How well do electric cars do in bumper to bumper traffic like we see in the evacuations in Florida?
In: Technology
As others have said in this thread, it’s perhaps the best use case for electric vehicles. They do great in it. Here’s some info I’ll add:
My Kia EV6 has a display telling me how much power is being dedicated at any given time to four different areas: the powertrain (i.e. moving the car), climate control (air conditioning, heating, the blower fan for moving air around the cabin), electronics (the in-dash computers, lights, wipers, etc.), and battery management (the car has a system that can either heat up or cool down the battery in extreme cold or heat (respectively) to keep it within an optimal range…this category is almost always at 0 kW because it usually doesn’t need to turn on).
The most I’ve *ever* seen the air conditioning or heater use in the “climate control” category is about 3.5 kW of power, and that’s almost always only on the initial start-up of the system where the cabin needs to be initially warmed up from extreme cold or cooled down from extreme heat. Once it actually gets to the set-point temperature, it typically uses 1.5 kW or less. But even at the max 3.5 kW power usage, it would take over 24 hours for that to drain my 77.4 kWh battery if I started off with a 100% charge. At 1.5 kW, it’d take **over 2 days** to drain my battery from a full charge. All the while, the drivetrain would be using literally no energy at all because you’re stuck at a stand still. The electronics might use 0.5-1.0 kW of power. And nothing else would use any power at all. Punchline is you can sit still for 24+ hours in most modern EVs without overheating, freezing to death, or running out of juice for weather updates to play through the speakers.
But in a realistic scenario, you’re not sitting truly still. You’re moving. Take the following hypothetical:
Let’s say you live in Tampa, FL, and are choosing to evacuate to Adel, GA (I know nothing about Adel, GA, apart from the fact that it is far enough north of the expected path of Hurricane Milton that it is almost certainly a safe place to be for this storm). That’s a 255 mile drive that, right now with current traffic, Google Maps is claiming will take 3 hrs. 47 min. Over the course of 4 hours, 1.5 kW of HVAC usage will eat up 6 kWh of battery energy. At highway speeds, that’s about 18 miles of driving you cannot do because the energy to do it was instead used up by the HVAC. So as long as you are in an EV that can do 275+ miles on a single charge, you could make it all the way from Tampa to Adel, GA, without recharging not even once.
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