The big news on EV charging is from BYD in late March when they announced (and it caused TSLA to fall by a few percent) that their new line of superchargers will be able to charge cars to give them a range of 400 km in just a few minutes. This is the state of the art in production
They are expanding in Europe rapidly, and in China of course.
In the Netherlands they are partnered with a local green electricity provider (Vattenfall) and Shel for their charger network. Shell owns the most petrol stations along the highways, so they will have their chargers there for sure.
I'm expecting the tariffs on Chinese EVs to be rolled back in EU after the US tariffs. They might want BYD to open local factories, like NIO is planning to do.
> I'm expecting the tariffs on Chinese EVs to be rolled back in EU after the US tariffs.
I doubt it. This would likely have a significant negative impact on domestic EU car companies, most of which are considered cornerstones of their local country's economy. Now, whether this should happen (to benefit consumers/the environment) is another argument.
Countries really need to stop unfairly penalizing Chinese EVs. If they aren't allowed to compete, local industries will never have an incentive to improve. No argument about safety has ever had any merit - Teslas burst into flames all the time.
The real claim is 10 minute charging of lithium-ion batteries with a process which is a minor mod to existing battery production.
There's no product yet.
Batteries with good low temp behavior have many specialized uses.
Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this. Even flashlights could use this.
> Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this.
As a side topic, what are the currently available options for this?
I've heard about sodium ion (safer but still not sub-zero charging friendly, also no easily available solar charging controller boards), lithium titanate (same), and plain old deep-cycle lead acid.
For small solar-powered projects, it would be nice if there was a power bank on market which supported solar charging, and could either be safely charged in freezing temperatures, or had built-in temperature sensor and reject charging when it's too cold.
it seems a little bit dubious to me. You can't beat the Arrhenius Law, not in Electrochemistry, anyhow. The ion mobility would be very very low, you'd have to rely that the temperature in the battery itself is above 0°C
The battery can be large enough that it takes a long time to heat it, but that's usually what an EV is doing when it preconditions the battery for charging. My car (and pretty much all EVs) will precondition the battery if the next navigation stop is a charging station, for example.
This assumes that nav data is current or a telematics subscription is active. As Alec Watson of Tech Connections fame recently pointed out about his first-gen IONIQ 5, this needs to be feature accessible to the driver.
Indeed. For example in most cars, if you decide to use the navigation from Apple's CarPlay or Google's, the vehicle will not pre-heat the battery before charging.
In my BMW EV we recently got an update and it's now possible to manually pre-heat the battery, not only from within the car, but also even remotely via app. You can even lookup now the battery temperature.
Even then, it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem in the first place and that they are willing to take steps to solve it.
For most people, a car is at least the second-most expensive thing they'll ever own -- as well as the most expensive machine they'll ever own. It is also something that many are very unwilling to RTFM for, often to the point of irately defending this unwillingness and the resultant ignorance.
An improved battery that can charge quickly when cold (while maintaining safety and longevity) solves many problems, including some that may be self-inflicted.
> it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem
3 decades ago everyone with a mobile phone knew that you should never charge the battery unless it's empty. They knew "it has memory" and if you charge it when it's half full it will "remember" that new charge as its capacity. A decade or so later with LiIon or LiPo everyone knew the opposite, never let it go to empty.
Nobody knew why, how, they just knew this is how you should do it.
This would work for EVs too because they're expensive to buy, expensive to replace batteries, and range or charging speed are super huge deals.
Yeah, and this myth of never charging until empty has persisted through the 3 decades of the battery technology changes.
Not sure what would work for EVs too? I'd suggest education from the ev manufacturer is better (eg by repeating to the driver the first 50 times how and why to prepare for changing), and by the technical means (doint it automatically if possible).
Creating yet another "rule" that will then persist as the downright counterproductive or maybe even harmful myth decades later is not a good solution IMO.
Many EVs (Teslas) already contain a heat pump to warm the battery. I presume that improved battery chemistry would supplement this -- but maybe replacement would be possible?
While the technology may be advantageous, it seems weird to write a whole article about it without mentioning the obvious solution: Just Heat The Battery. It's true that many early EVs (and most non-Teslas even today) don't ship with battery thermal management. But they won't be getting new battery chemistry either.
This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is. It's not enough for this to beat a cold battery with a performance delta ("5x", per the article) that would justify its additional cost. It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached, which is a much (much) lower cost barrier.
