Lol….she really does put up with a lot of antics….my wife would have been like…”interesting experiment, let me know how it works out and can you stop and pick up some casamigos on your way home?”
huge thanks to kyle and alyssa for working on content over the holidays running important experiments. your work isn't going unnoticed and is deeply appreciated!
I appreciate all your effort. The lessons of cold weather charging are very clear. If you want to travel any great distance to Grandma's this Christmas, take an ICE car.
@@byrnc927 Hmmmm..... He wasn't travelling anywhere. It was called an experiment. Like you. You're clearly the result of an experiment. A FAILED experiment...
Tip for those charging connectors that won’t latch…there’s a small notch on the underside of the connector that gets iced up. Blow your warm breath onto it and scrape it out so the receiving end on your Tesla can latch onto it. I was recently in Tahoe during the 5 foot snowstorm and the superchargers had a foot and a half of snow on them, and it was 9 degrees F. Had similar charging experience as Kyle did.
I've also had one or two experiences when snow got blown into the connector and then froze, so I had to remove the ice before the connector could be plugged into the car.
I remember the time when my history teacher told me about the good old times, where everyone had a coal or wood stove. It was so nice outside that you couldnt even breath normal and everything was dark from the soot (i hope you get the irony). Your real cars are the coal and wood stove from that time. Its time to move on to cleaner cars too. Sure they are still not perfect but give them time and you will see they are the better solution in the future and even now. Maybe in some years even you will then realise how short sighted your thinking was back then.
Yeah. This is definitely serving the metal idol instead of the car serving you. Sitting in a freezing car, with just seat warners, spending an hour of warming batteries with "waste heat" before even pushing a charge.....running back to another car with the cabin heater on to survive the night....running down the charge on the other vehicle. What a Doc Brown nerd fest. We saw Tuesday that the cars went down to zero, just parked overnight.
he intentionally did not turn on the cabin heater for the test. you could just sit in the car normally. and normally it would precondition. and also gas cars in freezing weather need to use engine block heaters and stuff.
His closing comments didn't age well. An extreme case but it would never happen in the real world.... Chicago Chicago that toddling Town. Any severe cold situation involves vehicles left alone and untethered to freeze up. His method on trips, also discussed, running down in his skivvys to plug in his car at the hotel charger to prewarm it....that doesn't work when the hotel is full and there are two chargers.
For those who live right near by the supercharger, if you even turn on your tesla cabin heater on, it will start heating your battery as well, so just make it toasty before driving to supercharger and it will be way efficient charging than just showing up cold 🥶
@@johnnylego807 this is about doing it in -20° F. At that temperature, your vehicle is not going to even start in the first place unlike a Tesla and you're probably going to have to get an engine block heater as well as an oil heater and something to jump the vehicle and a battery blanket as well. Your rubber tiles will be dented in the area that touches the ground so you'll be going to get very low speeds until they warm up anyways but the beauty of hybrids and electrics is even in this crap of the weather they'll start and move
@@NadeemAhmed-nv2br Lol yea ok, here in Canada I've parked my vehicles overnight at below -30C without a block heater and was still able to start them no problem. If you have an old shitty battery obviously it'll have problems starting, I guarantee an older battery in a Tesla is going to give some problems in the cold as well. I'd rather not screw around having to wait for the battery to warm up or charge the damn thing while i'm getting frostbite, and this is after messing with that charger that looks like a pain in the ass to deal with in freezing weather.
FYI: My R1T sat outside since Wednesday in CO. I plugged it into an L2 charger in my garage and it pulled 7kW for ~45min before it put anything into the battery and went up to the full 11kW.
@@SurtistuffOf course it is wasted energy. And when you compare with the starter motor, you should now that if we have a pretty beefy starter motor that is 2 kW. Then you use around 1 Wh to start the car....
@@Surtistuff Why can't they build a battery that's devoid of this process? It still seems a massive waste of power? 5kw for 45 minutes just to ''Heat'' the energy cell so that it can ''Hold'' a charge?? Times this by 1 billion some day and thats1000's of power plants just keeping batteries ''Warm''?? Combustion provides this energy for ''Free'' in gasolene motors.
