Electric cars lose nearly 60 percent of their range in cold weather, AAA report finds

Shawn Knight

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electric car range drops dramatically cold weather aaa battery life range electric cars

A new study from the AAA Automotive Research Center in South Carolina confirms what some have suspected all along: cold weather and extreme heat can indeed impact the driving range of electric vehicles.

To gather data, AAA conducted a simulation to measure the driving range of three fully-electric vehicles. Each vehicle completed a driving cycle for moderate, hot and cold climates following standard EPA-DOE test procedures. The vehicles were fully charged and then “driven” on a dynamometer in a climate-controlled room until the battery was fully exhausted.

When testing vehicles for city driving to mimic start-and-stop traffic, the average battery range was 105 miles at a moderate 75F. Dropping the temperature to a constant 20F resulted in a range of just 43 miles – a 57 percent drop.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the study found that hot temperatures have less of an impact on battery range. Electric vehicles delivered an average range of 69 miles per full charge when temperatures were kept at a steady 95F.

John Nielsen, managing director, AAA Automotive Engineering and Repair, said electric motors provide smooth operation, strong acceleration, require less maintenance than internal combustion engines and for many motorists, offer a cost effective option.At the same time, however, he warns that as the study has shown, EV drivers need to carefully monitor driving range in hot and cold weather.

After all, nobody wants to end up stranded on the side of the road due to dead batteries.

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This only demonstrates what everyone has already known from the start; EVs are great as economical commuter vehicles but fall short of being effective under all conditions.
 
This wouldn't have anything to do with air conditioning and heating, would it? I can see that AC would take a lot of power. Cold weather presents two problems. 1) battery output isn't as high in the cold. 2) Unlike internal combustion cars, electric cars have to use induction to create heat instead of using the head that comes off the engine. So the cold has a two fold problem. We need some great innovation in energy storage before electric cars will be effective. If we ever do, electric cars will be the way to go.
 
Honestly I was never very impressed by electric cars in the first place. I'll stick with American muscle cars like my Mustang.
 
Oh hey Tesla Motors, remember that report about your cars losing miles in the winter and you were so defensive about it that you kept criticizing the reporter.

Good job.
 
In time this will be ironed out its like when new CPU technology gets mainstreamish their are always bugs to iron out some are worse in certain condition but they will get sorted out in time :)
 
So create a better battery! All the world's Grandma's should be driving electric cars.
To and from supermarkets and breakfast buffets.
 
Oh my goodness. Didn't anyone see this. "AAA conducted a simulation". They didn't even do any real testing.

How about selecting the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf and then two Internal Combustion Engine vehicle. Report what you find in BTU's consumed per mile. That would be a much more fair test and accurate way to measure energy consumed.

This is the way all vehicles will be measured in the future. No more MPG but instead "BTU'S per mile" since you can convert ANYTHING to that value. Things like propane, diesel, natural gas, fuel cells, electric vehicles can all be measured in BTU'S consumed per mile.

What I think you will find is that the electric vehicles do quite well under those conditions.
 
I have a Chevy Volt and here is my experience with cold weather. During regular temperatures of 70-80F, I get around 43 miles per charge. Colder weather 20-30F, I get about 38 miles per charge. This is still enough to get me places without using my gas range extender. During extreme cold, the Volt will start the engine to warm up the battery fluid and give you better range (with the cost of some gasoline usage). Now what the article doesn't state, is whether they are using the heater in the car during cold weather. Everyone has to remember that EV's do not get free heat as regular combustion cars do during operation. The heater draws A LOT of power, much more than AC.
 
I can only speak for my own experience as a Chevy Volt owner in Las Vegas weather.

My 2012 Volt has a spec of 37 miles on pure battery before it switches over to gasoline, and this is usually plenty for my typical daily driving around town. I'll burn gas on longer highway trips; these amount to 25% of my total miles. A "fill up" at the pump is 9 gallons and between the battery and the gasoline the total range is around 350 miles.

Ambient temperatures here run up to 115 F afternoons in summer and 28 F overnight lows in winter, during my ownership of this car. The pure electric range I get runs from 34 miles (winter night lows) to 45 miles (ideal spring/fall conditions), on the nearly two-year old battery. But my habit is to dress for the conditions and I rarely run heating in winter, and I use the "eco mode" air conditioning in summer, rather than the full blast AC setting. On hot August days the range seems to be around 36-38. I'm sure these figures would suffer if I were more aggressive with heating and AC.

