EV winter horror!

Disclaimer: I did not cover any topics that are not winter related.

If all you did was watch / read / listen to the mainstream news and give time to your biased anti-EV friends, you’d conclude that owning an EV in winter and especially in deep freezes like we experienced in January 2024 make EVs completely impractical. If I was just as loose with my facts, I could make ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles sound just as bad. Let us compare the doomsday statements with facts and argue why ICE isn’t that much better.

One. EVs lose a lot of their range when it’s really cold. This is true. If your EV can get 400 km on a full charge in summer, you may get as little as 250 km in a deep freeze.

ICE vehicles lose range in a deep freeze too. Not as much, but they are not immune to the effects of cold on how much fuel you burn for a given distance.

Counterpoint: It doesn’t matter as much when an EV loses range because overnight you’re typically plugging the EV into a charger to refill the battery. So as long as your daily use is less than the reduced range, you won’t care.

Two. EVs get stranded in snow. It happens.

ICE vehicles get stranded in snow too. You won’t need to look very hard to find many examples of this.

Counterpoint: It’s not about the motive power. It’s about the weather conditions, the driver’s skill and the tires they have. All season tires should not be used in snow or deep cold. Period.

Three. It takes a long time to warm up an EV. Not just the cabin, but the battery too. If the battery is too cold, you lose performance and recharge speed.

It takes a long time to warm up an ICE vehicle too. So much so, that many people resort to starting their vehicle and letting it idle for many minutes. Others plug in their block heater to keep the engine somewhat warm. Some ICE vehicles don’t start at all.

Counterpoint: If you are already plugging the EV in for a charge, you can also warm the cabin at the same time. The EV’s app makes it possible to warm up the interior and the battery long before you get in and drive. If you intend to charge at a public charger, by navigating to a charger using the vehicle’s nav ability, the EV is smart enough to know to start warming the battery in preparation for a recharge. Also, if an EV’s battery is more than 15% full, you will have no issue at all starting the vehicle and driving away, right away. And there’s no fuel line to freeze.

Four. I know a lot of people who ran out of charge before they could get to a charger. Some had 2 or 3 percent charge and on arrival at a charger, the spots were all full. Their EV ran out of charge.

This can just as easily happen to an ICE vehicle. You’ve never seen someone run out of gas?

Counterpoint: These are all examples of poor planning and/or people not knowing enough about their vehicle. I have watched hundreds of EV owners’ YouTube videos and not once did they run out of charge before getting to a charge spot. In fact, every EV owner on YouTube is aghast at the situation that happened and was widely reported in Chicago, because these were all avoidable situations. You never wait until you’re down to below 5% charge to start looking for a charge spot. You never arrive at a charge spot without first preconditioning the battery, or you suffer slow charge rate until the battery warms up.

People need to understand that yes, owning an EV takes a lot of adjustment. But you have to understand that many EVs, save for Tesla, have only been on the market for under 5 years and their manufacturers are still trying to figure this new technology out. ICE vehicles have been around and evolved for over 100 years.

Here’s a real EV owner using common sense

If you don’t have the time time to watch, here’s what an owner’s test determined about getting stuck in traffic for an hour:

Warm, road trip car with a warm battery: 2-3kWh used. You'd last for days in the traffic jam.

Dead cold car with a cold battery: 8kWh used. You’d still last at least 8 hours in a traffic jam on a full charge.