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"Not ideal". That is a mild way of saying "usually impossible".
Well, again, apartment/condo dwellers and townhomes that have only on-street parking make up about 1/3rd of car owners. So out of 280 million cars, that leaves 186 million cars that have a path to home charging. We sold 1 million EVs last year. I think that in the decades it'd take to sell EVs to those with a path to home charging NOW, the plight of the other third will be solved.
For those of us who do not waste our time watching random youtube videos purported to be useful, please answer the following:
1) what are the credentials of the people discussing this - are they engineers & scientists, or housewives & influencers?
2) what are their conclusions?
3) how robust are their conclusions?
If you are truly interested in gaining knowledge on EVs, EV infrastructure and the industry then you know Kyle Conner and Out of Spec, or you will once you start trying to learn. If you just like to bicker on forums about EVs then you probably don't and it's not my job provide you credentials. He flew to Chicago to cover this story on there ground, which tells you how deep he is in the game. His summary cound be found at 29 minutes.
Kyle and Out of Spec are EV enthusiast who are also some of the most critical folks you will found on the state of EV infrastructure. He hass access to the CEOs all the way down to the engineers.
If you are truly interested in gaining knowledge on EVs, EV infrastructure and the industry then you know Kyle Conner and Out of Spec, or you will once you start trying to learn. If you just like to bicker on forums about EVs then you probably don't and it's not my job provide you credentials. He flew to Chicago to cover this story on there ground, which tells you how deep he is in the game. His summary cound be found at 29 minutes.
Kyle and Out of Spec are EV enthusiast who are also some of the most critical folks you will found on the state of EV infrastructure. He hass access to the CEOs all the way down to the engineers.
I have seen a good number of the Out of Spec videos and quite like the guy. He's not afraid to call out genuine problems, but, he doesn't just make s--- up or exaggerate wildly just to make EVs sound bad. In other words, he's fairly balanced and he has good integrity. Finally, he does the legwork to be able to speak from practical, first-hand experience. This guy is not part of the culture war.
Most EV owners are going to charge at home most of the time with either level 1 or 2 slow chargers, so not a practical issue. You go to work, come home, plug it in over night. Unless you have a huge commute, even a 115V outlet probably tops you back off by morning.
My '21 Ioniq (not the new sexy post-2021 one, this is essentially a Hyundai Elantra with an electric drive train) has about a 185 mile range on a mild summery day with a tailwind, probably about 130 miles on a bitterly cold winter day due to battery chemistry, snow tires and heater running -- but I seldom put even 10 miles on in any given day and normally trickle-charge it once a week. I have NEVER had the slightest problem charging it fully, it just has a reduced range in winter. I have NEVER had it go down to zero, that isn't how drive batteries work. I suppose if you let it sit all winter it might lose some of its charge but this isn't like a 12V accessory battery.
Which brings me to another point of failure, there IS a 12V accessory battery in many EVs, as it's cheaper to run the standard accessories off that separately. That COULD fail like the 12V battery in any ICE vehicle and it isn't necessarily true that the drive battery power would get routed through the dead 12V to compensate. But since there's no starter motor to turn a motor over with jelly-like crankcase oil, I would think a complete failure to start the vehicle would be much less likely. It's literally just to bootstrap the computer and turn on the drive train.
I HAVE noticed that I can turn the vehicle on after a full charge, on a very cold day it might show 115 or 120 miles of range and after I drive it a half mile it suddenly shows 130 or 135 -- I am sure that is due to warming up the system. I'm skeptical that a fast charger wouldn't warm most batteries quickly. The more likely cause of problems with fast charging in cold weather is bugs in the power management software, which I'd expect to not be nearly so well tested in extreme weather. Perhaps, problems with the charger itself being cold as well. Extreme winter conditions would be well off what we software developers call "the happy path". So I would expect these issues to be addressed over time.
If you are truly interested in gaining knowledge on EVs, EV infrastructure and the industry then you know Kyle Conner and Out of Spec, or you will once you start trying to learn. If you just like to bicker on forums about EVs then you probably don't and it's not my job provide you credentials. He flew to Chicago to cover this story on there ground, which tells you how deep he is in the game. His summary cound be found at 29 minutes.