I'm on a 36 month lease, to avoid concerns about battery life, range erosion, and replacement costs in later years.

Given the plentiful Las Vegas sun, I use solar power to charge the vehicle, and at the rate of savings in monthly gasoline I no longer purchase, my solar investment breaks even in 4.3 years (another two years to go). After that, the first 40 miles or so of daily driving shall have no fuel cost, for the remaining life of the solar array (20-25 years), no matter what e-car I replace the Volt with over the long run.

Were I to pay for utility power to put the daily 40 miles on the battery, it would cost about $1.40 under the usual 12 cents/kilowatt-hour power rates here. But I buy my utility power in a tiered pricing contract, making certain times of day cheaper, so if I'm not using solar, I pay about 72 cents for those forty miles.

However, my usual source of power is free solar. Either way, compare this to my old Mercedes, which burned two gallons of premium gas for those 40 miles, about $8 worth.

Rather than put more money into a bigger downpayment on the vehicle, a financial IRR analysis showed that it was much smarter to put that money into purchasing the solar array instead from an ROI viewpoint.

As measured by the amount of monthly expense I avoid by using solar power rather than gas, the array's ROI is 22% (n.b., simple, non-compounding). What investment is paying a near zero risk 22%, year in and year out for the next two decades? Plus, savings are not taxed, only income is taxed. Were I still paying the monthly cost of gasoline, I'd be having to cover that cost with even more earnings, given the income taxes I'd have to pay.

I don't know any other deal that gets you two decades of zero-cost fuel for daily driving, and for that I'm more than happy to keep an eye on range. Of course the Volt switches over to gas if one drives beyond the battery range, so getting stranded along the highway is not any threat anyway.

The basic idea GM's engineers had behind this design is to carry a battery only as big and costly as one's daily average mileage demands, rather than rely entirely on a bigger, costlier battery for longer trips that are statistical outliers vs. daily averages. (Of course, one is having to carry a small gas engine too.)

It is also worth noting how great it feels to know what my "e-fuel" will cost for the next two decades. There is no price volatility with solar derived e-fuel unlike the constant weekly roller coaster ride at the gas pump that used to drive me nuts. The strategy I have outlined is a fine way to manage gasoline price inflation risk one normally suffers in one's retirement. I don't curse at gas pumps anymore. My blood pressure stays lower.

Those who mindlessly parrot the conservative (or more broadly, the vested interests') media's many attacks on e-vehicles might have a fatter wallet at the end of each month if they'd do a little math and think for themselves.

Jim
Retired electrical engineer
 
I knew it was a placebo effect when the dead AAA batteries I placed in the freezer for about 1 hour suddenly have 'extra juice'.:)
 
I can only speak for my own experience as a Chevy Volt owner in Las Vegas weather.

Jim
Retired electrical engineer

Hi Jim, thanks for the perspective, but I don't understand your math. You can't compare the ROI of a car purchase to an investment(apples and oranges), and you can't logically say you'd replace money spent with additional taxed earnings(unrealistic).
For the sake of the argument, let's say your solar panels are free. The cost of a Volt is around $38,000 (at least at my local Chevy dealer) while the cost of a Cruze is around $20,000. The Cruze will get you about 28 MPG combined. If you drive 34 miles per day, 365 days a year that's a total of 12,410 miles in a year. If you drive less, the benefit of the Volt goes down, because you're only saving money when your travelling for free. If you drive more than that, then you're burning gas and saving nothing. That makes 34 miles per day the amount you'd have to drive to save the maximum from buying a Volt.
If you had a Cruze, those 12,410 miles would cost you $1772 a year in gas @$4/gallon (your gas price you said). That means, just to recoup the cost of buying a Volt instead of a Cruze you'd have to drive the Volt for almost 8 and a half years. That's hard to do with a 3 year lease. :)
And this is ignoring the cost of your solar panels.

Now if you were looking at spending $38,000 on a car you could compare it to say a V6 Sedan that gets 20 MPG, then you'd be coming out on top a lot sooner. But people who buy the Volt aren't buying it because it's powerful or luxurious. It's most accurate to compare the Volt to cars of equal power and luxury.

Maybe this is why the 'haters' in the media speak poorly of electric. Personally, I've never seen this opinion from any news source, and I take in a lot of news. The problem people have with electric cars isn't anything against being green, it's that the math doesn't work out to savings yet. I have envied Volt owners since they came out... I envy Tesla owners even more. But I can't afford either, and couldn't justify it even if I could. Someday maybe.
 
