This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I've been seeing this surfacing a lot lately, two curious things:
#¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It sounded like a bunch of things combined: chargers going down, long queues at the working chargers as people take much longer than usual to charge, Uber drivers with rented EVs who don't really know about charging in the cold, etc.
So people who did do the right things and turned up at a charger with a warm battery ready to charge found themselves on the end of a five hour queue, and by the time they got a turn their cars were cold so they needed a long time on the charger to warm up before they can even start charging.
If you don't have enough working chargers at very low temperatures it can all just kind of snowball. That's not really an EV issue, it's an infrastructure problem. Strangely, you won't hear Faux News advocating for more chargers.
I'm not saying an event like that didn't happen, but as far as we know a single event is blown out of proportions by Fox, it's reported out of the context all over the world, giving people the feeling it's a common occurrence
This is part of the 'EV apocalypse' FUD campaign.
AFAICT one super charging site in Chicago had more than one non-functional chargers. Why they were not functioning is not known. Quite a few Teslas queued up there in the cold and some of them ran their batteries down to zero. Each regurgitation of the this event has the same pictures of the same cars at the same place.
It is a fact that EV range decreases with cold, and that decrease can be significant. Drivers unaware of this, and who don't monitor their battery levels, can indeed find themselves effectively 'out of gas'.
We need much better urban charging infrastructure. Street level L2 charging should be ubiquitous, and that can be easily achieved using the existing street level power line infrastructure.
The problem is teslas. Better designers have non-engine reliant heating systems, that you can use to warm your battery enough to hold a charge, so it can run your engine and keep itself warm.
Teslas dont have this. So when they go cold, they are stuck cold.
You dont need to redesign the charging infrastructure to cater to the poorly designed car. You need to fix the shit car.
Huh? Tesla scvanges heat from all over the car https://youtu.be/Dujr3DRkpDU
And a Tesla is more than capable of charging when left out in the cold and not preconditioned (although it was initially very slow) https://youtu.be/i-c8AUeKs5c
You have no idea what you're talking about
This is easily explained like most anti EV articles.
Don't forget about alternate motivations (money and power). We know that there is an extreme amount of money put into tricking the public to not buy EVs from many organizations (Political, gas and oil companies, countries depending on gas and oil production... Etc). Check the source - it's Faux news... Red flag
does this make sense, do we have a comparison? Surely this can't be the first time EVs were cold. I live in Europe, and I know the Nordic countries have tons of EVs. When I was in Iceland during the winter, I rented a EV and it was fucking cold. Mine was fine, they all are fine despite likely worse conditions... This article may have some seeds of truth somewhere but sounds like bullshit.
The problem with Tesla cars is that they uses two batteries. One is the main one, which is used for propulsion, and the other one, a conventional car battery, is used for most of the critical electronic.
Problem is, both are independent from each other, which mean you can have a full main battery, and still be locked out of your car if the secondary on is out. And those batteries hate cold.
You can have a similar results with gas car, where the ignition won't happen because of the cold, but at least you can recharge it easily with another car that happens to pass by. For Teslas, you can't. Because those fuckers decided that it was too unsightly to see the bare battery, and bolted a plastic turd over it to make sure the only person to ever be able to change it is a Tesla tech.
All other car manufacturers, which happens to have a bit more experience than those asses, understood that being able to have an unified battery, that happens to be thermally insulated (and often in the nordic countries, heated), to make sure you actually use them, even in cold weather.
Tesla cars are a perfect example of a product that only survive out of hype. They are overall badly designed, arguably ugly, their only redeeming quality was their autopilot, but even that is starting to crack.
My Kia also has a normal 12v battery for normal car stuff in addition to the main battery pack. But it uses the main battery to charge the 12v if that ever gets low while parked
And that a simple trick that Tesla still don't have implemented, to my knowledge.
That is false. Teslas maintain charge on their low voltage battery from the high voltage battery, just like every other EV
The problem with Tesla cars is that they uses two batteries.
