Shock! Electric Vehicles Perform Poorly In Cold Weather

P. Gardner Goldsmith | January 5, 2023
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A story such as this is charged with the potential for puns, but, at its heart, it’s not amusing – more akin to a black hole down which bureaucrats, politicians, and corporate cronies want to pour your choices and hard-earned cash.

RealClearScience’s Ross Pomeroy reports that – to no one's surprise – electric vehicles aren’t a very good idea if you want to be mobile in a cold climate.

He notes that there are an estimated 1.7 million EVs “on U.S. roads” today – more than four times the 400,000 circa 2018. (Though he does NOT note that, already, the Biden administration and majority in Congress have short-circuited the U.S. Constitution in favor of more than $30 BILLION in subsidies to EV makers, lithium battery manufacturers, and “charging station infrastructure,” plus billions handed to the U.S. Postal “Service” to buy a fleet of electric vehicles over the next 10 years.)

But his coverage of EV inefficiency and lack of reliability in cold temps is good to absorb. For example, Pomeroy compares the average cold-temp driving range of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles to that of EVs:

“While a typical ICE vehicle might have its range reduced by 15% to 25% in below-freezing temperatures, an EV's range will be slashed 20% to 50% depending upon driving speed, temperature, and interior climate preferences.”

This is a fact that he discussed last summer, perhaps trying to warn people before the cold set in:

“I warned about this in August: Driving an EV on the highway in extreme cold will produce a range loss of 40% or more. EV owners of various brands traveling for the holidays shared numerous stories verifying this annoying (and potentially dangerous) reality. Drivers traveling in temperatures at or around zero with a headwind could go only 100 to 150 miles before needing to stop and recharge, depending upon the car, significantly increasing travel time. When they did charge, they had to deal with another disconcerting problem with EVs and winter...”

 

Related: New EPA 'Rules' Will Increase Already Stunning Federal Burden On Truckers...and Consumers | MRCTV

And when EV owners are forced to charge? The “throughput” problem I’ve noted for MRCTV – that of people having to wait while others finish their charges – is magnified by cold temps.

“The colder the EV battery, the slower the rate of charge that it will accept, making ‘fast-charging’ in subzero temperatures a potentially miserable and plodding experience. Think a 45 to 60 minute charge instead of a 25 to 35 minute one. To top it off, users reported that fast-charging equipment, particularly from Electrify America, often just didn't work in temperatures below -10 °F.” 

While Pomeroy correctly notes that home-charging in a garage might work better, he does not note that most homes are not fitted with the same high-capacity electric lines that are found at “fast-charging” stations. The risk of EV fire (which produces dangerous hydrogen-fluoride) within garages also has prompted many people to park their electric cars outside.

As auto expert Eric Peters wrote for American Spectator in 2020:

“You cannot just pour in electricity, as you do with gasoline. Electricity doesn’t sit ready to go in storage tanks, underneath the pumps. It has to be transmitted as demanded — via cables from the generating source — and this requires cables of much greater capacity than your household extension cord.”

And he observed:

“This is why it is not possible to ‘fast’ charge an EV at most private homes. You can reduce the waiting time from eight or more hours but not to 15 minutes. Not without upgrading your house to commercial-grade electric capacity.”

The market for that kind of expensive undertaking is not strong. But the desire among politicians to force electric vehicles on us IS strong, and they will continue to leverage unconstitutional “infrastructure” bills, “research grants,” “environmental studies,” subsidies, EPA so-called “regulations” (i.e. threats) that strangle traditional ICE engines out of the market, and even behavior-changing tax breaks to keep pushing us into the unattractive and inefficient corral of electric vehicles and heating.

All of it is warping the market. In fact, it already HAS warped the market. America doesn’t have a free market for autos, or fuel, or home energy. It has a top-down, fascistic, favoritism-fueled system that completely opposes freedom and IMPOSES pie-in-the-sky utopian ideas that have nothing to do with our free will.

And their “utopian” ideas are fueling a dystopian future for us.

Related: EPA Pushes USPS To Spend BILLIONS On Fleet Of Electric Mail Trucks | MRCTV

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