you have a diesel engine, you're parked outside, the temperatures are exceptionally cold (<= -10F?), and you weren't planning on driving for more than a day. It's something you'd see on, like, farms or semi truck lots; not houses.
The risk of not starting isn't really in the engine itself; it's in the fuel "gelifying". Diesel is gross.
But sure; the issue is overblown, especially when the majority of EVs on the list still retain >10% of their maximum battery capacity in freezing weather, and the highest range EVs on the list (where you'd expect to see the highest drop) are only losing a few percentage points. This is not a situation where EVs have a fundamental problem; it's a situation where a few manufacturers (cough Detroit cough) are royally screwing something up.
I do, as do multiple members of my immediate family who park our vehicles outside. We have block heaters so we can start them on those -10F mornings. None of us have diesel either - Toyota 4runner, Ford Explorer, GMC Sierra. Every winter we get at least a couple weeks where it's that cold in Wisconsin.
Living in a cold-weather climate, it is the local norm to plug a car (gas or diesel) during winter even if you're only parked for a couple hours. Most cars purchased locally come with engine block heaters installed and most private parking spaces (houses, apartments, office buildings, surface lots, parking garages, etc.) provide an outlet.
Factually incorrect. Block chargers are ubiquitous in Alaska where I grew up and you should probably use one well before -10F to reduce wear on your engine.
The guy with the 25yo shitbox that doesn't have enough compression to start in the cold is.
But I don't think that's the kind of ownership experience you want to be comparing any newish car to.
This EV test however is barely in cold weather, it gets a lot worse when it's cold.
Engine heaters are generally used for long term reliability and comfort. Years of daily cold starts can do problems, but most cars on road can start from cold.
Anything liquid might end up freezing. In an EV that's electrolytes, cooling liquid, brake fluids, etc. Of course, batteries can be heated in an EV and that helps. Simply using them heats them up. That's why many EVs have battery cooling. Also many owners might want to turn up the heat remotely so they enter a nicely warmed car instead of an ice box. That costs energy and range of course.
So, it's not all that black and white. But overall, it seems EVs can do well under arctic conditions. All the big vendors test under those conditions. The cold hard reality (to paraphrase the alarmist title) is that it isn't that big of a deal.