(Jalopnik) It's Too Hot For EVs To Work Right
(Jalopnik) It's Too Hot For EVs To Work Right
The heat wave affecting much of the U.S. may be causing electric vehicles to lose nearly a third of their range.
Jalopnik / Go Media always is one for clickbait titles, but as per Rule#5, I'm not changing their clickbait title or adding my commentary to it.
The actual article is about how various EVs are down 30% in range due to this summer heatwave. Teslas included.
TL;DR for people who don’t want to read the article:
EV’s are losing range, likely due to increased AC usage during hot weather.
Theoretically extreme heat can cause batteries to degrade, but modern EV’s have thermal management and probably can keep their batteries cool.
Some apparently suffered a 31 percent drop when temps got about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That is less than ideal. At cooler temperatures, the outlet reports that the range loss wasn’t as high. There was an average of 5 percent reduction at 90 degrees and 2.8 percent at 80, so it’s definitely not linear.
As someone that has a bit of “range anxiety” and is hesitant to make the switch, this is definitely something to be mindful of.
A 30% reduction on a 300 mile range means you’re at 210 miles now, which can influence how you drive or where you stop to recharge.
Small ev owner here, definitely noticed a drop in range but that's less to do with driving temperature and more to do with charging temp.
My car charges at work on a 120v outlet. I live in the Dallas Texas area and lately we've been seeing around 110 consistently. This means my car has to run an ac compressor more frequently for the battery. I check on the car every day at lunch (people also plug into the same circuit and pop the breaker) and noticed today a 10% drop in usual state of charge.
This is a two fold observation because on one hand I had slightly more driving to do this morning (around 8% more battery usage) but at the same time I started charging later in the morning when temps were closer to 95 and my battery needed more time to get settled into the correct temperature and since I only have 1.2 maybe 1.4kw going in every minute running the compressor for the battery is a minute spent not really charging the battery.
Bottom line my car only has 80 miles of range to begin with and lately that's a bit more like 60 (other factors play in) but if you're on the fence I wouldn't worry about it too much as even with my tiny ev I managed 20k miles last year.
Worth noting that if you're on the fence and shopping in cold climates I did struggle a bit on extreme cold...again due to popping breakers preventing me from charging in the first place.
If you have any questions feel free to message me, I'd be happy to answer them.
It’s worth noting that the article stated that 31% drop was the worst of the impacted EVs, and - because this is the realtesla community - that all of Tesla’s models were at the bottom of the list of range loss.
However, any amount of range loss is a concern for an EV. ICE vehicles will also see an efficiency loss in the heat, but what does 10% (or even 30%) really matter when you have the option to fill up in a few minutes basically anywhere
I’m curious how affected ICE range is by additional AC usage. It can’t be nothing, but is it negligible? Or comparable?
Like ~3 MPG, which is like ~10% in my car.
But my AC doesn't need to run while my car sits in a parking lot. Teslas do.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/ac-comes-on-by-itself-after-park.281579/
Teslas have cabin overheat protection, because a lot of their computer parts are not automotive grade and thus need to be kept cooler than 140F. When Teslas detect this, they turn on the AC even when you're away from the car.
So if you go to work, expecting a certain charge, you might not get it because Tesla ate up a bunch of battery over the last few hours for AC to protect its own electronics. And on hotter days, it runs more aggressively.
In contrast, ICE cars are designed for way hotter temperatures, because burning gasoline is 500F+ IIRC, so your ICE cars just are designed to withstand way hotter temps without breaking.
No, I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s not right. The thread you link to is indicative of the battery ventilation fan turning on to cool the battery, which certainly uses some power, but a tiny fraction of what the AC uses. Cabin Overheat Protection is an optional feature that is turned off by default. An owner may knowingly enable it if they wish to incur the range cost to reduce cabin temperatures. Additionally, it also comes in two options: Full and Fan Only. As above, the fan uses a significantly smaller amount of energy than full AC.
Do you have a source for the claim of issues with Tesla electronics exceeding 140°? I did a little bit of Googling but couldn’t find anything to support that.