How frigid weather are affecting electric vehicles
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Tom Krisher
2024-01-17 21:58:52GMT
Ankita Bansal prepares to charge her Tesla, Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024, in Ann Arbor, Mich.(AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
PITTSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — For nearly a week, frigid temperatures from Chicago to northern Texas have made life painful for electric-vehicle owners, with reduced driving range and hours of waiting at charging stations.
In Oak Brook, Illinois, near Chicago, on Monday, television reporters found Teslas that were running out of juice while in long lines for plugs at a Supercharger station. The temperature hit a low of minus 9 Fahrenheit (-23 Celsius).
Outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Teslas were plugged in at six of eight charging stations Wednesday as the wind howled with a temperature of 7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 14 Celsius). At least one driver was nearly out of juice.
It’s well known that EVs lose some of their travel range in the cold, especially in subzero temperatures like those that hit the nation’s mid-section this week. Studies found that range loss varies from 10% to 36%.
EVs also don’t charge as quickly in extreme cold. Some Tesla owners near Chicago told reporters their cars wouldn’t charge at all.
Experts acknowledge that cold weather can be hard for EVs, but they say with some planning and a little adjustment, owners should be able to travel pretty much as normal.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Inside EV batteries, lithium ions flow through a liquid electrolyte, producing electricity. But they travel more slowly through the electrolyte when it gets cold and don’t release as much energy. That cuts into the range and can deplete a battery faster.
The same happens in reverse. Since electrons move more slowly, the battery can’t accept as much electricity from a charging plug. That slows down charging.
The problem is that when temperatures plunge, batteries have to be warm enough for the electrons to move. And they have to be even warmer at fast-charging stations like Tesla’s.
“Pretty much anything that’s a chemical substance slows down when you get to a low temperature,” said Neil Dasgupta, associate professor of mechanical and materials science engineering at the University of Michigan. “That’s just something that nature has given us, and we have to deal with that.”
At a Supercharger station in Pittsfield Township, Michigan, just south of Ann Arbor, the battery in Ankita Bansal’s Tesla had only 7% of its charge left. She plugged in, but the car wouldn’t take electricity. Instead, the display said the battery was heating up. After it hits the proper temperature, it would take an hour and 50 minutes to get to a full charge, the display said.
“I have a long way to go,” said Bansal, a University of Michigan graduate student who wanted to get to a full charge because she doesn’t have a charging station at home.
HOW TO MAKE IT WORK
Bruce Westlake, president of the Eastern Michigan Electric Vehicle Association, said most EVs are programmed to warm the battery if the driver tells vehicle’s navigation system that a trip to the charging station is coming.
Many of those who think their cars won’t charge are new to EVs and don’t know how to “precondition” their batteries, said Westlake, who has two Teslas.
“They’re just learning,” he said. “And Tesla isn’t very good at explaining some things.” A message was left seeking comment from Tesla.
In frigid temperatures, it can take a half hour to warm the battery so it’s ready to charge, Westlake said. Preconditioning the battery does cost some range, although it’s usually only a few miles, he said.
Bansal, who has had her Tesla for only a week, didn’t know about preconditioning the car before charging, but she does now.
A few stalls away from her, Kim Burney’s Tesla Model 3 was charging just a little slower than it does in normal temperatures. She had driven farther than she thought on a trip to her dentist in Ann Arbor Wednesday morning and wanted to get close to a full charge for the rest of the day’s travels.
So she told the car she was going to the charging station and it was ready by the time she arrived and plugged in.
Like Westlake, Burney said EV drivers need to plan ahead, especially in cold weather. The car, she said, will tell you where charging stations are and how much range you have left. “The more you drive it the more you’re comfortable knowing how far you can go and how much to charge it,” she said.
Burney said she loses roughly 15% to 20% of her battery range in cold weather, but it gets dramatically worse in cold snaps like the one this week.
THE FUTURE OF CHARGING
In the short run, automakers are likely to come up with better ways to protect battery life and warm them for charging, Dasgupta said. And there are new battery chemistries in development that are more resilient in cold weather.
In the short term, Dasgupta said that as more mainstream consumers buy EVs, and as more automakers enter the market, they’ll develop models using existing lithium-ion chemistry that are tailored to colder climates. In some cases overall range might have to be sacrificed a little to get better cold-weather performance, he said.