In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery. Tesla is nice enough to hide this under "You should keep your car plugged in all the time" messages. It's really a pain, especially if you have a relatively small battery to begin with. I have a 2019 Model 3 w/ a 50 kwh battery, and use 10-20 kwh on a regular basis; 5 kwh wasted means as much as 1/3 of my energy use is effectively waste.
I'd be very interested in seeing what they can provide for us. Improved battery chemistry for use in the far north is of far, far more value than yet another 5 person car for 1 person driving in San Francisco.
When I bought a Model 3 last year I knew full well the issues with charging, temperature capacity loss, battery heating, etc. What I was surprised by was loss of regen! If the battery is below 20F or so then the firmware will only give it a trickle of regen braking. After all, it's effectively very fast charging, which a frozen battery can't handle.
I wonder if regen braking going to zero is behind some of the horror stories of sudden unexpected range loss in cold temps.
> In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery.
Exactly! That sounds like a drawback when you state it like that, but what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor (assuming no other drawbacks) just to be break-even in the market. You don't disrupt markets with numbers like that.
> what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor
The problem is mostly that it does the battery draw when parked.
Solid electrolytes are coming some day soon, so that we can let it freeze without killing the cells.
Right now, the Tesla is hard to use in a winter sport season unless where you're driving has a charger or underground parking near a plug point.
I can drive up hill to a nice ski resort, spend 3+ days taking the bus with all your shoes on without touching the car.
With the batteries, they'll just run down when parked, so I cannot park it for a whole week outdoors like I can do with my Subaru.
And with the low battery + low temps, it will not charge back up going downhill so the expected range drops massively by the time you're downhill.
Once you navigate to a charger, the car starts running the heater and driving down range further.
Watching the car battery eating its own range while driving to "Donner pass road" on your way out of Tahoe or Reno feels rather appropriately horrific.
My 2022 Volkswagen e-Up has zero thermal management of the battery, it's completely passively cooled with no heating. Not that it really matters, people have tested it and charging speed only starts to degrade after 3-4 rapid charges in one day, with "rapid" in quotes(in tops out at 40kW).
I believe the eGolf which was sold in the US shares the same drivetrain and battery.
Almost all non-Tesla EVs offer a heat pump option. Most non-Tesla EVs sold do not have one. Just go to your local VW dealer or whatever and see what the specs are on the ID.4's on the lot is.
You can easily read about your example VW MEB platform battery configurations, including built in thermal management system, online at the Munro teardown, for example.
Perhaps you are changing the topic from your original thermal management to heat pump systems specifically?
Heating, in its various forms, has one big drawback that having a battery that can charge faster in low temps would be really nice in: Starting the day needing to charge.
Ideally, you don't do that, but when traveling sometimes you have to stay at a place that doesn't have a charger, and it's really cold, and now rather than a 30 minute charge it's more like 90 minutes.
I mean this is an incremental improvement that would be very welcome. Why be so negative? Look around the products that have lived through decades of incremental improvements and compare them. Like the phone in your pocket or computer you are using.
You don't even need a heat pump. You can just slightly overvolt the charger, so that some electrical energy is lost as heat rather get than transformed into chemical bonds.
> This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is.
This technology makes no sense for fast DC charging because there's enough waste heat to keep up the battery temperature, and you can just use some of the power to heat up the battery.
But it can help for slow overnight charging. Keeping battery heated all night is wasteful, but you still want to be able to charge.
> You don't even need a heat pump. You can just slightly overvolt the charger
The BMW i3 had inductive heating strips underneath the coolant channels in the battery pack[1]. I know our i3 had a heat pump, I presume both were in play.
We used our i3 down to -25C (-13F) many times, didn't have any issues.
That doesn’t work when the problem is the battery is already sub-zero - lithium plating occurs when trying to charge in those conditions, destroying the battery.
You can’t just overvolt out of that - you need an external source of heat until you’re out of the dangerous thermal area.
I'm not sure if that affects all chemistries and compositions. If you look at the spec-sheet for e.g. the LG E63 cells used in some older EVs (notably without TMS), those specify charging down to -20 °C - and the owner's manuals certainly have no warnings in them that the car will implode if you charge in the winter.
Heat pumps struggle to do much at the temperature range the article proposes.
Edit: downvote me all you want, I was responding specifically to “It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached” of which EV heat pumps are not garden variety heat pumps, which do struggle at those temperatures. Didn’t think I had to be so pedantic.
