It's Too Hot For EVs To Work Right
jalopnik.com
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.

  • buycurious@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ratman150@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • adj16@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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