Millions are being invested in new battery technology that performs better in the cold that will find its way from military, aerospace and undersea applications into electric vehicles, Dasgupta said.
“You can be an EV driver in a cold-weather climate,” he said. “Be optimistic and excited about what the future holds because it’s only going to get better from here.”
---
Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Emily Schmall and Jenny Gross
2024-01-17 21:18:33GMT
A driver charging his car in Denver on Tuesday. Tesla drivers across the United States have struggled with severely cold weather this week. Credit...David Zalubowski/Associated Press
With Chicago temperatures sinking below zero, electric vehicle charging stations have become scenes of desperation: depleted batteries, confrontational drivers and lines stretching out onto the street.
“When it’s cold like this, cars aren’t functioning well, chargers aren’t functioning well, and people don’t function so well either,” said Javed Spencer, an Uber driver who said he had done little else in the last three days besides charge his rented Chevy Bolt and worry about being stranded with a dead battery — again.
Mr. Spencer, 27, said he set out on Sunday for a charging station with 30 miles left on his battery. Within minutes, the battery was dead. He had to have the car towed to the station.
“When I finally plugged it in, it wasn’t getting any charge,” he said. Recharging the battery, which usually takes Mr. Spencer an hour, took five hours.
With more people owning electric vehicles than ever before, cold snaps this winter have created 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 this week have been stunned by bitterly cold temperatures. On Tuesday, wind chills plummeted near -30 degrees across much of the Chicago area, according to the National Weather Service. Dangerously low temperatures and waves of snow are expected to stick through the end of the week.
‘It’s kind of like, I don’t really want a Tesla.’
Vehicles use more energy to heat their batteries and cabin in cold weather, so it is normal to see energy consumption increase, Tesla reminds users in a post on its website, where it offers a few tips for drivers: Keep the charge level above 20 percent to reduce the impact of freezing temperatures. Tesla also recommends that drivers use its “scheduled departure” feature to register the start of a trip in advance, so the vehicle can determine the best time to start charging and preconditioning. That allows the car to operate at peak efficiency from the moment it starts.
In a painfully chilly parking lot in Chicago on Tuesday, Tesla drivers huddled in their cars waiting for a charge.
That morning, Nick Sethi, a 35-year-old engineer in Chicago, said he had found his Tesla frozen shut. He spent an hour in minus 5-degree temperatures struggling with the locks.
Finally, he was able to chisel out the embedded trunk handle to open it, clambering in and driving his Model Y Long Range S.U.V. five miles to the closest supercharging station. He joined a long line of Tesla drivers.
All 12 charging posts were occupied, with drivers slowing the process down slightly by staying inside their vehicles with the heat on high.
“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” Mr. Sethi, who moved to Chicago from Dallas last spring, said of owning a Tesla through a string of brutally cold days. “I’ll go through the winter and then decide whether I keep it.”
A few charging posts down, Joshalin Rivera was also experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse. She sat with the heat blasting inside her 2023 Tesla Model 3 as she juiced up the battery.
“If you’re waiting in that line and you only have 50 miles, you’re not going to make it,” Ms. Rivera said, gesturing to the line of vehicles stretched out onto Elston Avenue. She said that she had seen a Tesla run out of battery shortly after a driver attempted to cut the line.
In normal conditions, Ms. Rivera’s car can drive up to 273 miles on a single, 30-minute charge. This week, Ms. Rivera said she has awakened to find about a third of her car battery drained from the overnight cold. As temperatures plummeted, she spent hours every morning waiting in line and recharging the 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 and a high-voltage. In particularly cold weather, the lower-voltage, 12-volt battery can also lose charge, like it does in traditional vehicles.
When that happens, the E.V. cannot charge at a fast charger until the low voltage battery has been jump-started, said Albert Gore III, a former Tesla employee who is now the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, which represents automakers including Tesla and has released a tips sheet for operating electric vehicles in cold weather.
The challenge for electric vehicles is the two sides of the battery — the anode and the cathode — have chemical reactions that are slowed during extremely cold temperatures. That affects both the charging and the discharging of the battery, said Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
“It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions,” Mr. Brouwer said. “You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
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 been simply outmatched by the extreme cold weather.
“We’re just a few years into E.V. deployment at scale,” Mr. Gore said. “This is not a categorical problem for electric vehicles,” he added, “because it has largely been sorted out in other places.”