@@yabbadabbadoo8225 Try starting your deep frozen combustion car, it probably won't even straight up start. Then in cold countries you start and idle the car to warm it up, and in that process you wasted a lot more energy than 13500kJ. In fact every gallon of gas you burn later down the line while driving produces at least 59400kJ of waste heat assuming you have a 50% efficient engine. I doubt your engine does anything close to that
I don't know much about Tesla's, but I learned so much from this video. I know now to take special precautions to keep battery warm when temps drop really low. Therefore, for those with garages should install their own chargers so they can charge it the night before with their own Tesla charger. The software applications for the diagnostics on the screen looked quite amazing.
Pack temperature is one of the most informative pieces of data for an EV driver to understand vehicle performance and it’s a shame most EVs don’t show it. I keep a min/max pack temp display on my Tesla and Rivian dash to understand how the car will drive and charge.
Thanks for running this! I am an engineer responsible for thermal systems on BEV with a large auto maker. Really helpful to see how the competition is doing.
Other good tip for overnight roadtrip stops, besides preconditioning, is to supercharge ON ARRIVAL, when the battery is warm from driving (and the pre-conditioning), and get a decent charge while still warm... vs letting it cold-soak overnight like this, and trying to charge in the morning. And/or if you have destination charger, let it charge & stay warm all night plugged in... or you can mix both and supercharge a moderate amount on arrival, and finish charging overnight. Then pre-heat the cabin (and battery!) while plugged in before leaving. re the frozen latch: isn't there a recent feature to not engage the charge latch in freezing temps, so it doesn't get frozen/stuck? I've seen folks complaining of "latch not engaged" warnings in very cold temps, I think it is intentional? Made worse by a clogged/frozen plug end too, but...?
My early M3 LR RWD has this software feature to not latch the cable when below freezing. However it is for L1/L2 charging only. Supercharging would not be safe without the cable latch.
@@fyrefitrt2 I'm sure with your Denali when it's been sitting cold in -14 for two days straight you just crank it up and floor it without any warmup. Good way to damage your engine. Not to mention when you start getting down to -15 to -20 F you almost need a block heater for an ICE. An EV doesn't because it uses a minimal amount of power in the battery to keep it safe. The colder it gets the more energy it will use. With an ICE the colder it gets then you better have a block heater. With a Tesla you simply set a timer from your phone or the car to begin a battery preheat at a certain time in the morning. You can do it 1 hour before you leave the house or whatever. Just like warming up your car. It would melt the snow and ice off the windshield for you and the battery will be conditioned when you come out and jump in. This video is only a sensational example of what would happen if you didn't preheat the battery to show how long you would need to wait. If you are driving your Tesla in -14 then the battery will be warmed up and you won't have to wait when you stop to charge. Only when it's been sitting for days cold soaking. No different than an ICE engine like yours.
@@oddjobsandrandomprojects also don't forget - they let their teslas run on next to no battery power too. That's like me complaining about how shit my Buick Regal Grand Sport is, because I ran it to mere fumes and moaned that it wouldn't start in the cold.
This Test is a bit Dodgy, who preheats one car and goes sit in another warm car 🤔🫣 I mean what happens when you try to preheat your Family inside the car & Batteries at the same time, is there enough eat for both, Cabin & Car 🤔 what happens if you only have a rwd motor and is - 20 can the Single Motor preheat car & cabin
When I drove my Model 3 cross country this time last year, when it was 0F basically as soon as I unplugged one supercharger it started preconditioning for the next. Very neat to pull into the next one and get normal charging rates.
@@SimRan-ur5nl Thermal mass is the capacity material have to absorb, store and release heat. Your question was great, because its not clear why a enourmous thermal mass would do any good for that EV without good gravimetric energy density and low thermal inertia. That EVs battery could have great thermal mass but still be useless after one cold night if it had high thermal inertia and even more so if the nominal energy would be low.