Kyle and Out of Spec are EV enthusiast who are also some of the most critical folks you will found on the state of EV infrastructure. He hass access to the CEOs all the way down to the engineers.
Yeah his summary sounds like not a problem with EVs but with chargers and specifically fast chargers combined with the need on a very cold day to "warm up" the system before even attempting a fast charge. This strikes me as exposing a problem with insufficient engineering around this fairly common use case. It's not insurmountable or requiring some exotic type of battery or radical redesign.
I use my EV regionally almost 100%, almost never fast charge it, and it doesn't have the range to make it a practical road trip vehicle so I still have a conventional ICE vehicle for long journeys.
As soon as I can get a hatchback or small SUV with 4 wheel drive and at least a 400 mile range (preferably 500+), I will trade both vehicles for that in a heartbeat. EVs have a fraction of the moving parts, there's SO much less to go wrong, I'm not going to worry about the occasional subzero day when I probably shouldn't be tooling around anyway.
[quote=Yoski;66317513]If you are truly interested in gaining knowledge on EVs, EV infrastructure and the industry then you know Kyle Conner and Out of Spec, or you will once you start trying to learn. If you just like to bicker on forums about EVs then you probably don't and it's not my job provide you credentials. He flew to Chicago to cover this story on there ground, which tells you how deep he is in the game. His summary cound be found at 29 minutes.
I have posted some of the Kyle's videos in this forum, and did so specifically with EV owners and drivers in mind. All the issues experienced by some EV drivers are addressed in some of the videos, but it seems that some of both EV and ICE vehicle drivers only want to listen to what they want to hear, and ignore the rest.
In the case of the videos about EV's losing drive range and waiting inline for hours to charge their vehicles, or even being stranded along the way. Things like that happen and will continue happening. These things are normal for ICE automobile drivers when one is caught by surprise by something that disrupts the way one does things from day to day. In this case: a. drivers were not prepared for the wave of cold temperatures moving South from Alaska and Canada, and b. They were unaware to what happens if charging a cold battery that is too cold and nearly discharged.
These are some of the things that have been explained in Kyles videos. EV battery internal temperature, in reference to what happens to a battery that is nearly discharged and you are unable to turn on-or the vehicle does not have the feature that allows you to preheat the battery before you arrive at the charging station (some EV’s don’t have it), But all is mentioned in the videos.
A battery that is nearly discharged and already too cold cannot be charged rapidly, unless you can preheat it first. So a bunch of EV drivers in the cold-on their way to the charging stations have no idea that the battery will take a very long time to charge. Meanwhile other EV drivers have to stay inline for hours waiting to charge their EVs. This won’t happen if you just drive home where you have a charging station, but it will happen to some who don’t charge at home.
Here is another cold-weather video from this week, from another objective source, TFL-EV. They fully charged their Tesla Model 3 Performance trim EV in a warm garage, then parked it outside by the office overnight on a cold night, which got down to -3F.
Then the next morning, they did a range test in it, on a mostly highway route, in weather that was still around 0F. The car was also wearing Michelin Cross Climate 2 all-weather tires, which will give up a little range, but those are the tires you'd want in the Colorado winter, so this is a real-world kind of conditions test.
Tommy ran the heat when he drove to stay comfortable at 0F (again, as anyone would do under normal conditions), and he noted there was a little snow on the road still and that might increase rolling resistance a bit too. Given the serious cold conditions, he didn't run the battery down to zero, but he pulled into a charging station with 2% battery left - and he had driven 158 miles at that point. So they lost nearly 50% of rated range.
He did precondition the battery as they approached the charging station at trip's end, and the charger actually worked fine in the frigid 0F weather, delivering a maximum near 230kW from a 250kW charger.
The video title and screen shot are a little dramatic, since they were never stranded - a little clickbait there I guess. They did indeed lose quite a lot of range, but on this trip, using battery preconditioning prior to DC-fast charging outdoors at 0F, charging was fine.
This whole story was intentionally crafted to ensure maximum read meat for the anti’s. It is what it is. Some people are programmed to fall for such games. Others not so much. That’s what it all comes down to.
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