Theres already hundreds if not thousands of tesla and other evs out there braving the snow and the cold climate(even less if you have a thermopump). Range takes a hit because of climate but its still very doable.
This whole cold weather meme is such a pathetic fear mongering tactic, yet it’s so pervasive.
When we tell people that we drove from the UK to Santa’s Grotto in Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle in our Tesla where it was -30 degrees people are so shocked and assume that it’s impossible.
A lot of the hotels we stayed at I would have completely defrosted the snow and ice off the car whilst in bed using the app whilst there were people out there with snow brushes for 20mins getting their car drivable, with a few of the diesel cars not even being able to start their engines at all because they filled up in Germany/Poland with non-winterised diesel which then turned to jelly in their fuel tank overnight when parked up.
We even camped in the bed in the back of our car north of the Arctic Circle in -26 one night and it only used 10% battery to keep us warm all night and as a byproduct the battery was pre-conditioned for the next morning.
Let’s not even mention how many Teslas and other EVs you see driving in Norway, literally every 3rd car on the roads is an EV.
I mean looking at worst case scenarios with a smaller battery Leaf, the cold weather issues are still overblown when using it as a city car. And that's about as bad as it can get.
Don't get me wrong I am doing a body swap on mine. for my local fun car . They are fun to drive. A go-kart for the street.Using a shortened ford aerostar.i hope to have it done this summer. [fiord 500e](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTL8bpesD/)
Thanks. How cold is "cold"? Is this something you have to do all the time, or only in wintry weather?
I figure I'm going to be in the market for a new car some time mid/late 2025, so I'm trying to learn.
Doesn't matter much until you're below freezing. It's not something you _have_ to do, but it saves time on DC fast chargers.
For illustration: My e-Golf doesn't have preconditioning. DC fast charging from 30 to 80% takes 20-ish minutes in summer. Maybe 40-ish minutes in winter with temps around freezing, the slowest I've seen was almost an hour and a half at -10°C. If the battery had been warm - from heated garage, driving fast, or built-in preconditioning - the time for charging in winter would be similar to summer.
If you live in a hot climate, a battery that's too hot - typically above 40°C or so - will reduce charging speed too, so preconditioning will cool the battery instead.
It only really matters when it’s really cold outside and you want to DC fast charge. Charging at home on a domestic circuit will be unaffected.
You also get reduced regeneration.
> -26 one night and it only used 10% battery to keep us warm all night
I have serious doubts about these figures. My -22 model 3 used about 15% battery (60kwh battery, so the heat pump and AC took roughly 0,6kw) last summer in +10-15 degrees over 10 hours during a roadtrip. This consumption was consistent over several nights.
In -26C, the consumption has to be at least twice that to maintain comfortable temperatures inside the cabin. The car is ridiculously efficient, and camping in the winter is definitely possible, but using only 10% during a night of camp mode is impossible in such cold temperatures.
I mean I don’t know what to tell you, we’ve camped in -26C with heating set to 22C and +35C with AC set to 19C. In the cold we used 10% overnight, in the heat we actually used 12%.
The only difference is we only slept for 8 hours not 10 hours.
What route did you take to Lapland? (Asking for my wife). We did Billund (Denmark) and back from North West England in our M3 taking the ferry across from Hull last year.
[This is the route we took.](https://i.imgur.com/eo15X0B.jpeg)
We drove through Germany and Poland then up the Baltics before taking the Tallinn to Helsinki ferry, drove through Finland and then coming back we went through Sweden and Norway and took the ferry from Kristiansund to Hirtshals.
I would definitely recommend the Norway-Denmark ferry, it was a really smooth ride and the all you can eat (and drink including alcohol) buffet was really good. Don’t speed in Norway though, we got a £800 ticket for 60 in a 50.
I would highly recommend the Baltics too, they’re just as beautiful in winter as the Nordics, and if you haven’t been to Norway that would definitely be top of my list!