@@SimRan-ur5nl The specific heat depends on the material, but for batteries with copper foil, steel, carbon, plastic, some solvents and the cooling water, it should average about 0.45 Jules/degree C per gram. So heating a 770 kg battery + 20 kg water from -20 C to +20 C would take: 0.45 * 40C * 790,000g = 14,220,000 Jules of energy. dividing by 3600 seconds in an hour and by 1000, that is about 4 kWh to warm the battery up, or 5.25 kW for 3/4 hour. (assuming the battery and cooling system is perfectly insulated, which is isn't)
Try dealing with 50+ Teslas in these conditions all self-draining due to the cold and only having 2 Superchargers powered by a generator at your disposal for charging them… I dealt with that working at Tesla in Minnesota 🥶🥶
I hope you make the tesla owners sit next to the generator exhaust the entier time they charge. You should rig up some seats that if their ass leaves, their car stops charging. they should have to huff that beautiful exhaust gas the entire time they charge so they KNOW where this comes from. What facility do you run? Gas station? Hotel?
Even with the preface, the comments are still loaded with bad takes. This was an extreme test that basically doesn’t happen in the real world. Any amount of driving to a supercharger will speed up battery heating. Blasting cabin heat to the floor will help heat the battery a bit and not slow down preconditioning. The car used mains power to heat the battery when plugged in, so the percentage of charge lost between parking the car and charging it was a software temperature correction, not actual energy lost. In the real world, you tell the car where you want to go via the nav system and it figures out and handles the rest. The car will charge at full speed even in the cold if you drive 50 miles or more before the first charge stop. I’ve been driving EVs for 12 years. Cold weather charging is not a problem.
Took my 2020 model 3 to MN over the holidays from CO. Once the outside temps dropped below 5 degrees, the efficiency really started to take a hit, and even when navigating to a supercharger the battery wouldn't warm up enough to take a full power charge right away. Also encountered a LOT of snow/ice clogged charging heads, especially in Central Minnesota, as well as cables that had been knocked down by the wind, then filled with snow.
We traveled from northwest Ohio to Chicago on I 80/90 in northern Indiana. Many Supercharger cables were blown down in the wind and snow covered. It is unfortunate that the Supercharger stations don't have shelters over the units and the units don't have automatic heaters and sitting on top of the shelters that don't have a combination of solar panels and small wind turbines. We have a way to go yet. There is so much opportunity nonetheless.
@@kdjorgensen98 I agree with that whole heartedly. I have trouble with these Superchargers putting the handle back into the correct position all the time. Not intuitive for a klutz like me.
@@Frank-sy3li was that a gas car or a has-been car? sorry.... but not better for everything, just some things, and EVs are in their infancy. Many of their negative quirks will be worked out over the next decade or two. The government should not force folks to move to EVs, but eventually EVs will be so compelling and cost effective that most folks will want them. If I want to sleep in my car (Tesla Model Y) when visiting friends/relatives or traveling, I can do so comfortably with no fear of dying from car exhaust while the car stays warm in the winter or cool in the summer overnight. Most folks wouldn't care about that feature, but it appeals to me. Making sure I can always charge the car takes a little planning, but not much effort and I find it fun. Folks how prefer their blackberries and flip fold phones from the 90s over modern smart phones will probably continue to prefer gas cars and I'd bet that gas cars, at least used ones, will be available in sufficient number to scratch their itch for several decades, though eventually they may become subject to increased tax and registration fees as the government or even HOAs will be pushing for cleaner air in places where folks like to enjoy the outdoors.
When connected to a Supercharger you can turn on the cabin heater to heat the battery quicker. It'll pull juice from the charger to run the heatpump (or PTC heater depending on model) and then reuse that heat for the battery coolant loop as well.
Not anymore, now it's 10kw of heat to the battery, 7 from motors, and 3.5 from heat pump... If you want heat inside cabin, it'll be deducted from what the battery get
I was wondering why the car didn’t run the heater and dump it all into the battery pack as opposed to futzing with trying to make heat with the motors. Or at the very least include “turn on the heater” as a tip along with “next time navigate to the supercharger”. Really cool test though.
@@theonetruestripesTesla’s use heat pumps now. So to heat the cabin in conditions like this, it would use power to generate heat in the motors, and then use the heat pump to move that heat into the cabin. So that would mean less heat going from the motors into the battery in this case.
Great video. I know the BMW i3 uses similar telemetrics to regulate and pre-heat for charging. They just never thought people would want to see any of the data involved, but it is all available via detailed OBD data viewing.
Nah, most people will be smart enough to use the Pre-conditioning features. All it takes is 40 Uber drivers who have no clue how to drive the car to ruin it for everyone, though.
We found this out when heading home from FL to IA winter of 2020. Stayed overnight at a supercharger hotel. But parked with 30ish % overnight. Plugged in in the AM and it took an extra 45 min. Personally I suggest just charge it to 80% on the SC while the family is checking in the night before; But it’s a personal preference I suppose. I really Appreciate these style of videos !
Better reason to charge the night before instead of the morning. I woke up in the morning to a dark hotel. Mile away the supercharger also lost power along with the gas station it was located at. Since I charged the night before no issue.
@@kadmow It's not additional time if you set it to warm up while you are still in bed and not up, packed and checked out yet. If you are planning to get up to check out at 6am set your car in the app to turn on and run the cabin heat and precondition the pack at 5am before you even wake up. Right in the phone app there is a 'schedule' category where you can set the departure time and a button to select to precondition which means to set the climate and precondition the battery. This is exactly why this app exists. No need to do like in the video and go out and sit in the cold car for 45 minutes. If you have access to the weather forecast you know how cold it's going to be.
@@flipadavis : sorry - I must have misunderstood, not having stayed at a supercharger hotel (they don't exist in my "neck of the woods", I didn't realise that you could park all night in a supercharger stall.... kind of relegates it to merely a charger - slow charge overnight is definitely better for battery longevity.
Thanks for bringing issue of “no home charger” and “rely on supercharger” issue to attention. I don’t understand why can’t they just add a “Pre-condition” button to controls instead of having to defrost the entire cabin, which is a huge issue when you are in ice cold conditions unplugged.
Great video I’m in MN and we just had a stretch of sub zero weather. I charge overnight in an underground heated garage. Standard 110 outlet. I have a 35 mile commute with the car parked outside for 10 hours. Took about 10-12% each way instead of the 8-10% during non sub zero. Also I lost about 7-8% while parked outside all day. I found that I would get better overnight charging if I navigated to the super charger near my townhouse then plug in at home. This way my battery was already warm I charged to 93% overnight instead of the normal 83%. During the 10 day stretch of sub zero I “topped off” at a super charger twice - because I was actually making a Target run and they have Super Charging. I’m new to EV with my 22 M3 LR. I love it. Like I mentioned before I just charge with 110 and haven’t had any problems. One thing to note-make sure no moisture is in the charging port. It throws my GFI on the wall outlet. Had that challenge when we had a warm wet snow and everything was slushy. Some snow got in the port. Thanks again for the video
@@rkeith4442 I preheated (and charged) an ICE car for 30 minutes last week at -20C (-4F) because it would not start (weak battery). Replaced the battery in those temperatures because I needed to drive the next day at -30C (-22F). Pre-heated the car for 2 hours for that trip.
Kyle and Alyssa, thank you so much for making this video! You have no idea how close to my situation this is. I live in South Lake Tahoe, where we have a SuperCharger at the Hard Rock, an Electrify America station, and slower EV Go chargers. The wait during a holiday week is insane for them. My HOA does not allow EV home chargers, so those public stations would be my only options. I have consulted with my electric company, and the grid can only support one 11kW charger for the entire duplex. That's including my replacing the electrical panel to double my available amperage, which would mean my neighbors would be stuck with what they have. I might be able to get the HOA to change its rules, but the grid where I live simply cannot support wide-spread EV charging. After test-driving Tesla, Genesis, and BMW EVs, I wanted an i4 or iX, but with a two-year wait, I bought a gas car. I had entertained the thought of a second car Model Y, Fisker Ocean, or fantasy Rivian R1T, but your videos confirmed it's not viable for me while I live where I currently reside. We have just had several feet of snow, so my car sat for 2 days. I dug it out today and started it, but the roads were still too bad to go anywhere. Even if I charged an EV to 100%, I would lose considerable power before being able to go back to a charger. I would lose power warming the car and pre-warming the battery. The traffic from my home to the charging stations is impossible with the accidents and stuck vehicles of tourists. I would likely be waiting 5 days- not 2- to go back to the charger. Even the solar roof of a Fisker Ocean wouldn't offset the cold weather power loss. Parking is a tandem hassle. The whole point would be to have a vehicle with a lot of ground clearance so I wouldn't just leave the car for 10 days until the snow melted. If I did, I'm sure it would be an ice brick. Even as a second vehicle, an EV doesn't make sense where I live. EVs are awesome if you have a garage to prevent extreme temperatures or at least a home charger. For the rest of us, hopefully the electrical grid can be upgraded. Eventually, I hope that solid state batteries will provide the answer...
??? *HOA can't tell you that you can't have an EV home charger! That's like telling you you can't have a refrigerator! SUE them, take them to court, you'll win hand down. Usually HOA wins on stupid things, but they won't win on this because EV home charger is the future. All new homes will have built in EV charger.*
@@radicalrick9587he also said the electrical grid in his area could not accommodate him having a charger, even if he upgraded his home electrical panel. Although I believe you are correct about the hoa can’t prevent you from getting one, but then you make yourself a target for them to get revenge on you. It’s beyond me why ANYONE would even consider buying into a hoa neighborhood.
As an old leaf owner I eagerly await the cold soak leaf test. I imagine it'll be similar but start charging earlier at like 1 or 2kw. We saw -10C recently but home charging and cabin preheating made it a non-issue. I don't think the battery even got to the blue section of its temperature gauge.
Cool experiment, thanks for braving the cold to do it. Questions: How much did it cost to heat up the battery before it was able to charge? If you'd have run the HVAC to keep the car warm while charging, would that have added to the cost or time to get to 90%? That's probably a more realistic scenario, as few folks in this position would have a second car to hang out in to keep from freezing. Thanks!
@oscarpaisi4037 huh?? Lfp battery Tesla says charge to 100%. Yes, below 20% and it won't precondition battery for SC but it will charge fine. You probably own a 2005 Civic.
It would have been amazing to see the "scan my tesla" info live during the video. Looking at the battery temps and motor temps would be great. Time to get a new adapter?
We see it a lot in Sweden every winter when EV drivers are queued up outside every charging station for hours on their way to the mountains. In the Summers EV’s seem super fun and functional, but for winters diesel is definitely king here
I think you will encounter this in the real world. It’s on the news and if it’s to cold some EV cars won’t even move or just stop on the side of the road. Electronics and batteries don’t like cold and the last few days where I live it’s been -11 at night and a high of like 10 Fahrenheit. Good ole V8 starts right up and is warm in 10 minutes.
@@johnphelps2941 My "firebreather" starts at -40 no issue, and then it doesn't just quit and fail to restart when I'm on the TransCanada Hwy. My buddies Tesla fails this way weekly in the winter.
Garage kept, no doubt. Lead acid batteries don't like cold weather either. But you won't hear about this problem when sodium ion batteries take over. That's already started. The dinosaurs are going extinct. ICE is dying. we'll see if your kids thank you for climate change.@@brentlloyd7908
@@johnphelps2941 yeah but every 3-5 years I need to replace it and it costs me anywhere from 100-150 dollars. Not 17,000 and I can put it in myself with a couple of tools and 5 minutes of my time. Really no comparison.
I keep saying "wow" when i see some of Kyle's video ideas, but this deserves the "wow" whole heartedly. Great job of recording this video in such frigid temperatures and of course Alyssa for helping with the recording. When you can see your own breath while INSIDE the car, its got to be COLD. Kudos to you both. Keep it up - looking forward to the Leaf videos and I'd be interested in another CCS cold storage type test if you do it, but as Kyle said, this is really edge case testing.
I live in Fairbanks Alaska we recently hit -41 and I have seen minus 71 in the 14 years that I have lived here. I was extremely interested in seeing what your video reflected. I am impressed with your expertise and knowledge of the Tesla and really appreciate the information that you shared. I would definitely like information as to how efficient the Tesla ran at the negative temperatures. How much did it diminish the distance you could travel. Look forward to seeing more of your videos
If I were you, I wouldn't trust ANY fully electric vehicle to get you across the Dalton Highway - even in summer. Thank goodness for fossil fueled motors.