Pretty sure the ones in most EVs today work fine at -10C, but they may lose some efficiency. The thing is, there's already mechanisms in some cars to generate waste heat specifically for this purpose. Tesla's already have the ability to run their motors 'inefficiently' generating waste heat, which can be pumped into the battery coolant and heat that. It's no better than electric strip heating, but it doesn't add any cost to the system.
The real benefit, in my view, to being able to charge at cold temps is to improve overall efficiency. If you have to waste some amount of power to heat the battery then that is power that could have been used to charge the car instead...
You bring up a great point. The battery spec is only given at -10C. That's a mild normal day's low temperature in winter in Minneapolis, USA. But it's often much colder than that for long periods of time. I wonder if this glassy layer they apply can handle -30C; a temp where above ground heat pumps are no better than electrical resistive heating.
The 5x delta is stated to be at 14F. That absolutely is within the reasonable operating range of a Model Y heat pump, not sure what you're citing?
It's true that there are very cold environments (Fairbanks winters, say) where in-car thermal management won't be sufficient to keep charging rates high. But those are the same environments where you can't even start a gasoline car without an engine block heater, and I don't see many "no cars in Alaska" arguments on the internet. Everything has limits, but I don't see this battery trickery having much of a home.
You can start gasoline cars just fine down to 20 or 30 below, so long as you keep a good battery in it. Sometimes big diesel trucks use block heaters but gasoline cars don't need them.
I've succesfully started my rustbucket diesel from 2009 in -33C. It didn't sound too happy about it, but it did start and run and get to where I wanted
I live in a region where -40°C is not unheard of (it happens every winter and stays for up to several weeks). I've also been to another region (not far off) where -50°C is pretty typical.
Gasoline powered engines work just fine in these temperatures, although many cars come with auto ignition systems that start up the engine periodically throughout the night to keep it warm. Otherwise you might have to warm it yourself in the morning using a gasoline powered "torch" (or whatever it's called), which sometimes ends up with the car going up in flames.
So it's honestly pretty funny to read that EV work "down to -10°C". Although probably relatively few of us are desperate enough to be living in such conditions.
Only if they have the ability to stop charging if the battery pack is below freezing, and some way to heat the pack (and keep it) above freezing. Otherwise, charging in those temps will destroy the battery.
Stock gasoline cars do not do well at those temperatures. In Alaska most people with sense use engine block heaters, plugging in every cold night. Besides the issue of having trouble just starting the car, you will put excessive wear and tear on the engine doing it regularly.
And in places like Fairbanks where -40 (F/C) is fairly common in the winter, even cars that merely have an engine block heater will have trouble. You need even more heating pads for the rest of the stuff under the hood of you want to keep a car reliable and healthy in that kind of climate.
I can definitely say that old/USSR 2.7L gasoline engines for the military came with block heaters. But they were expected to start in -50C / -60F. Good luck getting anything out of an EV at those temperatures.
There's plenty of Norwegians on YouTube testing EVs down to those kinds of temperatures and they work absolutely fine, with the caveat that they won't charge until the battery warms up. Discharging Lithium batteries at really low temperatures isn't an issue, charging them is(because it actively damages them) - but even then the threshold is -32C or around that, easily overcome even with a simple resistive heater.
The big news on EV charging is from BYD in late March when they announced (and it caused TSLA to fall by a few percent) that their new line of superchargers will be able to charge cars to give them a range of 400 km in just a few minutes. This is the state of the art in production
https://www.ttnews.com/articles/byd-5-minute-charging-rivals
I mean, this is great, but BYD has pretty much zero installed charger footprint in markets where the Supercharger network exists.
Is that going to change?
They are expanding in Europe rapidly, and in China of course.
In the Netherlands they are partnered with a local green electricity provider (Vattenfall) and Shel for their charger network. Shell owns the most petrol stations along the highways, so they will have their chargers there for sure.
I'm expecting the tariffs on Chinese EVs to be rolled back in EU after the US tariffs. They might want BYD to open local factories, like NIO is planning to do.
> I'm expecting the tariffs on Chinese EVs to be rolled back in EU after the US tariffs.
I doubt it. This would likely have a significant negative impact on domestic EU car companies, most of which are considered cornerstones of their local country's economy. Now, whether this should happen (to benefit consumers/the environment) is another argument.