*alarm sound!!!* WRONG!! its been proven by Tesla that there is only a slight decrease in range, a decrease of 20-30 miles out of 200 is fine. So no one listen to this crap. It doesn't apply to all EV companies.
 
I knew it was a placebo effect when the dead AAA batteries I placed in the freezer for about 1 hour suddenly have 'extra juice'.:)
Carbon zinc,(I think), and alkaline batteries both exhibit that behaviour. However NiCads are exactly the opposite. Take them out in the cold and they go almost dead right away. That's especially true of well worn batteries, which may not have the capacity of new cells anyway. NiMh fares a bit better. Lithium ion too, I think.

The lead acid battery in my motorcycle, simply won't start without a hot shot, after the temps fall much below 40 F. A couple of years on the lead acid cells exacerbates the situation.

This is why car batteries have that, "CCA", (cold cranking amps) spec. Low temperatures drain battery capacity, and when combined with the thickening of the engine oil at winter temps, prove a disastrous combination for starting in low temperatures.

There is just so much bull sh!t going around in the way of mileage claims.

Now they're pitching, "clean diesel", great mileage, or so they say. What they don't tell you is that diesel fuel is probably 50 cents MORE a gallon, than regular gas. So, mileage from a diesel engine has to be a minimum of 12% better than a gasoline engine, just to break even.
 
So, in other words, "global warming" is great news for electric vehicles!
according to the article, not really. :)
A new study from the AAA Automotive Research Center in South Carolina confirms what some have suspected all along: cold weather and extreme heat can indeed impact the driving range of electric vehicles.
 
Now they're pitching, "clean diesel", great mileage, or so they say. What they don't tell you is that diesel fuel is probably 50 cents MORE a gallon, than regular gas. So, mileage from a diesel engine has to be a minimum of 12% better than a gasoline engine, just to break even.

Meh, in the UK Electric cars haven't really kicked off that much at all, but Diesel engines? I think more cars in the UK are Diesel than Petrol! Diesel is usually 1-5p more than petrol, depending on where you are in the country. The problem is Diesel Engine cars cost more in the first place, we'll take a Vauxhall Corsa as an example, you can get a 1.4 SXI for £14,500 or a 1.3 Turbo Diesel for £16,000.

Now the Diesel will get issues if the engine is only used for short city driving, they are more for if your travelling over 40 miles day kinda thing, Plus Diesel's have particulate filters and a lot of there power comes from the turbo, there's a higher chance of things going wrong.

Sure the mpg of the diesel is 55mpg and the petrol is 40mpg but overall, you have to be driving the diesel a lot more and over a good 7 years or so before you've saved enough money on the fuel to have paid for the initial investment in the car, then the potentially higher service costs of the diesel need to be taken in.

Just overall I don't think Diesel's are all what they crack up to be unless your travelling long distance everyday, then they make total sense. My dad has a 1.9 turbo diesel (130bhp) and I have a 1.6 Turbo Petrol (200bhp) both cars weigh about the same and so far in there life times I've had to pay out less purely because my engine doesn't have to be in the turbo as often and I don't have a particulate filter to go wrong, and for some reason his starter motor has gone as well which mine never has. Just an observation.
 
Electric vehicle are still in the early development stages. They'll get much better (and so will the batteries) as more development goes into them. They are no doubt the way of the future.
 
Electric vehicle are still in the early development stages. They'll get much better (and so will the batteries) as more development goes into them. They are no doubt the way of the future.
The first known electric car was built in 1837 so they have been in development for a very long time! However serious development of electric cars by the major car manufacturers is relatively recent. Electric cars do tend to be very expensive to buy even when there are subsidies offered.
Maybe they will get cheaper when more electric cars are mass produced.
 
The first known electric car was built in 1837 so they have been in development for a very long time! However serious development of electric cars by the major car manufacturers is relatively recent. Electric cars do tend to be very expensive to buy even when there are subsidies offered.
Maybe they will get cheaper when more electric cars are mass produced.
Serious development on electric cars has only just started. I think all the major (and not so major) manufacturers have a vested interest in them so we can expect to see things happen quickly. In a few decades when they become commonplace we'll even see entry level budget models.
That electric car that was built in 1837 probably plugged directly into the city's power grid and trailed a good few yards of electric cable. XP. I wouldn't be surprised if Edison or Westinghouse had a shares in it. :) Just kidding, electric trams were in operation long before the internal combustion engine was wheeled out.
 
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