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Never once in 25 years of living in northern Maine have I had an ICE engine not start in the cold. Fuck I can’t remember even diesel engines falling because of glow plugs.
Yet on the first 0 day I can recall in a few years I have three friends stuck.
I’ll believe this shit when I see some actual data that isn’t a random company in Norway.
Well, frankly, Northern Maine isn’t very much north and not enough inland to get the extremes?
Most of Scandinavia has been below -15F for a good part of the new year and being relatively dense (for Scandinavia) in EV coverage I’d say Norway is the best example of EV very cold weather performance.
We’ve had this same “debate” here as well with ice-owners lamenting the perceived loss of range and EV-owners responding “I know, don’t care. Always works, always warm and always topped up”.
I’ve lived in Minnesota for decades and I’ve never had an ICE not start in the winter.
That said, the cold weather performance isn’t enough to stop me from getting an EV. The same general rules apply for all vehicles in cold weather climates, which is to always have an emergency kit just in case.
There was a time though when I commuted 35 miles one way to work and the charging parking spots were always full when I got there. Range loss would worry me a bit there but in that case I’d buy a hybrid and plan for full EV on the next go round.
Really, never?
AFAIK Minnesota does get proper winter cold, so it’s just a bit surprising.I’ve had both petrol and diesel cars not start on me when it’s cold enough.
Diesel probably didn’t want to go because of old glow plugs and on the petrol I had somehow managed to get a bit of water in the tank that froze in the line.Never. I have had some hard starts when I’ve owned older cars but I’ve never had it not start.
My biggest issue was actually my first car with the headlights. It didn’t chime to remind you they were on and those didn’t turn off automatically. I had to tape a reminder to turn them off on the steering wheel because I killed the battery a couple times.
Still, winter performance wouldn’t stop me from getting an EV. It’s probably be a bonus because when it’s super cold out who wants to go anywhere? Good excuse to stay home.
I live in Chicago and both my relatively new cars wouldn’t start without a jump last week…
Sorry to hear that! You might benefit from a battery tender or one of those jump starter devices like the Halo.
I had to jump my mother in law last week and we might get her one as a birthday present. Her situation wasn’t directly cold related though, her negative terminal was super corroded. Ended up needing a battery and the terminal cable replaced.
For 90% of driving, EVs are great in the winter. Even if it only had 100mi range, and it’s so cold that it loses 40% of that, it’s still better. You can get to work, do errands, and make it home to charge just fine.
Its going to warm up the cabin faster than an ICE. Not only that, but if you know when you’re going to leave, you can set them to warm up ahead of time while still attached to the charger. You’ll pop right in to a toasty warm cabin. Once you have that, you don’t want to go back.
If the positions were swapped and ICE was a new thing, people would be writing op-eds about how cold they are for most of the drive to work.
TBF you can turn on an ICE car and let it warm up a bit before you drive it. Some ICE cars also allow you to remotely pre-start or there are after market options so you can use an app to do exactly that. Hell, Russian far east they simply leave the car on for the cold months.
It’s just that it’s incredibly wasteful/polluting.
My grandpa would do that back in the sixties. Luckily some things do change.
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.
The issue is you have a Tesla
First: It’s a site dedicated to electric vehicle promotion. So it might be a tiny bit biased.
Second: Their criteria was for their claim was, “13 percent of the cases with starting difficulties are electric cars”. Well, golly gosh gee, how surprising that an electric car would be easier to start in cold weather, since as long as you have any juice left in your battery, it’s gonna go. You don’t have problems like diesel fuel gelling, or oil turning into molasses. (If it gets cold enough, your battery might freeze solid, and then you have real problems.)
Finally: “[…] electric vehicles are involved in roughly 21% of all its cases so far in 2024” Given that Norway is roughly 25% electric vehicles–they don’t give the exact percentage in the article–that’s… Pretty much in line with overall percentages. It might even be high, given that EVs are more likely to be new than ICE vehicles.
If we’re going to do cars–and I don’t think that there’s a reasonable alternative that can be brought to bear in a reasonable time–then I’m all for electric. But this isn’t a great way to promote them.
Your second point is basically agreeing that electric cars are better at starting in the cold, where all you’re doing is explaining why. Maybe I missed what your second point of disagreement was.
Because the problem with ev is that the battery drains charge faster in the cold, charges slower in the cold, and struggles to charge at all if its too cold.
So if you have juice, starting is fine. But the cold problems for ev is that the cold is functionally drinking your gas for you, not that the engine cant turn over.
not that the engine cant turn over.
Funny you use this phrase, when the actual action of “turning over” isn’t something electric vehicles can even do :D
Windows dont roll down either, phones dont ring, and that weird square for my save icon means nothing to me.
Linguistic artifacts are weird