Considering current politics: not in the US, at least not for the foreseeable future.
Europe remains to be seen, but also unlikely short term as we're also slapping lots of tariffs on chinese EVs to protect local industries
Countries really need to stop unfairly penalizing Chinese EVs. If they aren't allowed to compete, local industries will never have an incentive to improve. No argument about safety has ever had any merit - Teslas burst into flames all the time.
Isn't their plan to sell them to charger operators?
Company web site.[1]
The real claim is 10 minute charging of lithium-ion batteries with a process which is a minor mod to existing battery production.
There's no product yet.
Batteries with good low temp behavior have many specialized uses. Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this. Even flashlights could use this.
[1] http://arborbatteries.us/
> Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this.
As a side topic, what are the currently available options for this?
I've heard about sodium ion (safer but still not sub-zero charging friendly, also no easily available solar charging controller boards), lithium titanate (same), and plain old deep-cycle lead acid.
For small solar-powered projects, it would be nice if there was a power bank on market which supported solar charging, and could either be safely charged in freezing temperatures, or had built-in temperature sensor and reject charging when it's too cold.
Most consumer LiFePO4 power stations have this sensor and cut charging below 0C, still allowing discharge up to around -10C.
it seems a little bit dubious to me. You can't beat the Arrhenius Law, not in Electrochemistry, anyhow. The ion mobility would be very very low, you'd have to rely that the temperature in the battery itself is above 0°C
How much more expensive will this solution be than putting a “block heater” into the battery to warm it up to room temperature faster while charging?
If the charge rate is reduced by battery temp and chemistry, shunt the surplus supply into changing the battery temp, no?
The battery can be large enough that it takes a long time to heat it, but that's usually what an EV is doing when it preconditions the battery for charging. My car (and pretty much all EVs) will precondition the battery if the next navigation stop is a charging station, for example.
This assumes that nav data is current or a telematics subscription is active. As Alec Watson of Tech Connections fame recently pointed out about his first-gen IONIQ 5, this needs to be feature accessible to the driver.
Indeed. For example in most cars, if you decide to use the navigation from Apple's CarPlay or Google's, the vehicle will not pre-heat the battery before charging.
In my BMW EV we recently got an update and it's now possible to manually pre-heat the battery, not only from within the car, but also even remotely via app. You can even lookup now the battery temperature.
Even then, it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem in the first place and that they are willing to take steps to solve it.
For most people, a car is at least the second-most expensive thing they'll ever own -- as well as the most expensive machine they'll ever own. It is also something that many are very unwilling to RTFM for, often to the point of irately defending this unwillingness and the resultant ignorance.
An improved battery that can charge quickly when cold (while maintaining safety and longevity) solves many problems, including some that may be self-inflicted.
> it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem
3 decades ago everyone with a mobile phone knew that you should never charge the battery unless it's empty. They knew "it has memory" and if you charge it when it's half full it will "remember" that new charge as its capacity. A decade or so later with LiIon or LiPo everyone knew the opposite, never let it go to empty.
Nobody knew why, how, they just knew this is how you should do it.
This would work for EVs too because they're expensive to buy, expensive to replace batteries, and range or charging speed are super huge deals.
Yeah, and this myth of never charging until empty has persisted through the 3 decades of the battery technology changes.
Not sure what would work for EVs too? I'd suggest education from the ev manufacturer is better (eg by repeating to the driver the first 50 times how and why to prepare for changing), and by the technical means (doint it automatically if possible).
Creating yet another "rule" that will then persist as the downright counterproductive or maybe even harmful myth decades later is not a good solution IMO.
Many EVs (Teslas) already contain a heat pump to warm the battery. I presume that improved battery chemistry would supplement this -- but maybe replacement would be possible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGgrkeds5U
Not only Teslas: my Renault has this as standard, and many brands have it at least as an option.
Link to the research article: https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00062-5
can we do it for the smartphones first? without turning them into a furnace
While the technology may be advantageous, it seems weird to write a whole article about it without mentioning the obvious solution: Just Heat The Battery. It's true that many early EVs (and most non-Teslas even today) don't ship with battery thermal management. But they won't be getting new battery chemistry either.
This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is. It's not enough for this to beat a cold battery with a performance delta ("5x", per the article) that would justify its additional cost. It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached, which is a much (much) lower cost barrier.
