"For starters, let me just say I love my Tesla.
... So it’s rather unfortunate that our winter weekend road trip turned out to be such a disaster.
We drove from New York to Vermont, where the state slogan should be “Because you can drive here.”
It’s an easy, breezy 184 mile drive via the Taconic State Parkway.
It’s so easy, in fact, we didn’t think to check if our destination had a supercharger because we just assumed there would be one reasonably close by.
Mistake #1.
And we start off with a “full tank”—i.e. 100% charge with a 322 mile range, so we think we’re golden.
Mistake #2.
One hundred miles into the journey, we should be at about 222 miles, but it reads 160.
Where’s the missing 62 miles?
I don’t know ...
... we need to charge up but there isn’t a supercharger within 40 miles of our destination.
Which, by the way, is Vermont, not North Dakota.
So we took a detour to the nearest Supercharge station in Lee, Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, the temperature has dropped to minus 2 Farenheit.
When it’s this cold, a snow icon appears next to your battery icon on your touchscreen display ...
After a 20 minute charge session, we arrived in Manchester with 150 miles left.
... Parked outside overnight in what is now negative 8 Fahrenheit, the battery lost 30 miles.
Because the cold saps the battery.
In industry parlance, they call this “low temperature performance.”
... Why does cold weather damage performance this badly in a Tesla, the world’s electric-car leader
... And how can this happen in the United States, which federally funds some of the best early-stage battery research in the world?
Really, how can this happen to a modern, microprocessor controlled, lithium-ion battery at all?
Especially given that the entire auto industry is amid its biggest transformation in a century, investing billions in bids to overtake Tesla?
It all comes down to the basic function of a regular old every day battery, something we cell phone addicts take for granted.
“Ions are traveling inside of the battery between the positive and negative electrodes through a liquid electrolyte.
As it gets colder, the liquid becomes thicker, now closer to freezing solid.
So the ions move more slowly, which causes more resistance.
The more the resistance goes up, the faster you lose power,” says Greg Less, Ph.D.
He’s the technical director at the UM Battery Lab in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The automotive industry uses his facility to build batteries to scale and test new ideas for inclusion in electric vehicles.
Modern batteries have been optimized for the least amount of resistance possible, but that obviously doesn’t help us in a polar vortex.
In a car battery, you don’t want to constrict the flow of ions in any way, which means you don’t want to be driving in freezing cold weather.
“You have to keep the battery warm, but the battery itself is where heat comes from.
You’re draining the battery to operate a heater,” adds Less.
“You can definitely engineer around temperature problems, but can you do that and still have the same mileage prediction you had when you left the garage?
The answer is no.”
... They’re going to tell you what your ‘maximum range” is fully charged (322 miles in the case of my 2020 Model 3), without calculating environmental conditions.
... What we know for sure is that the words “weather,” “temperature” and “freezing” do not appear anywhere on the MODEL 3 Long Range AWD car sticker.
Rather, the tiny print on the bottom right corner of the sticker reads:
“Actual results will vary for many reasons, including driving conditions and how you drive and maintain your vehicle.”
Gee, was that written by a corporate lawyer?
It might as well say: We bear no responsibility for anything that happens, ever — especially not mucking up your weekend road trip to Vermont.
By day three, with no time to snowshoe, see a moose, or make maple pancakes, I had to drive a nerve wracking 40 miles with a supposed 96 miles of charge on the car, only to arrive at the Supercharger with just 20 miles to spare.
That roundtrip took three hours.
After a year quarantining, do you want to give up your precious Saturday to charge a battery?
I think not.
Needless to say, I’ve completely sworn off maple candy, flannel pajamas, and winter weekends in electric vehicles unless and until the self-proclaimed “Technoking of Tesla” improves his batteries and there are as many Superchargers as there are gas stations in this electric land of plenty.
My reaction is precisely what EV car companies, and anyone who believes in our electric-powered future, want to avoid.
“How do we convey this to people, and not scare them away from EVs?” asks Less. “Tempering expectations also tempers excitement about transitioning to electric transportation. It’s a fine line to walk.”
Extreme temperatures have never been good for batteries. It’s why we don’t leave our cell phones baking in the sun. But we’re also talking about car safety.
“Users do have to take precautions when the weather is extremely cold. But do not consider this technology as a static tech.
Lots of scientists are trying to resolve this, and it will improve,” says battery expert Shirley Meng, Professor of NanoEngineering and Materials Science at the University of California San Diego."
Bearish article on the Tesla stock bubble:
http://el2017.blogspot.com/2021/03/tesla-is-in-bubble-and-its-going-down.html