Cold becomes the enemy of electric car owners – 01/18/2024 – Market

As Chicago temperatures plunged below freezing, electric vehicle charging stations became scenes of despair: dead batteries, confrontational drivers and lines stretching into the street.

“When it’s this cold, cars don’t work well, chargers don’t work well, and people don’t work that well either,” said Javed Spencer, an Uber driver who said he had done nothing for the past three days other than charge his car. rented Chevy Bolt and worry about being stranded with a dead battery—again.

Spencer, 27, said he left on Sunday (14) for a charging station with approximately 48 kilometers left on the battery. In a matter of minutes, the battery was dead. He had to tow the car to the station. “When I finally plugged it in, it wasn’t getting a charge,” he said.

Recharging the battery, which usually takes Spencer an hour, took five hours. With more people owning electric vehicles than ever before, this winter’s cold snaps have caused headaches for electric vehicle owners as freezing temperatures drain batteries and reduce driving range.

And the problems may persist a little longer. Chicago and other parts of the United States and Canada were surprised this week by extremely cold temperatures.

On Tuesday (16), the wind chill dropped to almost minus 30 degrees in much of the Chicago region, according to the National Weather Service. Dangerously low temperatures and waves of snow are expected through the end of the week.

‘It’s kind of like, I don’t really want a Tesla’

Vehicles consume more energy to heat their batteries and cabin in cold climates, so it is normal to see increased energy consumption, recalls Tesla in a post on its website, where it offers some tips for drivers: keep the charge level above 20% to reduce the impact of freezing temperatures.

Tesla also recommends that drivers use the “scheduled departure” feature to record the start of a trip in advance so the vehicle can determine the best time to begin charging and preconditioning. This allows the car to run at maximum efficiency from the moment it is started.

In a painfully cold Chicago parking lot on Tuesday, Tesla drivers crowded into their cars waiting for a charge. That morning, Nick Sethi, 35, an engineer in Chicago, said he found his Tesla frozen.

He spent an hour in temperatures of minus 5 degrees struggling with the locks. Finally, he managed to carve out the trunk’s built-in handle to open it, getting in and driving his Tesla Model Y Long Range SUV approximately 5 miles to the nearest supercharging station.

He joined a long line of Tesla drivers. All 12 charging stations were occupied, with drivers slowing the process somewhat by remaining inside their vehicles with the heater on.

“It’s been a roller coaster,” Sethi, who moved to Chicago from Dallas last spring, said of owning a Tesla during a string of bitterly cold days. “I’ll get through the winter and then decide whether to stick with it.”

A few charging stations away, Joshalin Rivera was also experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse. She was sitting with the heater on inside her 2023 Tesla Model 3 while charging the battery.

“If you’re waiting in that line and it’s only 50 miles, you’re not going to make it,” Rivera said, gesturing to the line of vehicles stretching down Elston Avenue. She said she saw a Tesla, whose desperate driver tried to jump the queue, shut down in the same spot on Monday.

Under normal conditions, Rivera’s car can travel up to 439 kilometers on a single 30-minute charge.

This week, Rivera said he woke up to find about a third of his car battery dead due to the cold overnight. As temperatures dropped, she spent hours each morning waiting in line and recharging her battery. “It’s kind of like, I don’t really want a Tesla,” she said.

Why does cold weather drain electric vehicle batteries?

Unlike cars with internal combustion engines, an electric vehicle has two batteries: a low-voltage battery and a high-voltage battery. In extreme cold conditions, the low-voltage 12-volt battery can also lose charge, as happens in traditional vehicles.

When this happens, the electric vehicle cannot charge on a fast charger until the low-voltage battery is reset, said Albert Gore III, a former Tesla employee and current executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, which represents automakers. including Tesla, and released a guide to tips for operating electric vehicles in cold weather.

The challenge for electric vehicles is that both sides of the battery — the anode and the cathode — have chemical reactions that slow down during extremely cold temperatures. This affects both battery charging and discharging, said Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

“It ends up being very difficult to get battery electric vehicles to work in very cold conditions,” Brouwer said. “You can’t charge a battery that fast or discharge a battery that fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way around it.” They don’t have these problems in Norway.

As people in the industry study what went wrong in Chicago, some suggest that the charging infrastructure may have simply been overwhelmed by the extremely cold weather. “We are just a few years into large-scale deployment of electric vehicles,” Gore said.

“This is not a categorical problem for electric vehicles,” he added, “because it has been solved elsewhere.” Some of the countries with the highest use of electric vehicles are also among the coldest. In Norway, where nearly 1 in 4 vehicles is electric, drivers are accustomed to taking steps, such as pre-warming the car before driving, to increase efficiency even in cold weather, said Lars Godbolt, a consultant at the Norwegian Automobile Association. Electric Vehicles, which represents more than 120,000 electric car owners in Norway.

Charging stations in Norway have longer queues in winter than in summer as vehicles take longer to charge in colder weather, but this has become less of a problem in recent years as Norway has built more charging stations, said Godbolt, citing a recent member survey.

Furthermore, most people in Norway live in houses, not apartments, and almost 90% of electric vehicle owners have their own charging stations at home, he said. Worldwide, 14% of all new cars sold in 2022 were electric, up from 9% in 2021 and less than 5% in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, which provides data on energy security.

In Europe, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Denmark had the highest share of electric vehicles in new car registrations in 2022, according to the European Environment Agency. Cold weather will likely be less of an issue as companies update electric vehicle models.

Even in recent years, companies have developed capabilities that allow newer models to be more efficient in the cold. “These new challenges arise and the industry innovates to at least partly solve many of these problems,” Godbolt said.

All vehicles, including those powered by diesel or gasoline, perform worse in cold weather, noted James Boley, spokesman for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a trade association representing more than 800 car companies in Britain. .

He said the problem was less about the ability of electric vehicles to perform well in cold weather and more about the inability to provide necessary infrastructure such as charging stations.

With a gasoline or diesel car, drivers have complete confidence that they will find gas stations, so they are less worried about decreased efficiency in cold weather, he said. “If electric vehicle charging infrastructure is not in place, it could be more concerning.”

Spencer, the Uber driver, said the economics of driving an electric vehicle for a ride-sharing service may not work in Chicago winters.

“The pay is the same, but the cost to drivers, with all these extra fees, is much higher,” he said.