Every single electric car has a low voltage system. Every single one. With maybe the exception of the G-Wiz.
You don't want hundreds of volts flowing through your lights etc. and you don't want an inverter running 24/7 in case you want to remote unlock your car.
One is the main one, which is used for propulsion, and the other one, a conventional car battery, is used for most of the critical electronic
Newer Teslas have a 16 volt lithium battery for the low voltage stuff. In theory it's more resilient to low charge conditions. Video here if you're interested: https://youtu.be/8-MNFgashpQ
Problem is, both are independent from each other, which mean you can have a full main battery, and still be locked out of your car if the secondary on is out. And those batteries hate cold.
The car is more than capable of topping up the low voltage battery from the high voltage battery should it be required, and in fact they do this if they are sitting for a while. I have left my Tesla for a couple of weeks without moving it without issue. Including in the cold. Although James May did have an issue with his model 3 during lockdown if I remember correctly.
Hyundai cars are notorious for allowing the low voltage system to run low, but I believe firmware updates have resolved that.
You can have a similar results with gas car, where the ignition won't happen because of the cold, but at least you can recharge it easily with another car that happens to pass by. For Teslas, you can't. Because those fuckers decided that it was too unsightly to see the bare battery, and bolted a plastic turd over it to make sure the only person to ever be able to change it is a Tesla tech.
It's a five minute job to remove that cover. Really. The plastic cover is a non issue.
All other car manufacturers, which happens to have a bit more experience than those asses, understood that being able to have an unified battery, that happens to be thermally insulated (and often in the nordic countries, heated), to make sure you actually use them, even in cold weather.
I'm intrigued. Please give me examples of this.
Tesla cars are a perfect example of a product that only survive out of hype.
If you don't like them, you don't like them. That's fine. Nobody has a gun to your head. But you probably shouldn't be making up stuff for no reason.
I stand corrected then, my apologies for not researching the topic enough.
Still, having to find an external power source ton open your own car is kinda badly designed. 😅
Agreed. I'd prefer a pull handle or something, but at least there is a way of getting in at all without causing damage. I suspect it's a very rare event to need it at all.
I've seen cars (not Tesla's, I think it was a Dodge, not sure) require the removal of an entire bumper just to change a light bulb. So I guess silly design decisions like this are not a new thing.
It's true, our plain old dinosaur fuel car was notably slower in turning over on the -5 and colder days we've had recently.
But since tesla bother to heat the propulsion battery why don't they either 1: have a 12v power supply to provide ancillary power from the propulsion batteries if the 12v supply fails, or 2: also heat that battery too?
Probably due to the legacy of their first car, which was a gas car (a Lexus if I recall correctly) converted to a fully electric car. To minimize what they had to change, they kept the electronic circuitry as is and just changed the propulsion. Problem is, a gas car has its internal engine to heat up the battery. Electric car doesn't.
FUD bullshit
I thought ev batteries had heating and cooling to prevent exactly this? Maybe they couldn't heat enough through the cold to get charging again?
It's people having their battery die while they wait for an open charger.
It was a domino effect. When a car with a cold battery tried to charge, it had to wait for the heaters to get it up to a working temperature. This meant a 20 minute charge became 20 (initial) + 10 (heating time) + 10 (replacing extra power lost to heating). A 20 minute charge then takes 40+ minutes. The next car has the same issue. Once this happens a few times, even cars that were warm have cooled down, while queueing.
It's the EV equivalent of the petrol panics that happen to ICE cars. They idle in the queue until they run out of fuel. It's an infrastructure problem combined with people learning the limits of a new technology.
And don't forget that this constant charging means that the supercharger's own batteries are probably depleted, limiting them to what they can pull from the grid, which IIRC is 350kW per 4 stalls. So instead of 250kW max per stall, they can now only do ~90kW.
I saw a clip where a car was plugged in but hadn't charged "for three hours". If this was one specific charging station then obviously it was having issues - not the cars.
/Tesla owner (until lease is up next month) in Sweden
What are you getting after the Tesla?
Pour one out.