In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery. Tesla is nice enough to hide this under "You should keep your car plugged in all the time" messages. It's really a pain, especially if you have a relatively small battery to begin with. I have a 2019 Model 3 w/ a 50 kwh battery, and use 10-20 kwh on a regular basis; 5 kwh wasted means as much as 1/3 of my energy use is effectively waste.
I'd be very interested in seeing what they can provide for us. Improved battery chemistry for use in the far north is of far, far more value than yet another 5 person car for 1 person driving in San Francisco.
When I bought a Model 3 last year I knew full well the issues with charging, temperature capacity loss, battery heating, etc. What I was surprised by was loss of regen! If the battery is below 20F or so then the firmware will only give it a trickle of regen braking. After all, it's effectively very fast charging, which a frozen battery can't handle.
I wonder if regen braking going to zero is behind some of the horror stories of sudden unexpected range loss in cold temps.
> In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery.
Exactly! That sounds like a drawback when you state it like that, but what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor (assuming no other drawbacks) just to be break-even in the market. You don't disrupt markets with numbers like that.
> what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor
The problem is mostly that it does the battery draw when parked.
Solid electrolytes are coming some day soon, so that we can let it freeze without killing the cells.
Right now, the Tesla is hard to use in a winter sport season unless where you're driving has a charger or underground parking near a plug point.
I can drive up hill to a nice ski resort, spend 3+ days taking the bus with all your shoes on without touching the car.
With the batteries, they'll just run down when parked, so I cannot park it for a whole week outdoors like I can do with my Subaru.
And with the low battery + low temps, it will not charge back up going downhill so the expected range drops massively by the time you're downhill.
Once you navigate to a charger, the car starts running the heater and driving down range further.
Watching the car battery eating its own range while driving to "Donner pass road" on your way out of Tahoe or Reno feels rather appropriately horrific.
> It's true that many early EVs (and most non-Teslas even today) don't ship with battery thermal management.
That’s false since at latest 2013 in the US.
The past 12 years of BMW as a counterexample all have thermal management. Tesla too.
You may be remembering the original Nissan Leaf?
My 2022 Volkswagen e-Up has zero thermal management of the battery, it's completely passively cooled with no heating. Not that it really matters, people have tested it and charging speed only starts to degrade after 3-4 rapid charges in one day, with "rapid" in quotes(in tops out at 40kW).
I believe the eGolf which was sold in the US shares the same drivetrain and battery.
Different drivetrain and battery for the eGolf, but both of these are effectively 2013 EVs.
Almost all non-Tesla EVs offer a heat pump option. Most non-Tesla EVs sold do not have one. Just go to your local VW dealer or whatever and see what the specs are on the ID.4's on the lot is.
You can easily read about your example VW MEB platform battery configurations, including built in thermal management system, online at the Munro teardown, for example.
Perhaps you are changing the topic from your original thermal management to heat pump systems specifically?
Those are different goal posts. There are other ways of heating a battery.
Heating, in its various forms, has one big drawback that having a battery that can charge faster in low temps would be really nice in: Starting the day needing to charge.
Ideally, you don't do that, but when traveling sometimes you have to stay at a place that doesn't have a charger, and it's really cold, and now rather than a 30 minute charge it's more like 90 minutes.
> (and most non-Teslas even today) don't ship with battery thermal management
Some do but don't enable it immediately, but do so with a software upgrade. (such as what happened with Kia EV6/Hyundai Ioniq 5)
I mean this is an incremental improvement that would be very welcome. Why be so negative? Look around the products that have lived through decades of incremental improvements and compare them. Like the phone in your pocket or computer you are using.
You don't even need a heat pump. You can just slightly overvolt the charger, so that some electrical energy is lost as heat rather get than transformed into chemical bonds.
> This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is.
This technology makes no sense for fast DC charging because there's enough waste heat to keep up the battery temperature, and you can just use some of the power to heat up the battery.
But it can help for slow overnight charging. Keeping battery heated all night is wasteful, but you still want to be able to charge.
> You don't even need a heat pump. You can just slightly overvolt the charger
The BMW i3 had inductive heating strips underneath the coolant channels in the battery pack[1]. I know our i3 had a heat pump, I presume both were in play.
We used our i3 down to -25C (-13F) many times, didn't have any issues.
[1]: https://youtu.be/JjPIuLz5VFI?t=1124
Heat pumps also serve for more efficient heating when you're driving. Just like at home where a heat pump is more efficient than a resistant heater.
