EVs will continue to improve. The best way to improve them is through the incentive provided by competition, not by banning or squeezing out traditional cars.
This cold thing just keeps happening. Oslo last week, Chicago this week. Extraordinary. Completely unexpected.
Darryl Johnson, an Uber driver, said he waited hours just to get to a charger, only to wait even longer while it charged. But the frustrations continued even after he left after he found his battery draining faster than normal.
“It’s horrible it takes two hours the wait an hour it takes two hours to charge, then the charge leaves really quickly, so now you’re back at the charger twice a day,” Johnson said.
According to the Associated Press, a 2019 study of five EVs by AAA found that cold temperatures can temporarily reduce EV range by more than 40% when drivers use interior heaters.
The AAA study found that in 20-degree weather, the average driving range fell by 12% when the car’s heater was not used and the range fell by 41% when it was used.
Several cars had to be towed at a charging station in Rolling Meadows on Sunday night after batteries died while drivers were waiting for open spots. . . .
Given that EV batteries take longer to charge in the cold, waiting for the car ahead to charge could take a while. And if, as it’s very cold outside, a foolish driver is tempted to turn on the car heater while waiting for the charger ahead to finish, he or she should keep away from that button. Turning on the car heating will drain the battery even faster. Just wear an overcoat, a hat, gloves. Setting a small fire, however, is not the way to go.
Charging stations have essentially turned into car graveyards in recent days as temperatures have dropped to the negative double digits, Fox Chicago reported.
“Nothing. No juice. Still on zero percent,” Tyler Beard, who had been trying to recharge his Tesla at an Oak Brook, Illinois Tesla supercharging station since Sunday afternoon, told the news outlet. “And this is like three hours being out here after being out here three hours yesterday.”
Beard and several other Tesla owners were trying to charge their cars amid long lines and abandoned cars at other Tesla charging stations in the Chicago area, the news station reported.
“We got a bunch of dead robots out here,” one man said.
Kevin Sumrak told the Fox station that he landed Sunday night at Chicago O’Hare International Airport and found his Tesla dead and unable to start. He was forced to hire a flatbed tow truck to haul the vehicle to a working charging station. . . .
Progress!
One of the standard pieces of advice on how to avoid a charging problem with an EV when the weather turns very cold is to keep it somewhere (relatively) warm, ideally charging away in a parking garage.
I’m not entirely sure how well-suited airport parking is for that, particularly, say, for someone planning, say, an overnight trip.
And if you don’t have a parking garage and have to park in the street, well . . .
Back to Fox Business:
One expert told the news outlet that cold weather can impact the ability of electric vehicles to charge properly.
“It’s not plug and go. You have to precondition the battery, meaning that you have to get the battery up to the optimal temperature to accept a fast charge,” said Mark Bilek of the Chicago Auto Trade Association.
Progress!
EVs will continue to improve. What’s more, there are already a decent number of people for whom an EV makes sense, even more so if they own more than one car, and at least one of them is powered by an internal combustion engine.
I’m never likely to be someone who would support a ban on sales of new or used “traditional” cars, but it does seem clear that EVs (and their backing infrastructure) are not yet at a stage when it is any way reasonable to “force” drivers to buy them, whether directly by an outright ban on conventional cars or, indirectly, by so restricting the supply of new conventional cars that the price of new (and due to the knock-on effect) used models shoots up. This would particularly risk hurting drivers unable to afford more than one car and for whom an EV is at this stage of development a poor fit.
The best way to improve EVs is through the incentives provided by competition. Banning or squeezing out the traditional cars that are still EVs’ most important competitors removes or reduces that incentive.
As a reminder: When the first autos (whether powered by gas, electricity, or steam) started appearing, no one banned horses. When planes started taking off, no one banned balloons. And somehow the light bulb managed to prevail over the candle without . . .
Well, you get the point.
More on what cold can do to EV batteries here.