This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I've been seeing this surfacing a lot lately, two curious things:
#¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It sounded like a bunch of things combined: chargers going down, long queues at the working chargers as people take much longer than usual to charge, Uber drivers with rented EVs who don't really know about charging in the cold, etc.
So people who did do the right things and turned up at a charger with a warm battery ready to charge found themselves on the end of a five hour queue, and by the time they got a turn their cars were cold so they needed a long time on the charger to warm up before they can even start charging.
If you don't have enough working chargers at very low temperatures it can all just kind of snowball. That's not really an EV issue, it's an infrastructure problem. Strangely, you won't hear Faux News advocating for more chargers.
I'm not saying an event like that didn't happen, but as far as we know a single event is blown out of proportions by Fox, it's reported out of the context all over the world, giving people the feeling it's a common occurrence
This is part of the 'EV apocalypse' FUD campaign.
AFAICT one super charging site in Chicago had more than one non-functional chargers. Why they were not functioning is not known. Quite a few Teslas queued up there in the cold and some of them ran their batteries down to zero. Each regurgitation of the this event has the same pictures of the same cars at the same place.
It is a fact that EV range decreases with cold, and that decrease can be significant. Drivers unaware of this, and who don't monitor their battery levels, can indeed find themselves effectively 'out of gas'.
We need much better urban charging infrastructure. Street level L2 charging should be ubiquitous, and that can be easily achieved using the existing street level power line infrastructure.
The problem is teslas. Better designers have non-engine reliant heating systems, that you can use to warm your battery enough to hold a charge, so it can run your engine and keep itself warm.
Teslas dont have this. So when they go cold, they are stuck cold.
You dont need to redesign the charging infrastructure to cater to the poorly designed car. You need to fix the shit car.
Huh? Tesla scvanges heat from all over the car https://youtu.be/Dujr3DRkpDU
And a Tesla is more than capable of charging when left out in the cold and not preconditioned (although it was initially very slow) https://youtu.be/i-c8AUeKs5c
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Dujr3DRkpDU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You have no idea what you're talking about
I was initially confused but after remembering how Americans cannot science and 0F =~ -18C this made a bit more sense.
My Tesla worked fine through several days of -35C though, but the battery efficiency was a bit shit. I think I spent something like 6-8% just to get the cabin warm, but starting the car or driving generally speaking was never a problem.
from what I understand from the article the problem is that people are queuing and because of long waiting times batteries die.
I honestly don't understand why people are buying EVs if they don't have the option of home charging.
Ooh, ok. That makes quite a lot of sense. Especially if one uses the miles/km number to show battery state, people are gonna get screwed by the cold. I changed that thing to percentages pretty soon after I got the car.
I honestly don’t understand why people are buying EVs if they don’t have the option of home charging.
Yeah, that doesn't make much sense.
From what I've seen/heard, people think they're trying to beat the system by using which ever free network was included when they bought the car. Thus, never charging at home for the 2 free years.
Sigh that sounds awful. Like the biggest perk of evs is no more gas stations
Elektrek did summer articles about this. The superchargers are overwhelmed because the grid cannot provide enough power. In the well known tropical paradise of Norway, no such problems occur.
Yeah I live in an area with winter weather. I still want an ev (and a subcompact one at that) but I live in an apartment without home charging so not yet. The wife and I have been discussing a plug in hybrid though basically as a “we need an internal combustion engine now and want an EV later, but don’t want it to be a car commitment away”
Are long waiting times really a thing? Here in Germany even the charging areas next to the autobahn have a maximum of 1-2 waiting cars if at all
after remembering how Americans cannot science and 0F =~ -18C
Just because Americans grew up with and are largely stuck with the Fahrenheit system doesn’t mean they can’t science. Come on. It’s an inferior system of measurement, sure, but no one even in America uses Fahrenheit for science anyway.
(Don’t get me wrong, I wish we’d all switch to Celsius over here. I did. It’s so much better. But it took a WHILE to reach the point where it felt natural, and during that time involved a lot more math than the average human is willing to do. Converting systems of measurement that are ingrained in your culture is HARD.)
Fahrenheit is a shit system for science. It is a great system for humans. It's basically the percent of heat humans can maintain. 0% or below is too fucking cold. 100% or above is too fucking hot. 72% hot is about room temperature. Fahrenheit degrees are about the smallest change humans can detect.
Fahrenheit is a shit system for science. It is a great system for humans. It's basically the percent of heat humans can maintain. 0% or below is too fucking cold. 100% or above is too fucking hot. 72% hot is about room temperature. Fahrenheit degrees are about the smallest change humans can detect.
I understand this argument. I used to make it myself! It is a good argument. I learned Celsius to test it.
The argument isn’t wrong, since really the best unit to use is the one that is understood. But my friend, having previously argued the merits of Fahrenheit for the weather, I have thoroughly changed my mind.
Degrees Celsius being larger means they have more significance. If you want the kind of resolution that Fahrenheit gives, you can always use half degrees. But I find I don’t actually need that granularity. Instead, a difference of a degree in Celsius matters enough to be worth paying attention to, or at least moreso than a degree Fahrenheit.
More importantly, though, switching to Celsius has finally given me a better understanding of sub-freezing temperatures.
23°F doesn’t really mean much to me, it just means “cold.” But -5°C means “as far below freezing as 5°C (41°F) is above freezing.” This makes it FAR easier to comprehend how many layers and what variety of layers I should wear. With Fahrenheit it was always a bit of guesswork for me.
I would HIGHLY recommend trying to learn Celsius just for the hell of it. I really enjoyed the process. The math is pretty easy, and even easier if you use this heuristic I came up with:
Start by memorizing the 10s in Celsius. If you forget you can find them again, 18°F for every 10°C. I started in the early summer, so the two I most needed were 20°C = 68°F and 30°C = 86°F. Easy to remember because the digits are reversed. Also learn 10°C = 50°F, etc. When finding the Fahrenheit value, which you’ll need to do for a while until you start to get the hang of the Celsius, start at the nearest 10 and add or remove 2°F per 1°C. So 16°C, start at 68°F and drop 8, leaving you at 60°F.
For more accuracy (and faster calculation) add in the 5s. So in the above example, you’d start at 15°C = 59°F, and add 2. Getting you to 61°F.
16°C is actually 60.8°F, so either of these is sufficiently accurate, but starting from 15 is MORE accurate.
It took me a while to really internalize it, but it was an interesting challenge and I feel like I truly benefitted from it. I recommend it to anyone who thinks they’re up for it and has the kind of brain that will embrace stuff like this.
The obsession with dick measuring over which ruler you use will always be funny
Do you really have nothing of genuine merit to be proud of? All you have is your thermostat?
Do you really have nothing of genuine merit to be proud of? All you have is your thermostat?
No, that's it. That's my whole identity and existence. Spring is coming, send help.
Pretty sad bud
FUD bullshit
I thought ev batteries had heating and cooling to prevent exactly this? Maybe they couldn't heat enough through the cold to get charging again?
It's people having their battery die while they wait for an open charger.
I saw a clip where a car was plugged in but hadn't charged "for three hours". If this was one specific charging station then obviously it was having issues - not the cars.
/Tesla owner (until lease is up next month) in Sweden
What are you getting after the Tesla?
Pour one out.
They would get towed pretty soon.
The nearest charging station to me (I don't use it, just noticed) has a car that's been abandoned since November. Someone even wrote "tow, abandoned 11/1/23" on every window yet it's still there.
Don't know if this is a common occurrence or not.
