As I've pointed out in the past, electric cars are very susceptible to weather extremes. When the mercury rises or falls, we have all had the experience of household batteries performing poorly in the real world, and the batteries in cars like the Tesla and Leaf are no different. It should come as no surprise, then, to see the results of AAA's latest test of electric cars in extreme temperature conditions.
The bad news for EV drivers is that this test confirms and quantifies what we already know. In 20 degree temperatures, range was found to be only 43 miles. In 95 degree heat, the range dropped to about 69 miles. Those compare to 105 miles at 75 degrees.
The test did not include using climate control for the vehicle or poor weather conditions, both of which would make range drop even lower.
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| -11 degrees, to be exact. |
The good news is that even in the worst case scenario, the range would still be more than enough for most urban drivers.
While no test is perfect, I have to express a little skepticism here. In my own experience, in temperatures much colder than 20 degrees, I was able to go a bit further than 43 miles on a charge, even when using the heater nonstop. I really don't see how they discharged the battery in such a short distance without using climate control. Also, it looks as though they only tested one example of each vehicle, and just once for each temperature, which would provide a pretty big margin of error.
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They had this story on the news this morning. But they called it "Why you shouldn't drive an electric car".
ReplyDeleteWhich was sort of bullshit.
Yep, I've come to expect nothing less from the media.
ReplyDelete