All vehicles, including ones powered by diesel or gas, perform worse in cold weather, a spokesman for an automotive trade organization noted. Dangerously cold temperatures are expected to continue in Chicago this week.Credit...Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press
Some of the countries with the highest usage of electric vehicles are also among the coldest. In Norway, where nearly one in four vehicles is electric, drivers are accustomed to taking steps, such as preheating the car ahead of a drive, to increase efficiency even in cold weather, said Lars Godbolt, an adviser of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association, which represents more than 120,000 electric car owners in Norway.
Charging stations in Norway see longer lines in the winter than summer, since vehicles are slower to charge in colder weather, but that has become less of an issue in recent years since Norway has built more charging ports, Mr. Godbolt said, citing a recent survey of members. Also, the majority of people in Norway live in houses, not apartments, and nearly 90 percent of electric vehicle owners have their own charging stations at home, he said.
Around the world, 14 percent of all new cars sold in 2022 were electric, up from 9 percent in 2021 and less than 5 percent 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 is likely to be less of an issue as companies update electric vehicles models. Even in the last few years, companies have developed capabilities that allow newer models to be more efficient in the cold. “These new challenges rise up, and the industry innovates their way to not completely but at least partly solve many of these issues,” Mr. Godbolt said.
All vehicles, including ones powered by diesel or gas, perform worse in cold weather, noted James Boley, a spokesman for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a trade association that represents more than 800 automotive companies in Britain. He said that the problem was less about the capacity of electric vehicles to run well in cold weather, and more about the inability to provide necessary infrastructure, like charging stations.
With a gas or diesel powered car, drivers have complete confidence that they will find gas stations, so are less focused on their decreased efficiency in cold weather, he said. “If electric vehicle charging infrastructure isn’t in place, it can be more of a concern.”
Mr. Spencer, the Uber driver, said the economics of driving an E.V. for a ride-sharing service may not work in Chicago winters. Uber said in a statement that it offers charging discounts for its drivers, but Mr. Spencer still worries.
“The payout is the same, but the cost to drivers, with all these extra charges, is much more,” he said.
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Tom Krisher
2024-01-17 21:58:52GMT
Ankita Bansal prepares to charge her Tesla, Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024, in Ann Arbor, Mich.(AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
PITTSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — For nearly a week, frigid temperatures from Chicago to northern Texas have made life painful for electric-vehicle owners, with reduced driving range and hours of waiting at charging stations.
In Oak Brook, Illinois, near Chicago, on Monday, television reporters found Teslas that were running out of juice while in long lines for plugs at a Supercharger station. The temperature hit a low of minus 9 Fahrenheit (-23 Celsius).
Outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Teslas were plugged in at six of eight charging stations Wednesday as the wind howled with a temperature of 7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 14 Celsius). At least one driver was nearly out of juice.
It’s well known that EVs lose some of their travel range in the cold, especially in subzero temperatures like those that hit the nation’s mid-section this week. Studies found that range loss varies from 10% to 36%.
EVs also don’t charge as quickly in extreme cold. Some Tesla owners near Chicago told reporters their cars wouldn’t charge at all.
Experts acknowledge that cold weather can be hard for EVs, but they say with some planning and a little adjustment, owners should be able to travel pretty much as normal.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Inside EV batteries, lithium ions flow through a liquid electrolyte, producing electricity. But they travel more slowly through the electrolyte when it gets cold and don’t release as much energy. That cuts into the range and can deplete a battery faster.
The same happens in reverse. Since electrons move more slowly, the battery can’t accept as much electricity from a charging plug. That slows down charging.
The problem is that when temperatures plunge, batteries have to be warm enough for the electrons to move. And they have to be even warmer at fast-charging stations like Tesla’s.
“Pretty much anything that’s a chemical substance slows down when you get to a low temperature,” said Neil Dasgupta, associate professor of mechanical and materials science engineering at the University of Michigan. “That’s just something that nature has given us, and we have to deal with that.”
At a Supercharger station in Pittsfield Township, Michigan, just south of Ann Arbor, the battery in Ankita Bansal’s Tesla had only 7% of its charge left. She plugged in, but the car wouldn’t take electricity. Instead, the display said the battery was heating up. After it hits the proper temperature, it would take an hour and 50 minutes to get to a full charge, the display said.