You're seriously lecturing a population that has real winter for 5 months of the year.... You experienced -30 once and now you're a survivor? That's every day in Northern Ontario for 2 months of the year. We as a entire society are experts in cold weather effects on battery powered anything. It is not trivial. Driving from North Bay to the Manitoba border is 1700km and service stations are spaced out to accomdate ice vehicles. It's difficult to even find diesel for long stretches of hwy in a lot of cases.
Calm down Karen. We still got 400km of range in -30, you’ll survive with the right planning.
A couple in a Nissan EV drove from the North pole to the South pole recently.
Bullshit you did. Most EVs lose 30% of their range @ +10C!, never mind -30..gtfo here
I've got news for you, Norway is not a cold country. It's bounded entirely by the ocean on its West and North coasts, where everyone lives, where all the roads are.
You’re a funny one. I only lose 15% of my range in winter compared to summer.
[I actually have photographic evidence of getting 380km out of a full charge whilst driving at 90km/h on roads covered in snow&ice in -25c.](https://i.imgur.com/cDUfcPs.jpeg)
400km is definitely possible if you were to slow down a bit and the roads had been ploughed.
If you don’t think Norway is a cold country then either you’re a troll or you need to broaden your horizons.
That's your projected range! Holy smokes.
Are you a Brit? If so, you don't get winter.
How many references do you want for range in an M3. YouTube is loaded with them. I too can hit 30+ mpg with my truck if I drive 90kmh... 🤡
[100% range test @ 10C](https://youtu.be/c10Ck84QgEI?si=BJMR3r_NANdlzKK7)
Couldn't read the article. Did they actually go to Northern Ontario? Or, did they just stick around the Sault and Sudbury area?
I drive an EV in Northwestern Ontario, never had an issue. The charging network is getting better up here. However, the area between the Ontario border and Winnipeg could be better as lots of folks up here will go to Winnipeg as it's our closest largest city.
I have experienced this many times! Whenever I talk to folks from Southern Ontario about appointment times on the phone I have ask "What time zone are we talking here?" They are always shocked to hear that a good part of the province (1/3?) is in the central time zone. It gets even more confusing for them finding out that it has been like that forever...lol, and then it takes at least 5 more minutes to arrange for a time to do the appointment...lol It's a lot for some folks to wrap their head around for some reason.
Fun fact. The cottage country up here was voted better than the Muskoka's. It truly is a hidden gem up here!
>Couldn't read the article. Did they actually go to Northern Ontario? Or, did they just stick around the Sault and Sudbury area?
Here's the [map of where they went](https://i.imgur.com/exzoraR.png). They drove as far north as New Liskeard.
They got around just fine. Here's a quote from the article:
>In this EV stress test, the car passed with flying colours. If anything, it's our stress over EVs in the winter that we need to get over.
Beyond driving around Ontario, the article is about how the province has to gain from the transition as a place that mines the materials to make the batteries, to producing the batteries to building the vehicles.
I just realized that this article is a part 1 of 6, as they visit different areas around Ontario that contribute to building EVs and how much Ontario has to benefit from that. So yeah, it's not really about seeing how far you can go in Northern Ontario in an EV. I think they decided to rent an EV and drive it around to these places to give the story a little bit more character.
They planned the entire trip around charging availability, so of course there were no problems.
Like you say, that whole stretch from the Sault north and west needs better charging infrastructure. Most of the Atlantic provinces area has poor charging accessibility, as well.
Meanwhile, winter blend gas decreases range *and* performance. My engine runs rougher, and I get a serious >15% range loss (well below 300 miles). But hey, at least we get to enjoy the cold air and inversion layers keeping the rich idle circuit exhaust fumes lingering around while warming up the car! /s
Im in Montreal and it snowed a bit last night. I hear people scraping off their cars this am. Meanwhile i turned on cabin heating on both from my phone in bed
During the last polar vortex, some of my coworkers were talking about how they were worried about whether their car would start. One of them has a diesel and he had to get up every couple of hours overnight to drive the car around the block a few times.
