We've all seen the images of dead Teslas being pushed and towed in to chargers in Chicago only for the owners to discovers the cars won't take a charge. The other day I woke up at my home in Colorado to find the outside temp at 27 below zero and a foot of new snow on my car, parked outside all night. I live 9,000 feet up in the Rockies. I plowed the driveway, put my car in "Precondition" mode, and in about 15 to 20 minutes the "range reduced due to cold battery" warning went away, and I drove the 29 miles to work... front and read defrost blazing, seat heater, steering wheel, heater, lights, and about 10 minutes of interior pre-heating before leaving, and driving in snow the entire way. Car ran like a champ. I left with 328 miles on the clock arrived at work with 288. Much of it is down hill so in level driving it would have taken off more miles from it in those conditions, but I was happy with no compromises due to the cold weather.
Frozen Teslas piling up at chargers....
- Thread starter DOBrien
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Especially in winter, may want to get out of the habit of displaying your range remaining in miles as opposed to percentages. Those are readings are based on the EPA, not your current driving or conditions. Much info about this can be found at www.lucidupdates.com.
I have no idea how a Tesla would have done under those conditions. I habitually do a pre-condition on my battery on cold mornings so that my batteries are able to take the regen that is generated by the 1,500ft elevation loss I experience in the first three miles of my commute, so I'm sure my car would have been able to take some kind of charge after a short conditioning session. I know that there are LOTS more Teslas out there than Lucids, and I'm sure a percentage of those Tesla owners just don't pay too much attention to the technology in their cars. They just want to get in and drive. I know my Lucid will drive in those temperatures, but I also know it won't take much of a regen charge when the battery is that cold. The car is smart enough to only take so much regen before it cuts it out (protecting the battery). But I have driven the car after cold-soaking all night in single-digit temps. In those conditions I never drove it "hard" or tried to give it a fast charge.
Own both cars. Tesla's work fine in the cold. Not sure why you would precondition the battery and not just drive down the hill. Sounds like your are using battery capacity or wall current so that you can put some of it back with regen? Overall, it might be more efficient to just drive and use your brakes.
Well, I have just driven the car with a cold battery down the hill. It's a pretty steep descent and I just don't like the feeling of regen kicking out because charge current goes too high for it at that temperature. It only takes about 10 min of pre-condition to eliminate that problem and I'm guessing that I'll return more juice to the battery than the power used for a short heating session.
No, I would not have attempted to charge at those low temps, except maybe with the 120v cord with about 1kw or so. After a short pre-condition I did go down the hill which usually adds 9 to 10 miles to the "counter" in that 3-mile drive, so the car did take that kind of charge (about 3 miles per minute). It would NOT have done so without the precondition. It would have disengaged regen.
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27 below? That’s just brutal. I thought 14 degrees was cold this morning here in the Hudson valley. You didn’t say what SOC you were starting at which makes a big difference. I think many of those Chicago Teslas the owners were running down to a low state of change and finding out the battery would not charge. I noticed much of the segment of the anti EV press was crowing how impractical EVs are due to this development. They alway ignore most EV owners charge at home and start off with a mostly full charge as needed. Nothing like spreading a little FUD without giving a balanced view
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100% agree on this.
The Chicago area thing was a bunch of things that hit all at once. Kyle from OutOfSpec actually flew out for some reason and did some reporting and found:
1- Colder temperatures elongate EV charging time when they are not preconditioned to pre-warm the battery
2- There’s a huge amount of rideshare drivers that don’t understand the operation of EVs and likely didn’t plan for higher consumption and slower charging
3- Chargers were (and are!) still broken. Tesla had technicians at one of the sites I visited checking stalls, and superchargers are pretty much back running smoothly, but the other public chargers still are majorly lacking working units
4- Chicago already has a strained EV charging network. Add in longer charging duration with less working chargers and cars using more energy due to the cold and, well, shit hits the fan
Add in that BTC (Maker of L3 chargers) had a firmware issue that caused some of the non-Tesla problems, they say it has been fixed now.
1- Colder temperatures elongate EV charging time when they are not preconditioned to pre-warm the battery
2- There’s a huge amount of rideshare drivers that don’t understand the operation of EVs and likely didn’t plan for higher consumption and slower charging
3- Chargers were (and are!) still broken. Tesla had technicians at one of the sites I visited checking stalls, and superchargers are pretty much back running smoothly, but the other public chargers still are majorly lacking working units
4- Chicago already has a strained EV charging network. Add in longer charging duration with less working chargers and cars using more energy due to the cold and, well, shit hits the fan
Add in that BTC (Maker of L3 chargers) had a firmware issue that caused some of the non-Tesla problems, they say it has been fixed now.
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