To be fair, this data doesn’t adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.
Duh.
We have GM to thank for that.
#stillbitteraboutEV1
Imagine a world where EV1 kicked off the EV revolution in the 90s and 2000s, and we were living 15 years in the future.
In For All Mankind the EV1s were released in the 1980s.
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.
You know that remote start is a thing for ICE vehicles too right?
You can, but not in a closed garage. Granted, if you had that the cabin wouldn’t be quite as cold.
I mean… just open the garage door when you start the vehicle. It’s not like the garage will instantly ice over.
Yeah but I’ve only seen start ….
I went from a ln ICE car where remote start would have been a subscription item. It only started the engine, although a warm engine is the most important part of heating the car. You had to remember to set everything
My current EV has that included among many features in the app. I can schedule when the car is warm or have dedicated buttons for on and defrost. Clicking on, I have complete control over every part of the heating system, including which seats to heat.
For me it’s a much better experience, although admittedly because the car is more computerized and the manufacturer is not trying to nickel and dime me with subscriptions, and could happen in an ICE car
I’m not sure what that has to do with one car being ice and the other electric though
Exhaust fumes. Remote heating an ICE requires starting the engine, which is a dangerous thing to do unsupervised particularly when many cars are stored in garages attached to homes.
While that’s true (you’d have to open the garage door with the rear facing out minimum) that’s not what we’re talking about in this corner of the thread. The person I’m replying to is bringing up subscription models for some reason? I’m asking what do subscription models have to do with whether a car is ice or ev?
Probably because ICE cars can’t heat when scheduled because they can kill you while EV can heat on schedule.
They brought up how the feature is a subscription to their displeasure but ICE app integration would likely also be a subscription.
It’s not really the same. My last car with remote start would only run the car for ten minutes before shutting down, which was hardly enough to warm the engine up on cold days. Meanwhile my EV fully heats the cabin in about 5 minutes and will melt a few inches of snow off the car in ten.
Also, when I run errands I leave the heat/AC on basically the entire time. Can’t really do that with an ICE even in places where it’s not illegal to idle for extended periods of time.
Those laws stopped like four people. People warm up their ICE cars in the cold. And what kind of remote start shuts off after 10 minutes? I’ve had a few cars with remote start and never even heard of this. Even if that was the case, set a 10m timer on your phone and restart it.
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.
Some ICE cars also allow you to remotely pre-start
But you cannot do that in the garage (unless you like huffing exhaust fumes).
And if you spend a couple hundred bucks on insulation, you don’t need to preheat anything in your garage either.
Exhaust fans are not new or unapproachable tech.
They are also not a common fixture of garages.
But they are a life and death safety device in the scenario you describe. Hvac equipment.
The majority of garages I’ve seen have a garage door so the fumes don’t just build up in the garage.
Which means that your home then has increased heat loss because the garage door is open.
Eh, I don’t even have a garage, and my place stays warm just fine. It’s just a few minutes
What’s special about the door or do you mean just opening it? If the latter, that still won’t prevent it from collecting at the ceiling and you’d better hope you remembered to open the door.
It’s just that it’s incredibly wasteful/polluting.
Which actually makes it illegal in some countries, too
Is illegal in my city. You’d never know it by walking around in the morning.
Welcome to my morning walk with the dogs every morning where its colder then 35F. Every fucking car in my neighborhood does this bullshit and when there’s little to no wind, all that exhaust doesn’t go anywhere and just sits at ground level where I get to breathe it in for an hour. It stick at the back of my throat for the rest of the day. Add to that snowblowers after even less than an inch of snow.
I can’t fucking wait for EVs to gain market share. Its fucking disgusting what my neighbors find acceptable.
The only enjoyment I find in this situation is people that back into their garages then warm up their car while still parked in their garage, spewing that exhaust into there instead of outside. I’ll never understand what brain logic leads them to that solution but it’s the same people doing it every morning.
Edit: I should add that the other great thing about people doing this is the rise of car thefts since some of these people also just turn their car on, leave the keys in the car, leave it unlocked and go back indoors because it’s cold
Yup, this is why the practice of idling a car to heat it up is rightfully illegal in many places.
IIRC you can fit an ICE vehicle with an electric engine block heater which will use mains electricity to heat the water and circulate it through the engine. So you run an extension cord out to your car, leave it plugged in and turn it on half an hour before you leave.
Yep it’s what people in northern Sweden have been doing for probably at least 40 years now.
My grandpa would do that back in the sixties. Luckily some things do change.
The peak version of this that’s kind of sold me is you can pre-condition in the garage. Like, why wouldn’t anyone want to do that.
Even phevs have this availability. Loving our Mazda cx90 for this feature. Can program their app to have it start warming 15-20 mins before my wife leaves for work and it’s ready to go and comfortable.
In Sweden every vehicle has had this as standard since the 1980s.
