Climate Change: EVs Fair Weather Cars At Best?
Thinking about getting an EV? Better move to a balmier state.
“It turns out batteries are like people. They love room temperature,” Bill Wallace, director of Global Battery Systems at GM said at an energy forum at the University of Chicago. He had come under fire, ammunition courtesy of Consumer Reports which said its tests showed the battery’s range of the Chevy Volt would last only 23 to 28 miles in cold weather.
The next day, Ford tried to make hay on the ruckus and issued a press release, titled “Cold Weather No Problem for Ford Focus Electric’s Liquid-Heated Battery System.”
Bill Wallace disagrees. “Nobody — Ford, Nissan or anybody — has anything better,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “I’m certain that a year or two from now, when they’re actually in the market and they’re actually showing cars, they will not be able to outperform us.”
Jake Fisher, a senior automotive engineer at Consumer Reports Auto Test Center thinks that “in the end, any of the technologies that are out there are very limited in terms of their capacity.”
Ford is backpedaling. “We’re not seeing a big breakthrough in the next few years in terms of where you will suddenly be able to drive an electric vehicle and not have the battery be affected by temperature,” Sherif Marakby, director of electrification programs and engineering at Ford, said.
The Chicago Tribune smells a climate change in reporting an thinks that “other reviews noting the limited range of electric vehicles in extreme temperatures are likely on the way.”
Consumer Reports recommends to get a hybrid.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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A 23 mile range in cold weather, eh? Gee, what remarkable progress from the electric golf carts of the 1970s. Wanna save the planet in a 2011 Chevy? Buy a dino-powered Cruze, and then tell six billion of your closest friends to do the same thing.
I am an electric car hater. Don1967 says they haven't advanced since the 1970s golf carts. I say they haven't advanced since my great-grandmother's 1915 Baker Electric. Batteries kept at a toasty 180 degrees are not going to save BEVs from obsolescence. BEVs got beat out by superior technology 90 years ago, nothing that could change that verdict has happened, nor will it happen.
I've been trying to find just exactly what Consumer Reports means when they say "cold weather".
According to the GM engineer in the video, the battery pack is kept between 32 deg F and 80 deg F and that outside those parameters you might be using as much as 25% of the battery pack's energy for battery and interior cabin climate control. It seems to me that with the fairly sophisticated battery temp and conditioning management system GM is using to keep the battery at optimum operating temperatures that the decreased range in cold weather has less to do with the battery not performing well at those temps than the fact that they're expending energy to keep the battery in it's optimum temp range.
I'm interested to see what CR says about the Nissan Leaf's cold weather range. Nissan is air-cooling their batteries.
Personally I think 23-28 miles in cold weather is pretty damn good. Especially considering that w/Volt you have real car wrapped around you. Show me an ICE vehicle that doesn't have reduced range in cold weather.