As far as I know the heat pumps still work at 0F, they just aren't as efficient. But I think they can still provide more heat than the old resistive heaters did.
It just takes a long time to heat up the mass of the battery.
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What's happening here? Too cold for Superchargers?
- Thread starter Noflash
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It just takes a long time to heat up the mass of the battery.
I'm not aware of this happening in Canada and it is freezing cold too. Cables do get stiffer so handles fall in snow on the ground. In some cases ice forms in the connector and those stations become "out of service". A good tap, or using something to scrape off snow or melt it, makes it operable again.
I keep a piece of wire and pliers just in case but i haven't had a need for them yet.
If it truly is the case that a frozen car can warm up and then start charging after an hour, then someone needs to correct the Fox News article. Since it is also being picked up by other news outlets. It essentially states that ppl have been trying to charge for hours or days and are still unable to.
Pfft… correct the news?
Good luck with that.
This boils down to:
1. Needing more chargers.
2. Too many people using this for Uber/or don’t have home charging.
3. People not knowing to set the charger location ahead of time to give the car time to precondition. Otherwise all that time is wasted at the charger for it to warm up. Hence the 2 hours to charge.
That 50 site charger location In Chicago can’t come soon enough.
Why does no one report about all the gas cars in Chicago that failed to start.........same old story, pick on Tesla to sell news.
I would say this charging situation is worse.
But it isn’t the fault of the car. It’s a combination of people not knowing better and not enough chargers. (And maybe having heater coils in charge stands to prevent ice in contacts?)
EVs take some training. Just like it takes knowledge to know not to run your gas vehicle in a closed garage even though some do and have died.
Some can, if they are made to do that. This entirely depends on how each model of heat pump is designed. Do the Tesla ones operate down that low? I hope they would have used ones that are designed down to that level, but it's kind of rare. Most are made to switch to some kind of backup heat equipment when it's that cold.
When we last replaced the air conditioner for our house, we opted for a combo unit that is also a heat pump. But it's a moderate use heat pump, which is intended to also have a supplemental/alternate heating supply. We do also have a gas furnace it switches with. So our heat pump definitely isn't made to operate down to 0 degrees F. It defers to the gas furnace in the mid 30's temperatures.
Definitely not more heat. Their advantage is in efficiency, not fast or strong heating performance.
Yes, I'm pretty sure they do. There is no backup heat, other than using the motors inefficiently.
I'm pretty sure that the battery heater in an old Model S was 5kW, and that the heat pump in Tesla vehicles can produce 6kW of heat even when it is very cold. (Running the compressor in an inefficient "loop-back" mode that is not trying to pull heat from the air, it generates the heat internally.) Then it can do even more than that by producing heat in the motors and "amplifying" it in the heat pump.
Video from Out of Spec on the incident in Chicago:
It seems the main people clogging the chargers were ride-share drivers that are renting vehicles and didn't know anything about how an EV works. And that the charging infrastructure in the Chicago area was barely keeping up with demand in normal weather, and that with increased usage and inefficiencies in the cold weather it pushed things over the edge.
In it Kyle mentioned an EVgo charger that was down, and he had to call a contact he has at EVgo to get it working. Their telematics must not be working, or they don't monitor them unless someone calls and gets ahold of someone that cares and can do something.
It seems the main people clogging the chargers were ride-share drivers that are renting vehicles and didn't know anything about how an EV works. And that the charging infrastructure in the Chicago area was barely keeping up with demand in normal weather, and that with increased usage and inefficiencies in the cold weather it pushed things over the edge.
In it Kyle mentioned an EVgo charger that was down, and he had to call a contact he has at EVgo to get it working. Their telematics must not be working, or they don't monitor them unless someone calls and gets ahold of someone that cares and can do something.
Oh, I forgot about that, where it is way more complex than simply a heat pump.
Yeah, that is the backup/alternate heat equipment. I forgot that it has that method for creating heat directly and feeding that into an internal "warmth" chamber that it can then feed to the heat pump as a source that is warmer than the outside air. So that is the secondary or two stage kind of heating thing that makes it more than a simple outside air source heat pump. That would be the thing that allows it to continue to work down to much colder temperatures.
Strange that it took a youtuber going there themselves in order to get details on this incident. I would've thought that the news organizations would have sent a reporter to investigate. Since Fox did go and get quotes from ppl there.
Spottedsharks
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The old cars and the new cars both use the motors to provide heat for the battery pack. The old cars do it directly through the coolant loop, while the heat pump transfers from the motors to the pack via refrigerant (and coolant, of course).
The issue is with how long it takes to heat up a 1,000 pound mass while the cold ambient air and wind are simultaneously sucking that heat out. This problem is particularly bad on single motor cars, which have half the heat output of dual motor cars. On top of that, LFP is less tolerant of cold temperatures.
An LFP, rear-wheel-drive car with no home charging is the worst combination for cold weather. *Uber has entered the chat*
I should also mention that this isn’t just happening in Chicago. I was in Seattle on Friday when it was in the teens. The Superchargers were full with several people in line. Charge times were extended due to the cold weather, making the line move more slowly. Nobody was abandoning their cars, but the situation might have been different in the negative teens instead of the positive teens.
Vancouver, New York City and Brooklyn have been super busy this week, too.
Vancouver, New York City and Brooklyn have been super busy this week, too.
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