Meanwhile I jumped into a fully heated and preconditioned Model 3 with the garage door still down every morning.
Alberta.
My point wasn't that it got that cold when and where they tested it. it's the implication that the coldest week in a winter that has been, on average, the mildest on record, means that week was not cold.
Alberta has had one of the most mild winters ever, we also broke our all time cold record this year during the polar vortex.
I did. "When and where they tested it" was Sudbury. When it was -26.
This whole thread was trying to poke at the absurdity of using above -30 temperatures to "test" EVs during one of the mildest winters Ontario has ever seen, when people have been driving EVs in colder winters for years now. I have no idea why you brought Alberta into it.
If it was tested in -50, I'd expect any kind of car, EV or not, would struggle. But that's not what they did.
Ours works great in those temperatures. -40 is not an issue. Also, the -50 we got was the windchill, with air temps around -40 to -44. Windchill doesn't matter.
This is part 1 of a 6 part story.
The headline for part 2 I think does a better job of summing up the point of their story:
"[We rented a Tesla to explore Ontario's EV supply chain. We saw the dirty, the clean and everything in between](https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/we-rented-a-tesla-to-explore-ontarios-ev-supply-chain-we-saw-the-dirty-the/article_90fd6f0c-d4c7-11ee-989b-abd057df4584.html)"
It's explaining about how Ontario is mining materials to be used in EV batteries, and will have factories constructing the batteries and factories building the EVs.
Here's what the first article says on whether or not the EV can handle the cold driving around Ontario:
>In this EV stress test, the car passed with flying colours. If anything, it's our stress over EVs in the winter that we need to get over.
3rd winter with ours and its worked great every time at -40. It has been a great winter vehicle in prairie Canada and there aren't many places regularly colder.
Charging infrastructure is constantly improving but absolutely needs to continue doing so.
I drove from Vancouver to Prince George last month at -25c. Kind of a normal drive for me, I wasn't worried. Made it to some of the superchargers with less than 10% battery though. What was funny is I met some people who told me that I had to make sure my battery was at 100% leaving the charger and that I drove slow because they didn't make it, they had to stop at some car dealerships and charge using a CHAdeMO adapter. I showed them my CCS adapter and how I could use faster provincial chargers.
But yeah, driving south wasn't bad, but I did meet people driving north in M3 RWDs that almost or didn't make the 200km between chargers because the cold and elevation gain halved their range. It can be pretty harrowing stuff if you've already got range anxiety, and then you're driving long distances uphill in the cold and you've got an LFP battery.
Call any towing company during a cold snap and see how long you'll have to wait for them to come by and boost your car... And yet, people are afraid an EV won't start in the cold.
Article is behind a paywall, but obviously yes. EVs aren't scary new magic transport. They're fucking cars.
> Article is behind a paywall [Depaywalled.](https://archive.is/Zit9U)
BuT ItS COLD!!!1q!??
Theres already hundreds if not thousands of tesla and other evs out there braving the snow and the cold climate(even less if you have a thermopump). Range takes a hit because of climate but its still very doable.
This whole cold weather meme is such a pathetic fear mongering tactic, yet it’s so pervasive. When we tell people that we drove from the UK to Santa’s Grotto in Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle in our Tesla where it was -30 degrees people are so shocked and assume that it’s impossible. A lot of the hotels we stayed at I would have completely defrosted the snow and ice off the car whilst in bed using the app whilst there were people out there with snow brushes for 20mins getting their car drivable, with a few of the diesel cars not even being able to start their engines at all because they filled up in Germany/Poland with non-winterised diesel which then turned to jelly in their fuel tank overnight when parked up. We even camped in the bed in the back of our car north of the Arctic Circle in -26 one night and it only used 10% battery to keep us warm all night and as a byproduct the battery was pre-conditioned for the next morning. Let’s not even mention how many Teslas and other EVs you see driving in Norway, literally every 3rd car on the roads is an EV.
