Max Spaghetti
Member
Indeed, and I believe the liquid heat transfer in the vehicle is very sophisticated and extremely well designed. I'm guessing that the primary driver for this is energy efficiency. It feels like somebody important stood up at a meeting of engineers one day and said "Look. There are a lot of thing in this car that generate heat, and there are a lot of things in this car that need to be heated. There are also things in this car that need to be cooled. Design something that integrates the entire heating/cooling system".I think it has a range of operating temps but I'm not certain of exactly what it is. Driving will produce heat from battery discharge and motors + motor inverters, so the heat will distribute depending on what the car needs in certain places
And they ended up with this state-of-the-art super-manifold octo-valve heat pump system that runs liquid cooling through more than a dozen heat sources in the vehicle, cooling things that need to be cooled whilst simultaneously heating things that need to be heated, and then and only then sending excess heat to the atmosphere or drawing heat from the atmosphere via the heat pump.
There is an awesome YouTube video about it from Weber State University - it's a long watch but if you are technically minded and interested, I recommend it: