this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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The whole thing about them losing range in the cold isn't even really true unless you can't precondition the battery. Which might be the case for people who don't charge at home, but at the very least it's a statement which requires qualification.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. I have a Model 3 and use it as my daily driver but have also done at least 4 cross country trips, two of which were in summer, one in spring, and one in winter.
For daily driving I can absolutely tell a difference in my range in the winter time and I do have a charger at home and car set to precondition. Preconditioning does make a big difference but it doesn’t completely offset the cold. Furthermore when it’s time to drive home from work I either have to drive on a cold battery or try to precondition without a charger.
During the recent cold snap (single digit Fahrenheit temps) I did an experiment with this where I started trying to precondition two hours before I left work. I just wanted to see how much battery it would take to precondition and ultimately test if that would be better than driving home cold. After two hours the battery was still not preconditioned sufficiently and I had used 20% of my battery. I would definitely have been better to just drive on a cold battery.
On long distance drives I have also found that the range suffers noticeably during winter weather. On my cross country winter trip it seemed like had about 15-20% less range between charges. And since I was driving all day and supercharging, the battery was fully conditioned the whole time. Didn’t prevent decreased range in the cold though.
I mean I do the same 100 mile trip every 2-3 weeks and I get almost exactly the same WH/mi year round as long as I'm not cranking the heat.
It's very hard to compare range on separate trips, since elevation change is by far the biggest factor.
Preconditioning only gets it ready for charging. It does almost nothing for driving except to allow the regen to work.
Lithium delivers fine below freezing, but it needs to be above freezing to accept a charge.
When you preconditioned at work for 2 hours all it did was waste battery.
XC trips when you put a supercharger as destination, it will automatically precondition to get ready to charge. And preconditioning takes away from your range.
The issue is you have a Tesla
Which EV maker has a model whose range doesn't diminish in cold weather?
This is just plain wrong.
We have two EV's in Norway (cold as fuck at times) and there is no way to manage the same range in winter as in summer.
Sure you can mitigate some of it by preheating both the cabin and the battery, but the heater working harder to maintain the temperature when it's cold outside and the added friction of driving on snow is always going to be there