“I have a long way to go,” said Bansal, a University of Michigan graduate student who wanted to get to a full charge because she doesn’t have a charging station at home.
HOW TO MAKE IT WORK
Bruce Westlake, president of the Eastern Michigan Electric Vehicle Association, said most EVs are programmed to warm the battery if the driver tells vehicle’s navigation system that a trip to the charging station is coming.
Many of those who think their cars won’t charge are new to EVs and don’t know how to “precondition” their batteries, said Westlake, who has two Teslas.
“They’re just learning,” he said. “And Tesla isn’t very good at explaining some things.” A message was left seeking comment from Tesla.
In frigid temperatures, it can take a half hour to warm the battery so it’s ready to charge, Westlake said. Preconditioning the battery does cost some range, although it’s usually only a few miles, he said.
Bansal, who has had her Tesla for only a week, didn’t know about preconditioning the car before charging, but she does now.
A few stalls away from her, Kim Burney’s Tesla Model 3 was charging just a little slower than it does in normal temperatures. She had driven farther than she thought on a trip to her dentist in Ann Arbor Wednesday morning and wanted to get close to a full charge for the rest of the day’s travels.
So she told the car she was going to the charging station and it was ready by the time she arrived and plugged in.
Like Westlake, Burney said EV drivers need to plan ahead, especially in cold weather. The car, she said, will tell you where charging stations are and how much range you have left. “The more you drive it the more you’re comfortable knowing how far you can go and how much to charge it,” she said.
Burney said she loses roughly 15% to 20% of her battery range in cold weather, but it gets dramatically worse in cold snaps like the one this week.
THE FUTURE OF CHARGING
In the short run, automakers are likely to come up with better ways to protect battery life and warm them for charging, Dasgupta said. And there are new battery chemistries in development that are more resilient in cold weather.
In the short term, Dasgupta said that as more mainstream consumers buy EVs, and as more automakers enter the market, they’ll develop models using existing lithium-ion chemistry that are tailored to colder climates. In some cases overall range might have to be sacrificed a little to get better cold-weather performance, he said.
Millions are being invested in new battery technology that performs better in the cold that will find its way from military, aerospace and undersea applications into electric vehicles, Dasgupta said.
“You can be an EV driver in a cold-weather climate,” he said. “Be optimistic and excited about what the future holds because it’s only going to get better from here.”
---
Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Emily Schmall and Jenny Gross
2024-01-17 21:18:33GMT
A driver charging his car in Denver on Tuesday. Tesla drivers across the United States have struggled with severely cold weather this week. Credit...David Zalubowski/Associated Press
With Chicago temperatures sinking below zero, electric vehicle charging stations have become scenes of desperation: depleted batteries, confrontational drivers and lines stretching out onto the street.
“When it’s cold like this, cars aren’t functioning well, chargers aren’t functioning well, and people don’t function so well either,” said Javed Spencer, an Uber driver who said he had done little else in the last three days besides charge his rented Chevy Bolt and worry about being stranded with a dead battery — again.
Mr. Spencer, 27, said he set out on Sunday for a charging station with 30 miles left on his battery. Within minutes, the battery was dead. He had to have the car towed to the station.
“When I finally plugged it in, it wasn’t getting any charge,” he said. Recharging the battery, which usually takes Mr. Spencer an hour, took five hours.
With more people owning electric vehicles than ever before, cold snaps this winter have created 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 this week have been stunned by bitterly cold temperatures. On Tuesday, wind chills plummeted near -30 degrees across much of the Chicago area, according to the National Weather Service. Dangerously low temperatures and waves of snow are expected to stick through the end of the week.
‘It’s kind of like, I don’t really want a Tesla.’
Vehicles use more energy to heat their batteries and cabin in cold weather, so it is normal to see energy consumption increase, Tesla reminds users in a post on its website, where it offers a few tips for drivers: Keep the charge level above 20 percent to reduce the impact of freezing temperatures. Tesla also recommends that drivers use its “scheduled departure” feature to register the start of a trip in advance, so the vehicle can determine the best time to start charging and preconditioning. That allows the car to operate at peak efficiency from the moment it starts.
In a painfully chilly parking lot in Chicago on Tuesday, Tesla drivers huddled in their cars waiting for a charge.
