EVs in Winter

EVs take more energy in winter – but they still work!

In Norway, a country with significant area above the arctic circle, about 82% of new cars were EVs in 2023. I read about EV owners in Maine and Alaska and how they do just fine, thank you, all the time. I personally took an EV a few miles down a snowy road into a deep canyon, AM temperature 5F, parked it on an ice-covered parking lot without a ray of sun all day, and drove home at the end of the day. I personally have parked overnight in Sno-parks, then drove off, charged my EV in the cold of the evening, and had no problems. I saw more than one carful of folks at the 2023 Ouray, CO ice climbing festival. That was not exactly balmy weather either. 

The cold (sorry), hard facts of EVs in winter

1) EVs are less efficient in winter. The best EVs suffer drastic drops in efficiency by -30F (-34C) - 30% or more. So, in really cold conditions, you'll have to charge more often, and/or to higher state-of-charge.

2) If the battery of your car is below zero F (-16c), it is very hard to charge it. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN'T CHARGE A BATTERY WHEN IT'S COLD OUT. The better EVs precondition their batteries for charging and fast charging. The best EVs have a heat pump, which is much more effieient than a resistive heater. 

So, if you think EVs don't work in winter you're going to have to explain away all the folks who use –and charge– their EVs down to -35 F or C with no problem. 

If you live in an extremely cold climate, you can put on a battery insulating panel for the winter; here is the first one I found, and it's recommended to keep your car plugged in when it's not moving - like ICEV people do (you plug in the "engine block heater", standard equipment for all ICEVs for cold climates). 

3) Most EVs have little or no performance effects in extreme cold - you push down the gas, it rockets.  The problems are confined to efficiency and charging, as in #1 and #2.

4) Some EVs are better than others in winter (preconditioning/battey warming capabilities, efficiency, and to some extent size of battery). It's best to look in owners forums about real experience with specific models. 

The Great Chicago EV Fail of Winter 2023/2024 - or was it?

In Jan of 2024, news outlets everywhere reported "charging lots full of EVs were stacked with dead and abandoned cars, some owners waiting days...".  The public absolutely ate this up. "bunch of dead robots" was, I believe, the most popular headline. Really, I wondered?  How is it that I have used EVs in the cold, but there was such a catastrophe in Chicago? (The Guardian reported -5F). 

The very same day as the disaster in Chicago was all over the news, someone posted their video driving around in Alberta, Canada at -35 C, charging here and there – with no problems of any kind.  Here, on an EV owners forum, people reporting extreme cold charging, including a guy from Alaska, pretty much the same day, and again in single digit F temps in Maine. Even in Chicago, same day, same place, in same temperatures, many EV drivers reaction to this report was, "huh? But I don't have any problem at all!". 

What gives? 

 Doubtless because this sounded so completely wacky, an EV youtuber literally flew to chicago to report on what the heck happened - but to understand, not to grab a headline. 

Here is the real story: 

• Chicago is requiring rideshare drivers to use EVs. In response, rideshare drivers rent EVs. That means you have people with often limited understanding and experience with EVs, especially in the cold, not just using them, but pushing them. EV drivers are incentivized to try to get "just one more ride" out of their battery when it's very low, whereas most people would never. 

• Obviously, rideshare drivers, as a business with profit motive, rent the cheapest EVs available. That would be Chevy Bolts and Model 3 short range RWD LFP battery models.Chevy Bolts have no battery heaters/conditioning, and small batteries. Tesla model 3 short range RWD LFPs have: a) less effective battery heating than AWDs b) LFP battery chemistry, which performs noticeably worse in the winter than than the "standard" NMC chemistry,

• If you have an EV near zero SOC, AND it's extremely cold out, it can't keep its battery warm with preconditioning, and then if you plug into a charger, it will often take a very long time, on the scale of an hour (NMC), for the battery to warm up enough for fast charging. So apparently, in the city center only, folks left dead, frozen RWD LFP Teslas plugged in for hours, while the cars waiting, using their heaters to keep the drivers warm  drained their batteries to zero and exacerbated the problem, in a vicious cycle. It was even worse at public chargers, where dead Chevy bolts with no battery conditioning fared even worse. 

• In these high-use stations, some chargers were not working, exacerbating the problem.

So, I would call the Great Chicago EV Freeze something more like the Great Chicago EV Rideshare Drivers Fail - as in, the drivers, and to some extent the cars they selected, were the cause of the fail. Like I said, other EVs in Alaska, Norway, Maine etc. in much colder conditions were humming along just fine. 

#greenyourride. And don't fear winter - go play in it! If you're in a cold place, just like choosing an ICEV, choose an appropriate one. And oh yes, that computer-controlled tracking your all-computer EV has? It makes for way better traction on snow and ice.