I’ve always heard that EVs are not a great option if you live in really cold areas due to them not being very efficient in the cold. Why is that? And do gas powered vehicles have the same issue?
In: Engineering
All kinds of vehicles have batteries, and if the batteries get too cold they don’t work, and so the car won’t work.
Electric car batteries are more advanced and larger than normal car batteries, and so can generally keep themselves warm for about a week or two on full charge. Making things warm takes a lot of energy, and electric car batteries are 100x larger than regular car batteries, so it takes a lot more energy to keep then warm.
The reason people say electric vehicles struggle in the cold is because they are more efficient, meaning more of the energy goes into moving the car and less into heating it up. An electric motor is around 98% efficient, and a lithium ion car battery is around 95% efficient, for an overall efficiency of around 93%. Driving 60km/hr a 2 ton car has about 1 MegaJoules (MJ) of kinetic or moving energy. For a 93% electric car to accomplish this it needs to take 1.08MJ of energy out of the batteries, 1MJ goes to speeding up the car, 0.08MJ goes into heating up the batteries and motor.
Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars are around 25% efficient, so to speed up to 60km/hr they need to burn 4MJ of fuel energy, 1MJ goes to speeding up the car and 3MJ goes into heating up the engine and exhaust air going out the back. As you can see ICE cars have a lot of extra heat just being wasted, so once they get started they have no trouble staying warm. They still need a battery to get started, and if that gets too cold they are stuck, hence people use small block heaters to keep the normal car battery warm.
So in general electric cars are awesome, use less energy no matter if they are solar powered or coal. In cold climates the extra energy we need to keep any vehicle warm is just more noticable. It’s worth noting that combustion fuel is usually cheaper per MJ for heating things, so the need to spend extra energy keeping electric cars warm is more noticable in cold climates. The fact that all ICE cars are already generate lots of waste heat is no different in cold climates vs warm climates, so it is no additional cost from their normal operation, so it seems like a bigger difference than it is. To drive most electric cars in a normal climate is much cheaper for fuel, filling up a 75kWh long range Tesla at $0.15/kWh of electricity is $11.25, much cheaper than filling up a car with gas.
Worst case scenario in a cold climate you may use double or triple the energy to keep your electric car running, it is still using less energy overall and is probably cheaper to run than a gas car. The exception is if you are in a cold climate where electricity is super expensive, say $0.35/kWh or something, and you have no way to access a Type 2 charger with 6kW, or if you have a very short range electric car and have no extra battery capacity to drive and more your car warm. As electric car ranges improve this problem will become much less of.an issue.
Note that it does entirely depend on what you mean by “struggling”. There have been a few “shock” reports lately about EVs failing to start in extreme low temperatures (lower than -40 celsius) but the articles omit that ICE vehicles have the exact same issue.
Allow me to offer a shift in thinking: ICE vehicles are incredibly wasteful on energy as far as converting it to motion, all 12 months of the year (around 20-25%). But in colder months, that waste energy can get put to some use in heating. In the summer months, it just goes straight out to the atmosphere. EVs are incredibly efficient as far as converting energy into motion, as high as 95% under the right conditions. That means it doesn’t have the waste heat to warm up the cabin. As far as the actual energy to move the car in cold weather, it’s not that much worse than in the summer. It’s the pesky humans in the car that insist on not being cold that are the issue.
They don’t for normal use, Norway is a pretty cold country and has a 20% EV fleet and 80% new vehicle sales are EV. They don’t if battery heating/cooling solutions are fitted and activated before using the vehicle.
For EVs without active battery temperature control batteries drain quicker in low temperatures, as much as 50% range at -20°C. However, since 98% of journeys are under 100miles and the average car journey is <10miles cutting a 200mile EVs range in half won’t impact daily use for the majority of people.
batteries used chemistry to store electricity. chemical reactions slow down when it’s cold, getting the batteries to work when it’s cold to make the care go is therefore harder. gas cars don’t really have the same problem, the biggest problem for a fossil fuel vehicle when it’s cold is that engine/transmission oil tends to gel when it’s cold making it harder for the engine to move and stay lubricated till the engine warms up.
Cold batteries means bad-performing batteries, just like with an ICE car battery struggling to start the car on a cold morning.
Something like a Nissan Leaf would be bad in the cold because it doesn’t have much in the way of battery temperature management, although I think heating was added as an option recently. Tesla and Cadillac, and surely others, have full battery temperature management. They can also start heating your plugged-in battery long before it’s time to leave in the morning so you leave with a warm battery and a full charge. You will use a little more energy keeping them warm on the trip.
Dang man. No offense, truly just curious, but what’s your demographic? (i.e. country, age, etc) Cuz I forget this is an international community so sometimes I jump to conclusions with a lot of bias and assume everyone is a young, adult male living in the US. In assuming so, I get extremely worried when I come across such elementary questions such as this.
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