That doesn’t work when the problem is the battery is already sub-zero - lithium plating occurs when trying to charge in those conditions, destroying the battery.
You can’t just overvolt out of that - you need an external source of heat until you’re out of the dangerous thermal area.
I'm not sure if that affects all chemistries and compositions. If you look at the spec-sheet for e.g. the LG E63 cells used in some older EVs (notably without TMS), those specify charging down to -20 °C - and the owner's manuals certainly have no warnings in them that the car will implode if you charge in the winter.
Heat pumps struggle to do much at the temperature range the article proposes.
Edit: downvote me all you want, I was responding specifically to “It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached” of which EV heat pumps are not garden variety heat pumps, which do struggle at those temperatures. Didn’t think I had to be so pedantic.
Pretty sure the ones in most EVs today work fine at -10C, but they may lose some efficiency. The thing is, there's already mechanisms in some cars to generate waste heat specifically for this purpose. Tesla's already have the ability to run their motors 'inefficiently' generating waste heat, which can be pumped into the battery coolant and heat that. It's no better than electric strip heating, but it doesn't add any cost to the system.
The real benefit, in my view, to being able to charge at cold temps is to improve overall efficiency. If you have to waste some amount of power to heat the battery then that is power that could have been used to charge the car instead...
You bring up a great point. The battery spec is only given at -10C. That's a mild normal day's low temperature in winter in Minneapolis, USA. But it's often much colder than that for long periods of time. I wonder if this glassy layer they apply can handle -30C; a temp where above ground heat pumps are no better than electrical resistive heating.
https://ashp.neep.org/ for a list of heat pumps that perform well in cold weather.
The 5x delta is stated to be at 14F. That absolutely is within the reasonable operating range of a Model Y heat pump, not sure what you're citing?
It's true that there are very cold environments (Fairbanks winters, say) where in-car thermal management won't be sufficient to keep charging rates high. But those are the same environments where you can't even start a gasoline car without an engine block heater, and I don't see many "no cars in Alaska" arguments on the internet. Everything has limits, but I don't see this battery trickery having much of a home.
You can start gasoline cars just fine down to 20 or 30 below, so long as you keep a good battery in it. Sometimes big diesel trucks use block heaters but gasoline cars don't need them.
I've succesfully started my rustbucket diesel from 2009 in -33C. It didn't sound too happy about it, but it did start and run and get to where I wanted
I live in a region where -40°C is not unheard of (it happens every winter and stays for up to several weeks). I've also been to another region (not far off) where -50°C is pretty typical.
Gasoline powered engines work just fine in these temperatures, although many cars come with auto ignition systems that start up the engine periodically throughout the night to keep it warm. Otherwise you might have to warm it yourself in the morning using a gasoline powered "torch" (or whatever it's called), which sometimes ends up with the car going up in flames.
So it's honestly pretty funny to read that EV work "down to -10°C". Although probably relatively few of us are desperate enough to be living in such conditions.
They work down to -10. And colder than that too. Apologies to Mitch Hedberg.
Only if they have the ability to stop charging if the battery pack is below freezing, and some way to heat the pack (and keep it) above freezing. Otherwise, charging in those temps will destroy the battery.
I think that's everything but the Nissan Leaf.
Leaf can heat the pack, just no cooling
Stock gasoline cars do not do well at those temperatures. In Alaska most people with sense use engine block heaters, plugging in every cold night. Besides the issue of having trouble just starting the car, you will put excessive wear and tear on the engine doing it regularly.
And in places like Fairbanks where -40 (F/C) is fairly common in the winter, even cars that merely have an engine block heater will have trouble. You need even more heating pads for the rest of the stuff under the hood of you want to keep a car reliable and healthy in that kind of climate.
Yes, and even then ‘healthy’ is not what people in normal climates think. It puts a lot of wear and tear on vehicles.
I can definitely say that old/USSR 2.7L gasoline engines for the military came with block heaters. But they were expected to start in -50C / -60F. Good luck getting anything out of an EV at those temperatures.
There's plenty of Norwegians on YouTube testing EVs down to those kinds of temperatures and they work absolutely fine, with the caveat that they won't charge until the battery warms up. Discharging Lithium batteries at really low temperatures isn't an issue, charging them is(because it actively damages them) - but even then the threshold is -32C or around that, easily overcome even with a simple resistive heater.