Cars have had remote start for a long time. But you can’t just leave a gas car running in a closed garage. That’s a good way to accidentally take the forever nap.
Not talking about remote start but about heating the car before starting it. It’s powered by electricity not gasoline. The garage has an outlet that you plug the car into.
Yeah I have actually been kind of baffled no one else mentioned these, are conventional engine heaters not a thing outside scandinavia?
Are engine block heaters being confused for pre-heating the cabin? Because we have block heaters too.
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Wouldn’t be that hard to do on ICE vehicles. Just need a heating element added somewhere that heats the antifreeze to 100ish F. Then a remote to activate the blower motor.
The 60s era vws were notorious for never managing to produce any cabin heat.
That’s because of the design of the heater the heater actually blew air across the exhaust manifolds and then into the cabin it was frequent for that plumbing to end up with holes in it letting all that heat Escape but also letting exhaust gases into your cabin So Not only would it freeze you out but it tried to kill you and asphyxiate you with carbon monoxide
Yeah, which made them just fabulous for our favorite use for them at the time: driving around drinking. Pack that bug full of teen agers smoking and drinking and freezing and basically getting CO poisoning until somebody got sick and we all had to do an emergency exit drill.
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
have affected the chargers themselves rather than the vehicles, according to local sources.
I can’t find any news that confirm that?
It was partially a failure in the charging networks to plan, and also rideshares where people were unfamiliar with EVs not knowing how to plan.
Yeah when I saw the pictures with all the white 3s, I guessed they were hertz rentals used by ride share drivers (because hertz is renting them at really low rates) who either don’t know much about their cars or deliberately run them down to near zero to max their fares.
Bullshit.
Tesla forums and my own experience call bullshit on this.
The 12v battery of my own M3 died less than 3 years in from sale in moderate to low cold temps in Canada (Only like -30c max)
My mum’s 2019 Toyota Yaris has to have its engine run every few days or the battery dies from just sitting on the driveway. It could be a faulty car battery but considering this car isn’t even that old and has barely driven 30k miles, it’s not doing so great. I discovered yesterday that my EV charges better after I’ve driven it around and the battery’s warmed up a bit. The car goes a bit haywire when you cold start so it seems like it needs some prep time before a drive.
You probably have some parisitic power draw somewhere, my old Ford focus had the same issue. Was just a bad relay causing a fan to run when the car was off.
Some car batteries only last 3 - 5 years. It might be due for a replacement. They are fairly easy to change yourself too if you want to keep the costs down.
Also depends on the environment. Down here in central Texas you can’t expect the el cheapo batteries to last more than 2 or so years because the summer heat is brutal on them.
… If another one of your vehicles died constantly… What would you do…
Everyone is arguing about how they should fuel their cars, but I just want to see more electric powered transit.
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.
👌👍
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.
A random company in Norway is probably the best equipped to do this kinda testing.
Cold? Check. ICEs on the road? Check. A buunch of electric vehicles on the road? Check.
From the article:
this data doesn’t adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.
Their data and the article’s title are highly misleading. No shit a year old tesla is going to be more reliable than a 20 year old toyota corolla. You need to compare cars of a similar age, before you can come to a firm conclusion.
20 year old Corolla that might not have been maintained very well also.
Do keep in mind that in Europe there are often required checks whether a car is ‘roadworthy’, in Norway this seems to be a biannual check: so you cannot really skip maintenance to the extent that that would be a huge factor.
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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.
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.
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.
Living in Quebec for the past 18 years, I’ve seen plenty of ICE cars dead in parking lots and driveways when the temperature drops. It’s usually the battery. But the car, when it starts, it makes a really strange noise.
Fuck I can’t remember even diesel engines falling because of glow plugs.
Fun fact/anecdote:
I remember reading an old timey engineer/designer being told not to never route wiring or fuel under the diesel engine of a vehicle. The reason is that in colder climates, if it gets really cold and the diesel turns to syrup, people will/would sometimes light a small fire under the engine to heat the block and diesel up.
Obviously, nowadays there are electic engine heaters for that, but that doesn’t help much if you’re in the middle of the Siberian wilderness.
I have been under heavy equipment with a tiger torch in the cold before. Sometimes the glow plugs or ether aren’t quite enough to get it going.
Hah, I’ve helped plenty of friends over the years with ICE cars that won’t start in the cold but have yet to see a BEV refuse to start just because of cold.
Maybe it’s different here in Southern ……. New England
You’re not wrong. Where I live, we just had an entire week where the highest temp we got to was 5°F and the coldest without wind chill was -20°F. My ICE started fine every time without issue. Like the article says itself, this is only really applicable to older ICE cars sometimes having issues in the winter. Give it another decade and then we can get a more accurate picture on reliability (note: I do hope that EVs continue to be reliable en masse after that much time, I’m not anti-EV or anything).
Batteries last longer in cold climates