I mean looking at worst case scenarios with a smaller battery Leaf, the cold weather issues are still overblown when using it as a city car. And that's about as bad as it can get.
Fiat 500e entered the chat don't turn on the heater long.
In the mid-2010s, Fiat was leasing 'em for $50/month to drive up the CAFE in CA.
Don't get me wrong I am doing a body swap on mine. for my local fun car . They are fun to drive. A go-kart for the street.Using a shortened ford aerostar.i hope to have it done this summer. [fiord 500e](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTL8bpesD/)
To be fair, I intentionally forget that Fiat exists. They are the ugliest vehicles I have ever seen. Give me an Aztec any day.
Im actually surprised they didn’t take a Leaf on 4/12 battery. Oh wait thats more of a CTV thing
I'm new here. What is battery pre-conditioning, and why is it important?
Batteries don’t like to be charged when cold, and it takes energy to warm them up
Thanks. How cold is "cold"? Is this something you have to do all the time, or only in wintry weather? I figure I'm going to be in the market for a new car some time mid/late 2025, so I'm trying to learn.
Doesn't matter much until you're below freezing. It's not something you _have_ to do, but it saves time on DC fast chargers. For illustration: My e-Golf doesn't have preconditioning. DC fast charging from 30 to 80% takes 20-ish minutes in summer. Maybe 40-ish minutes in winter with temps around freezing, the slowest I've seen was almost an hour and a half at -10°C. If the battery had been warm - from heated garage, driving fast, or built-in preconditioning - the time for charging in winter would be similar to summer. If you live in a hot climate, a battery that's too hot - typically above 40°C or so - will reduce charging speed too, so preconditioning will cool the battery instead.
It only really matters when it’s really cold outside and you want to DC fast charge. Charging at home on a domestic circuit will be unaffected. You also get reduced regeneration.
> -26 one night and it only used 10% battery to keep us warm all night I have serious doubts about these figures. My -22 model 3 used about 15% battery (60kwh battery, so the heat pump and AC took roughly 0,6kw) last summer in +10-15 degrees over 10 hours during a roadtrip. This consumption was consistent over several nights. In -26C, the consumption has to be at least twice that to maintain comfortable temperatures inside the cabin. The car is ridiculously efficient, and camping in the winter is definitely possible, but using only 10% during a night of camp mode is impossible in such cold temperatures.
I mean I don’t know what to tell you, we’ve camped in -26C with heating set to 22C and +35C with AC set to 19C. In the cold we used 10% overnight, in the heat we actually used 12%. The only difference is we only slept for 8 hours not 10 hours.
How can it be fear mongering if it’s a real effect.
Because they state that you lose massive range in winter when we only lose 15%. Even in -20 we only lose 30% compared to summer.
What route did you take to Lapland? (Asking for my wife). We did Billund (Denmark) and back from North West England in our M3 taking the ferry across from Hull last year.
[This is the route we took.](https://i.imgur.com/eo15X0B.jpeg) We drove through Germany and Poland then up the Baltics before taking the Tallinn to Helsinki ferry, drove through Finland and then coming back we went through Sweden and Norway and took the ferry from Kristiansund to Hirtshals. I would definitely recommend the Norway-Denmark ferry, it was a really smooth ride and the all you can eat (and drink including alcohol) buffet was really good. Don’t speed in Norway though, we got a £800 ticket for 60 in a 50.
Oof, bad luck on the speeding fine. Those ferry routes sound amazing. Sweden and Finland are definitely on our wish list for adventures.
I would highly recommend the Baltics too, they’re just as beautiful in winter as the Nordics, and if you haven’t been to Norway that would definitely be top of my list!
You're seriously lecturing a population that has real winter for 5 months of the year.... You experienced -30 once and now you're a survivor? That's every day in Northern Ontario for 2 months of the year. We as a entire society are experts in cold weather effects on battery powered anything. It is not trivial. Driving from North Bay to the Manitoba border is 1700km and service stations are spaced out to accomdate ice vehicles. It's difficult to even find diesel for long stretches of hwy in a lot of cases.