That morning, Nick Sethi, a 35-year-old engineer in Chicago, said he had found his Tesla frozen shut. He spent an hour in minus 5-degree temperatures struggling with the locks.
Finally, he was able to chisel out the embedded trunk handle to open it, clambering in and driving his Model Y Long Range S.U.V. five miles to the closest supercharging station. He joined a long line of Tesla drivers.
All 12 charging posts were occupied, with drivers slowing the process down slightly by staying inside their vehicles with the heat on high.
“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” Mr. Sethi, who moved to Chicago from Dallas last spring, said of owning a Tesla through a string of brutally cold days. “I’ll go through the winter and then decide whether I keep it.”
A few charging posts down, Joshalin Rivera was also experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse. She sat with the heat blasting inside her 2023 Tesla Model 3 as she juiced up the battery.
“If you’re waiting in that line and you only have 50 miles, you’re not going to make it,” Ms. Rivera said, gesturing to the line of vehicles stretched out onto Elston Avenue. She said that she had seen a Tesla run out of battery shortly after a driver attempted to cut the line.
In normal conditions, Ms. Rivera’s car can drive up to 273 miles on a single, 30-minute charge. This week, Ms. Rivera said she has awakened to find about a third of her car battery drained from the overnight cold. As temperatures plummeted, she spent hours every morning waiting in line and recharging the 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 and a high-voltage. In particularly cold weather, the lower-voltage, 12-volt battery can also lose charge, like it does in traditional vehicles.
When that happens, the E.V. cannot charge at a fast charger until the low voltage battery has been jump-started, said Albert Gore III, a former Tesla employee who is now the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, which represents automakers including Tesla and has released a tips sheet for operating electric vehicles in cold weather.
The challenge for electric vehicles is the two sides of the battery — the anode and the cathode — have chemical reactions that are slowed during extremely cold temperatures. That affects both the charging and the discharging of the battery, said Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
“It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions,” Mr. Brouwer said. “You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
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 been simply outmatched by the extreme cold weather.
“We’re just a few years into E.V. deployment at scale,” Mr. Gore said. “This is not a categorical problem for electric vehicles,” he added, “because it has largely been sorted out in other places.”
All vehicles, including ones powered by diesel or gas, perform worse in cold weather, a spokesman for an automotive trade organization noted. Dangerously cold temperatures are expected to continue in Chicago this week.Credit...Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press
Some of the countries with the highest usage of electric vehicles are also among the coldest. In Norway, where nearly one in four vehicles is electric, drivers are accustomed to taking steps, such as preheating the car ahead of a drive, to increase efficiency even in cold weather, said Lars Godbolt, an adviser of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association, which represents more than 120,000 electric car owners in Norway.
Charging stations in Norway see longer lines in the winter than summer, since vehicles are slower to charge in colder weather, but that has become less of an issue in recent years since Norway has built more charging ports, Mr. Godbolt said, citing a recent survey of members. Also, the majority of people in Norway live in houses, not apartments, and nearly 90 percent of electric vehicle owners have their own charging stations at home, he said.
Around the world, 14 percent of all new cars sold in 2022 were electric, up from 9 percent in 2021 and less than 5 percent 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 is likely to be less of an issue as companies update electric vehicles models. Even in the last few years, companies have developed capabilities that allow newer models to be more efficient in the cold. “These new challenges rise up, and the industry innovates their way to not completely but at least partly solve many of these issues,” Mr. Godbolt said.
All vehicles, including ones powered by diesel or gas, perform worse in cold weather, noted James Boley, a spokesman for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a trade association that represents more than 800 automotive companies in Britain. He said that the problem was less about the capacity of electric vehicles to run well in cold weather, and more about the inability to provide necessary infrastructure, like charging stations.
With a gas or diesel powered car, drivers have complete confidence that they will find gas stations, so are less focused on their decreased efficiency in cold weather, he said. “If electric vehicle charging infrastructure isn’t in place, it can be more of a concern.”
Mr. Spencer, the Uber driver, said the economics of driving an E.V. for a ride-sharing service may not work in Chicago winters. Uber said in a statement that it offers charging discounts for its drivers, but Mr. Spencer still worries.
“The payout is the same, but the cost to drivers, with all these extra charges, is much more,” he said.
I'm just riding it out until it finally dies.