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The Best, and Worst, Places To Drive Your Electric Car
sciencehabit writes For those tired of winter, you're not alone. Electric cars hate the cold, too. Researchers have conducted the first investigation into how electric vehicles fare in different U.S. climates. The verdict (abstract): Electric car buyers in the chilly Midwest and sizzling Southwest get less bang for their buck, where poor energy efficiency and coal power plants unite to turn electric vehicles into bigger polluters.
He's right, EVs are ideal in our temperatures and very popular in northern Europe. A low centre of gravity makes them handle well on slippery roads and pre-heating is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Range is reduced a little but as long as your name isn't Broder and you planned for that they are wonderful.
Speaking as a Leaf owner in northern Europe.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. (As a Tesla owner.) Charge time is largely irrelevant. I plug in every evening (just like with my phone) and next morning have full range available. Meanwhile, my wife often has barely enough gas in her car in the morning to be able to get to the gas station. And battery technology is going to continue to improve. Why wouldn't it? With solar in my roof and a battery buried in my back yard, I will soon be living with free energy. As long as those who want us all to continue to live in the past don't blow us up first, anyway.
Read the actual numbers... "(170 Wh/km), whereas the upper Midwest fared the worst in terms of energy efficiency (196 Wh/km; red)". We're talking about a 13% difference - the article uses the 15% figure from 170, cheating IMHO. BFD, one way or the other, yet the graph varies from green to BRIGHT RED!!!!
More numbers; even if you power your electric car on 100% coal, its about twice as clean per mile than a gasoline engine. The math is trivial and I suggest everyone try it themselves:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
I know that my current gas vehicle (2010 Elantra) gets about 360 miles per tank in summer, and goes down to 280 miles per tank in winter, due to (Canadian) road conditions and temperature.
If an electric only gets 15% worse, as the article seems to imply, this is still an improvement over my increased gas consumption in winter...
Way to misunderstand it.
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not turn the heat/cooling on you get better milage... even in a ICE vehicle. However because of the heat generated by the engine being added to the heat generated by driving and the ambient heat, electric cars will perform poorer in hot environments because the parts get hotter and can't be cooled as effectively.In a ICE, the thermal limit is higher, but even regular ICE vehicles will suffer in a desert.
When it comes down to it, the most efficient energy usage is actually electric rail vehicles (and I'm not talking about light rail, I'm talking about grade-separated heavy-rail/commuter rail, and driverless metros), this is because "people" over-apply brakes, and make a lot of inefficient driving decisions for acceleration. However even real systems suffer in high temperatures. Rails actually buckle if they're not welded and bolted to concrete ties.
Way to misunderstand it.
Consider your post is the clueless ones and mods have sent it from 0 to +3, well...
Engine Block heaters, heat the engine block, they do not heat the interior of the car. When you have an eletric car, they heat the seats, not the air. It uses less power.
All heaters help, which is why I said block/interior. Even a block heater will help the usual warming system deliver warmer air much faster, interior heaters warm the entire interior and there's the "full package" that does both. And the last car I saw without electric heating in the seats was in the 90s, still doesn't change that windows fog up, your hands get cold and so on. This "seat only" warming is a power saving measure since using power for heating steals range. How comfy do you really think it is to have one hot side - your backside - and one cold side?
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles rely on the engine running, even if it's electric HVAC. Electric cars, especially late model ones have entirely eletric HVAC.
*facepalm* Take a look at DEFA warmup, ZeroStart or any other of a ton of integrated or not so integrated solutions to do what you say they don't. Do you live in California or something? The exact same kind of pre-heating solutions have existed for decades.
But in the end, it's never about heating the car, it's about how inefficient it is to maintain a stable temperature. If you can start the car and not turn the heat/cooling on you get better milage... even in a ICE vehicle.
That is blatantly false:
At -20C, the use of a block heater can improve overall fuel economy by as much as 10 percent. In a test program conducted by Environment Canada, a vehicle sitting at -25C was warmed using a block heater and then driven over a simulated urban driving cycle. This resulted in a 25 percent reduction in fuel consumption compared to cold-starting the vehicle and driving it over the same route
For the metric and Google-impaired, -20C and -25C is -4F and -13F respectively.
However because of the heat generated by the engine being added to the heat generated by driving and the ambient heat, electric cars will perform poorer in hot environments because the parts get hotter and can't be cooled as effectively.In a ICE, the thermal limit is higher, but even regular ICE vehicles will suffer in a desert.
Deserts are kinda the opposite end of the scale here. In cold weather, ICE cars perform weak and electrics worse. And yes, electrics like Nissan Leaf use an electric heater to heat the battery when it's too cold. Tesla doesn't, which makes it sluggish the first minutes in the cold. And heating the interior will use electric power that could have been used for range in both. In ICE cars it'll just sap a little of the battery that'll recharge as you drive, in EVs it's a real drain.
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