And, I guess, there's a couple of other things, but for later on this year in the fall.
Contrary to some panic-stricken types, Teslas generally drive fine in the cold. Modern Teslas have a heat pump system (read: Running an air conditioner in reverse) that warms the cabin. Your M3 LR gets around 250 W-hr/mile (calculating.. 1.6 km/mile, so that's..) or 156 W-hr/km; in the wintertime, with temperatures near 0C, one would expect that to go to around 280 W-hr/mile (175 W-hr/km). That's not terrible, but it a bit of reduction in range.
The
real problem is with charging. In the US our standard wall outlets are 120 VAC @ 12A, for a charging rate of 1440 W. That works out to, for a LR M3, a rate of some 5 miles/hour (8 km/mile).. which works in the summertime.
The problem is that the car needs to warm up the battery to charge it. And with the battery being as wide as the car and as long as the distance between the front and rear wheels, the surface area of the battery pack is large enough so that 1440 W isn't enough to warm the battery. For those of us on this side of the pond, attempting to charge from a standard 120 VAC wall socket results in either
no charging or some small 1 mile of charge per hour rate.
The solution is to charge at a higher rate, enough to get the battery warm enough so it can charge. For AC charging, that magic number over here seem to be around 240 VAC at something north of 15A or so, or around 3.6 kW.
Public chargers in the U.S. that are L2 tend to be 240 VAC @ 32A, or around 7.68 kW. Of course, Superchargers are all well above 78 kW and don't have that problem. Modern Superchargers on this side of the pond are all at 250 kW, with the occasional older one at 150 kW.
But this leads to the
other problem that cropped up this last winter over here: People who were trying to use Supercharging for more-or-less standard running around.
So, let's take this from the top. Under ideal conditions, with drivers with warmed-up batteries. and Superchargers with, I dunno, 16 stalls, it takes about 20 minutes to go from a near-empty battery to one that has 80% charge. So, in principle, one could move 16*(60/20) = 48 cars an hour through this Supercharger in the dead of winter.
But! Note that I said
warmed up battery. If the battery isn't warm and one shows up at a Supercharger, the car is going to charge at a much reduced rate until the battery
gets warmed and can take the higher power levels. So, instead of being in and out in 20 minutes, it might take 20 minutes to warm up, then another amount of time to charge to 80%. So, instead of getting 48 cars per hour through the Supercharger, one is only getting half that, 24 cars per hour. Oops.
Now one has a line of cars waiting to charge. And, if the battery
had been warmed up, it cools down since It's Cold Outside. Worse, people show up at the Supercharger with only a few percent of battery capacity, they wait in line, with the heat on.. and run out of charge. Now there's people blocking the line, maybe. And it takes a flatbed tow truck to get the car taken somewhere to be emergency charged. Urgle.
You see, Superchargers are
really meant for people who are going on trips. So, one chargers (at home, natch) to some high level and, during the navigation, the car learns that one is heading to a Supercharger. The car's running anyway, so the
pre-emptive heating of the battery (that's preconditioning) doesn't use that much more energy, and assures the owner that the actual charging session will be short and sweet.
Um. Back to the crowds swarming a Supercharger in the Winter. If a Tesla owner lives 1 km away, wakes up on a chill morning at -5C, grabs a cup of coffee, and takes off for the Supercharger, being careful to tell the NAV where the car is going so it
knows to precondition (there's no other way to tell the car), the time it takes to go that 1 km isn't going to be long enough for the battery to get warm. Oops. 5 km is more like what's needed.
(FWIW, I've been on trips between NY City and Boston, about 320 km, with a scheduled stop at a Supercharger 160 km up the road. The car will put up a message, "Preconditioning for charging" when I'm 100 km away from the Supercharger. Really.)
These kinds of problems aren't really an issue for home charging. First off, my home charging situation is that I've got 240 VAC @ 48A = 11.52 kW. That's much lower charge rate than a Supercharger, but it's more than enough to warm the battery to take a charge, so I get around 46 miles of charge per hour, even in the dead of winter. That works out to be around 5 hours to charge to 80% or so, which is overnight.
So.. You're parking in a parking lot near your apartment. I'd suggest a couple of things:
- If your travel is a commute to work, check to see if work has L2 chargers. It's not unusual in the US for workplaces to install a few L2 chargers in the company parking lot for the employees to use. My old workplace (before I retired) had done just that, with six or so L2 chargers, reserved for employees, at a lower rate for the energy that what people paid for at home.
- Scout the area for L2 chargers. I don't know if Slovenia has these, but it's not uncommon for libraries, city halls, and other government buildings to have L2 chargers. There's an app in common use in the U.S. called, "Plugshare".. Oh, well. I just tried, and it shows Plugshare locations in Austria, North Italy, and other countries around you, but none in Slovenia.
- Saying this carefully.. In the US, people own what are called "Mobile Homes". These "Campers", as they're called, have small kitchens, a bedroom, and such and people tour all over in them. Some particularly enthusiastic sorts actually live in these, year round. But all of them have an electrical connection to run the appliances and lights, and there are "campgrounds" that cater to the enthusiasts that, always, have a post with an high-power electrical socket on it. For that reason, early versions of Teslas, in the days before Superchargers became widespread, would come with a Tesla Mobile Connector and the high-power adapter, a NEMA14-50, so that a Tesla stuck in the middle of nowhere could get charged. Those campgrounds are, pretty much, everywhere. They got any near where you live or work?
- So, some years back, on another forum, a newbie showed up on another forum; he lived in Minot, North Dakota, and was a science teacher at the local high school, and asked that forum if we thought that him and his soon-to-be-gotten 2019 M3 would work out there. Minot is one of those places in the world where -40C temperatures in the winter aren't unheard of. We kind of pointed that out to him and told him that a standard wall socket wouldn't work. He happened to rent an apartment in a house, and so asked his landlord if said landlord would allow a L2 charger (or a NEMA14-50 socket) could be installed. The landlord was amenable, actually, and they installed a L2 charger, if memory serves. And this fellow went on to impress the students at his high school with his electric car. There's a point to this story: Asking the landlord for an accommodation like this isn't at all unusual, especially when electric cars are Coming, and everybody knows it. Having a L2 charger or four on posts makes the apartments in the building more desirable. So.. ask your landlord? You may be surprised.
I've actually helped a few people get things like this organized. In the US, there's lots of companies that make L2 chargers that a landlord can buy; others that will install a L2 charger that sells electricity, and that sale can be subsidized or be made free, depending upon how much effort/expense the landlord would like to do. Unfortunately, my expertise, such as it is, only works for what I know about North American electrical standards, and I have zero idea how the electricity works in places like Slovenia.
FWIW, Tesla, the company, actually sells turnkey L2 charging systems to landlords and such, but the ones I know about I got to from Tesla's web site for the US market. You might ask your local Service Center for some advice? Or find a country-specific forum on TMC that covers Slovenia and see if you can find some help there?