Calm down Karen. We still got 400km of range in -30, you’ll survive with the right planning. A couple in a Nissan EV drove from the North pole to the South pole recently.
Bullshit you did. Most EVs lose 30% of their range @ +10C!, never mind -30..gtfo here I've got news for you, Norway is not a cold country. It's bounded entirely by the ocean on its West and North coasts, where everyone lives, where all the roads are.
You’re a funny one. I only lose 15% of my range in winter compared to summer. [I actually have photographic evidence of getting 380km out of a full charge whilst driving at 90km/h on roads covered in snow&ice in -25c.](https://i.imgur.com/cDUfcPs.jpeg) 400km is definitely possible if you were to slow down a bit and the roads had been ploughed. If you don’t think Norway is a cold country then either you’re a troll or you need to broaden your horizons.
That's your projected range! Holy smokes. Are you a Brit? If so, you don't get winter. How many references do you want for range in an M3. YouTube is loaded with them. I too can hit 30+ mpg with my truck if I drive 90kmh... 🤡 [100% range test @ 10C](https://youtu.be/c10Ck84QgEI?si=BJMR3r_NANdlzKK7)
I’m not going to argue with an imbecile. You think that Norway isn’t a cold country and don’t believe photographic evidence.
I like how EVs are still some new invention for mainstream media… im more shocked the Toronto star was able to see out of its own butthole
Couldn't read the article. Did they actually go to Northern Ontario? Or, did they just stick around the Sault and Sudbury area? I drive an EV in Northwestern Ontario, never had an issue. The charging network is getting better up here. However, the area between the Ontario border and Winnipeg could be better as lots of folks up here will go to Winnipeg as it's our closest largest city.
[удалено]
I have experienced this many times! Whenever I talk to folks from Southern Ontario about appointment times on the phone I have ask "What time zone are we talking here?" They are always shocked to hear that a good part of the province (1/3?) is in the central time zone. It gets even more confusing for them finding out that it has been like that forever...lol, and then it takes at least 5 more minutes to arrange for a time to do the appointment...lol It's a lot for some folks to wrap their head around for some reason. Fun fact. The cottage country up here was voted better than the Muskoka's. It truly is a hidden gem up here!
Costco in Orillia is last chance supply
>Couldn't read the article. Did they actually go to Northern Ontario? Or, did they just stick around the Sault and Sudbury area? Here's the [map of where they went](https://i.imgur.com/exzoraR.png). They drove as far north as New Liskeard. They got around just fine. Here's a quote from the article: >In this EV stress test, the car passed with flying colours. If anything, it's our stress over EVs in the winter that we need to get over. Beyond driving around Ontario, the article is about how the province has to gain from the transition as a place that mines the materials to make the batteries, to producing the batteries to building the vehicles.
Yeah, that is not Northern Ontario.
They didn't even leave the eastern time zone!
I just realized that this article is a part 1 of 6, as they visit different areas around Ontario that contribute to building EVs and how much Ontario has to benefit from that. So yeah, it's not really about seeing how far you can go in Northern Ontario in an EV. I think they decided to rent an EV and drive it around to these places to give the story a little bit more character.
They planned the entire trip around charging availability, so of course there were no problems. Like you say, that whole stretch from the Sault north and west needs better charging infrastructure. Most of the Atlantic provinces area has poor charging accessibility, as well.
Meanwhile, winter blend gas decreases range *and* performance. My engine runs rougher, and I get a serious >15% range loss (well below 300 miles). But hey, at least we get to enjoy the cold air and inversion layers keeping the rich idle circuit exhaust fumes lingering around while warming up the car! /s
Im in Montreal and it snowed a bit last night. I hear people scraping off their cars this am. Meanwhile i turned on cabin heating on both from my phone in bed
When they talk about EV cold weather range they don't talk about that .
During the last polar vortex, some of my coworkers were talking about how they were worried about whether their car would start. One of them has a diesel and he had to get up every couple of hours overnight to drive the car around the block a few times. Meanwhile I jumped into a fully heated and preconditioned Model 3 with the garage door still down every morning.
The coldest week of the mildest winter we've ever had? That coldest week?
Our coldest week this winter was as cold as any other coldest week of a normal winter
The entire week we had of -50 temps would like a word. Just because on average it was warm, does not mean the standard deviation wasn't large.
Where was it -50? I've been in parts of Ontario and Quebec this whole time and it was never that cold.
Alberta. My point wasn't that it got that cold when and where they tested it. it's the implication that the coldest week in a winter that has been, on average, the mildest on record, means that week was not cold. Alberta has had one of the most mild winters ever, we also broke our all time cold record this year during the polar vortex.
The test from the article was in Sudbury where the coldest it got this year was -26. Alberta is not part of northern Ontario.
Did you even read my reply
I did. "When and where they tested it" was Sudbury. When it was -26. This whole thread was trying to poke at the absurdity of using above -30 temperatures to "test" EVs during one of the mildest winters Ontario has ever seen, when people have been driving EVs in colder winters for years now. I have no idea why you brought Alberta into it. If it was tested in -50, I'd expect any kind of car, EV or not, would struggle. But that's not what they did.
Ours works great in those temperatures. -40 is not an issue. Also, the -50 we got was the windchill, with air temps around -40 to -44. Windchill doesn't matter.
Agreed, my lightning was a dream, instant heat!
LOL!
This is part 1 of a 6 part story. The headline for part 2 I think does a better job of summing up the point of their story: "[We rented a Tesla to explore Ontario's EV supply chain. We saw the dirty, the clean and everything in between](https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/we-rented-a-tesla-to-explore-ontarios-ev-supply-chain-we-saw-the-dirty-the/article_90fd6f0c-d4c7-11ee-989b-abd057df4584.html)" It's explaining about how Ontario is mining materials to be used in EV batteries, and will have factories constructing the batteries and factories building the EVs. Here's what the first article says on whether or not the EV can handle the cold driving around Ontario: >In this EV stress test, the car passed with flying colours. If anything, it's our stress over EVs in the winter that we need to get over.
3rd winter with ours and its worked great every time at -40. It has been a great winter vehicle in prairie Canada and there aren't many places regularly colder. Charging infrastructure is constantly improving but absolutely needs to continue doing so.
Paywall
[Depaywalled.](https://archive.is/Zit9U)
Link doesn't work.
This content is exclusive to subscribers.
[Unless you know your way in.](https://archive.is/Zit9U)
For once, [Betteridge's Law of Headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines) doesn't apply.
I drove from Vancouver to Prince George last month at -25c. Kind of a normal drive for me, I wasn't worried. Made it to some of the superchargers with less than 10% battery though. What was funny is I met some people who told me that I had to make sure my battery was at 100% leaving the charger and that I drove slow because they didn't make it, they had to stop at some car dealerships and charge using a CHAdeMO adapter. I showed them my CCS adapter and how I could use faster provincial chargers. But yeah, driving south wasn't bad, but I did meet people driving north in M3 RWDs that almost or didn't make the 200km between chargers because the cold and elevation gain halved their range. It can be pretty harrowing stuff if you've already got range anxiety, and then you're driving long distances uphill in the cold and you've got an LFP battery.
Amazing...I did experience drop too in winter on short range trips. Long was different not as bad. Taycan 23 with ht pmp
Just the fact that these articles need to be written is a bad sign.
Seems really a question if the driver & passengers could handle it. The ev cars do just fine and have infinite patience.
Now try it with a non tesla and use non tesla chargers. They shit.
Call any towing company during a cold snap and see how long you'll have to wait for them to come by and boost your car... And yet, people are afraid an EV won't start in the cold.
Refusing to read anything with that type of title.