Does this mean the electricity you paid for went half as long?
(ev exp is ltd bc my cars are 30y-60y)
Second battery efficiency goes down.
Finally, the battery usually is constantly doing the regen breaking thing but in cold weather it doesn't to save pack wear until you get the pack warm again
6kW is not enough to make a big dent in required mechanical braking, and it’s also not enough to quickly heat the battery pack, especially when operated intermittently.
A bigger battery/coolant loop heater sounds more straightforward — the mechanism to convert kinetic energy to current is already there.
Most of the range loss comes from climate control. In a combustion car, the majority of the energy in the gasoline is turned into heat. In cold weather, you just dump some of this heat into the cabin to keep it warm. An EV's efficiency is a disadvantage in this case, as it needs to use energy from the battery to heat up the cabin.
I don't have the exact numbers there but the HVAC system should draw ~2kW at full throttle. Giving an average of, let say, 160Wh/km (speaking of a recent Tesla M3 for example) at highway speed. Over an hour of full throttle heating you would have consumed in heating an extra ~10% of what you spent to move the car. So OK, maybe air drag increase is not the worst offender here but it's not just the HVAC system.
...
While writing this I searched a bit and according to this [1] when there is really cold temperature and the battery still haven't got warm, it can draw 5-6kW at the beginning. Anyway when driving motors heat up, the heat is used to warm the battery, the battery heats up as well and all that heat is used by the heat pump to warm the inside of the vehicle.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/452464/tesla-model-y-heat-pump-sy...
Gas cars lose efficiency in the cold too, but it’s less drastic. Only stats I can find are 15% loss at 20F (which is a lot warmer than -4F).
Also, charging tends to be much slower in the cold as batteries need to be warm to accept full charge rate. If you’re cruising on the highway it’s usually not too bad, but if you start from an overnight stop and then try to immediately charge the car you could be waiting for the battery to warm up.
No, the battery simply isn't able to hold as much energy because the chemical process that makes it work "slows" down (my basic understanding of electrons, someone feel free to correct me).
TBH, the experience of most Tesla owners is just put the dest in the map and charge when needed on the way.
The one clear problem that is highlighted in that article is that hotel, or more generally destination, charging makes a huge difference. People think it is all about getting there, but it really is the being there that can be tricky.
Rental cars magnify this problem, which is why it was so strange that Hertz expanded the fleet so rapidly. Scaling the same move over 3 years would have had very different results(*).
(*) Maybe other than maintenance costs. There were odd rental effects in that from the stories that I've heard.
Do you think that's because it's far easier to charge your car at home while you are sleeping? And that renters who lack this convenience or face difficulty achieving it might be put out by the experience during a possibly expensive and rare vacation?
I've tried 3rd party chargers a few times and gave up on them. They're often broken or extremely slow. They usually require installing some app, and you don't know whether they're occupied or not until you get there. In contrast, Tesla's chargers are a consistently good experience. Without them, I'd simply never use my EV for road trips.
I still use other charging networks from time to time. The best that I can say is that they are usable, but they are often frustrating in various weird ways.
But that's not why I mentioned Tesla. I mentioned them because there's so much weird industry caused complexity that they avoid. Need to charge the car you've just rented? Just find a supercharger and plug in. Not ideal necessarily, but at least it isn't hard.
Got a non-Tesla and need to use EVGo or EA? If you're lucky the card reader isn't broken. Then there's a decent chance it times out while communicating, because the order of events isn't intuitive for first timers. Cancelling the session at this point sometimes gets tricky too. Oh, and all of this is assuming the unit itself wasn't broken. If the card reader was broken, now you are downloading an app, tapping in card details, trying to figure out which stall to active, etc. And finally, you find out that the Bolt might require you to hold the cord just right for it to activate. EA used to have a whole video just on this detail. :facepalm
It can be a really terrible experience.
In fact, mid drive Tesla will auto-reroute you to a supercharger station with more open slots if the one you're going to gets busy while on the drive. The UI is extremely accurate (like I can see open station numbers increment when a car pulls out).
Are you sure you're not hearing complaints about non-Tesla chargers?
- It's a cold state in winter and there's at least the perception that you don't want an EV in places with cold winters. (I see few enough Teslas in the wild in exurban Boston.)
- It's a relatively poor state.
- I imagine pickups and the like are disproportionately represented.
- It's big and sparsely populated as you say.
A friend of mine who lives in Boston but owns a house on a bunch of land in northern Vermont finally got a Tesla when he convinced himself there was sufficient buffer for weekly trips between the two places.
That's in spite of the range issue, and is due to the Norwegian government carrot-and-sticking heavily towards electric. Maine has no such incentives, and is sparsely populated, which doesn't play to the strengths of electric cars.
Norway shows that you can have EVs in a place that is very cold if you shovel cash at buyers. It doesn't prove that weather wouldn't be a central factor in a place like Maine.
1: https://www.oecd.org/climate-action/ipac/practices/norway-s-...
Makes it much easier if there's already infrastructure.
Bar Harbor, the destination of most of the out-of-state Teslas, has almost nowhere to charge. I went to a hotel once which promised to have 4 level-2 Tesla chargers. All of the spots were occupied by ICE trucks. I went in to point out this problem to the clerk. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "they're probably our customers." Apparently the chargers were just there to lure in suckers. "Yes, we have chargers, but good luck using one. They tend to be parked in by ICE pickup trucks. We're helpless to do anything about this." I failed to check to see whether the trucks had Maine plates. They didn't look like typical customers of this hotel.
Around Portland things are a bit better. And new stations are being put it. It's just behind neighboring states.
Equivalently, she chose a hotel without chargers, or without enough chargers. How much extra time and money would it have taken to find a hotel with/near chargers?
Which travel search engines/ OTAs/ directories allow you to find hotels with L1/L2 chargers? (Do they list number and ratio of chargers/rooms?) Just like how most of these allow you to search on free parking, breakfast, wifi, disabled access etc., I see this as a feature that will become common then standard.
EDIT: to the down-voter, this is on-topic and substantive comment. Per my other comment here, the onus is on the rental company to actively incentivize behavior modification in first-time-EV-renting customers, help them plan their trip, not just to merrily slam them for fees. Assuming Hertz want loyalty and repeat business (if not, then this is a wider issue with them, not with EVs).
The columnist concludes the sacrifices were worth it, given her dedication to environmentalism. The vast, vast majority of people would not choose her experience to be a little greener.
1: https://www.almanacnews.com/blogs/a-new-shade-of-green/2024/...