But the majority of use cases at this point is - EVs are way better. City driving, less than 100 miles per day, which is what most people do in most countries, charge at home, etc.
I suspect people overestimate the frequency in which they drive 250 miles a day.
California: 423970 km²
If anyone knows about it, I'd be interested to explore this further.
My understanding is that in some parts of Canada it's common to plug your currently petrol/diesel car into an electricity socket overnight to provide a low-level of heating (otherwise the car would be impossible to start in the morning) - is this level of heating insufficient for an EV?
Alternatively how much electricity would be wasted spending some power to keep batteries at a warm enough temperature to prevent performance degradation when charging? Are we talking a few percent or a double/tripling of power costs?
The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E for about 2.5 years now. In the winter the range that Ford claims drops by about 30 to 35%. That is a lot of range that goes missing just because the temp drops below 5 degrees Celsius.
Luckily I'm the perfect EV candidate: my daily commute is less than 50% of the total range so I can drive 2 days to the office if needed. And I can charge both at home and at the office.
The main problem that I see is that people cannot charge at home. If you are dependent on fast chargers by the side of the road you are going to have a hard time. The downtime for fast-chargers is enormous: my personal guess would be that they do not reach the 90% uptime. Which is bizar problem to have because a fast-charger and remote monitoring of the charger condition should be a solved problem by now.
> The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E
The Mach E delivers heat in the most inefficient way possible: resistive heat[0]. Modern EVs from other manufacturers use heat pumps, which are much more efficient. There's still some drop in winter range (like gas cars), but it's nowhere near 35% anymore.[1]
Ford's system is also Rube Goldberg[2]: they use a water-based PTC heater to warm a small isolated coolant loop (complete with its own separate reservoir!), and then run a pump to send it through a liquid-to-air heater core. Obviously done for commonality with an ICE heater core, but the unnecessary weight and complexity shows the compromises to shoehorn an electric drivetrain into a ICE (or even "flex") platform.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ejq7z4H6g&t=449
[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/here-s-how-much-range-a-t...
Kind of. Block heaters help warm the engine coolant which warms engine and the oil, making it less viscous and help it flow properly so that the battery doesn't need to work as hard to crank the engine. They're typically only 400w to 600w draw.
Modern full synthetic oil and a well maintained AGM battery makes it less necessary, it's just a little less wear on the engine overall over the long term. Most folks though don't spring for either since they're a bit more expensive then mineral oil and flooded lead acid batteries.
If we look at the total energy consumption for driving in cold conditions, then moving the vehicle along the road needs in the ballpark a similar amount of energy as what is required to heat up the interior of the car to a reasonable temperature and keep it there - cars aren't (and probably can't be) as insulated as houses, so they need quite a lot of energy to stay so much warmer than the outside.
In an ICE, most that heating is done from waste heat of the engine. In an EV, that comes directly out of your range.
I don't think there is a car in production where the heating is coming not from the engine.
Skimming the Tesla forums, some said to estimate a drop in range of almost 1/3 in this extreme heat?