I just read of a story where a brother and sister rented a tesla from Orlando to Kansas when they hit the cold weather, they had to charge 6 times in 1 day
I am in Canada and I can tell you that on a negative 30 day my range will be half. It’s not so much that you use more to travel it’s that it is heating the battery and keeping the cabin warm. So normally on a nice day with my spirted driving I could get about 400kms in the winter it’s around 200- 250. I am debating trying a few things to improve that. I am thinking insulating the glass roof might help. I might try this next cold snap. Keep in mind that if you have your Tesla plugged in just like your regular car you can pre heat the battery and interior before even leaving your house. So you can get a bit more range doing the preheating while still plugged in. The coldest my car has been was -42 and even at that temperature it still worked. But I would say just like a gas car if you hoop in on a -42 day and don’t pre heat or have the block heater going. It’s not going to be great for either gas or electric vehicles.
Oh one more little note I don’t believe there is a good way to get to the main land of the US from Alaska at the moment. Definitely not on the super charger network for sure. I feel like it could be done but not in the winter I would say and difficult in the summer. Definitely not a seamless experience.
Yeah. Most current EV owners will tell you how much they love their EVs and that's because they are delusional enthusiasts and owning an EV is basically their hobby. These people are literally sitting around in a freezing cold car so it will charge faster and it took over 45 minutes before it would even start charging. Lol.
Watching you look out the frosted fogged up windows and seeing your breath made me really appreciate my internal combustion engine; thanks for the video.
@@Adriaaan It only takes my Expedition 5 minutes to warm up enough to put out heat. And I've owned and operated ICE driven cars that put out usable heat much quicker than that. If you can't make it 5 minutes without heat, you should probably stay inside your house anyway.
@@Adriaaan And he would have filled up his tank and driven off in 90 seconds instead of sitting so long it warranted a video. EVs are a friggen joke and everyone knows it.
Or any other neighborhood of poor to middle class .cause we kno unless ur armed or from that hood an kno the people u are not gonna wanna hang out to do a deep charge cause the only charge u gonna get is the one police slap ur attackers with or u for defending ur self
Except it does. Currently we're in negative temps once again, and almost every day over the past 2 weeks we've seen negative temps. Same goes for last year as we had a 2 week stretch of nothing but negative temps.
@@MassBoost It's a battery heater, you press a button, that way you don't have frozen electrolyte capping the power draw or charge. You do use some energy in the battery to heat itself like a couple space heaters of power draw worth.
Kyle and Alyssa, your last two “sub zero” episodes illustrate why Out of Spec is the definitive American EV channel. Keep warm and have a merry Christmas with the dogs!
Would have been interesting if you had ScanMyTesla running on it. You could have watched all the internal temps of battery and motors, coolant flows, etc. Also the heat pump on the newer cars may not provide much help at these very cold temps. P.S. You did mention that as I was typing this. ScanMyTesla is a really valuable app for us data nerds. You can see everything that is going under the skin.
We have a 2013 Model S P85 which is primarily parked in an unheated, detached garage. In winter, its pretty common for us to have little to no regen due to a cold battery. If we know we're going to drive somewhere, we'll do two things about an hour or so before we leave: we bump up the charge level to get it to start charging (which is really just heating the battery), and we'll turn on the cabin heater. This usually will get half or most of our regen back, if we give it enough time. The battery pack represents a fairly big thermal mass, takes time to change its whole temp!
@@smelltheglove2038 Yes, around half the population in London don't have any way to plug in at home, so no pre-conditioning possible and public chargers are 80p / kWh ($1 / kWh). So you're looking at $70 + 1 hour to charge with pre-heating? - that's more than double per mile vs diesel if you don't value your time and don't count the cost of that costa :(
I can’t imagine owning a Tesla in the winter without having a home charger. Absolutely great car when you can wake up and it’s charged every morning, but dealing with charging a cold car and having to wait for your car to precondition… nah.
@@bellshooter I live about 20 minutes from a charger. I have forgotten to plug my car in overnight, navigated to a charger so it was preconditioning the whole way, and it still didn't charge at full speed and told me my battery was too cold. I'm guessing if you live in the city and drive one block to a charger your battery is not going to be very warm when you arrive at the charging location. So no, it's not quite that simple.
@@RionPhotography definitely why if they want EV adoption to move faster they need to start installing level two chargers at street parking and in parking garages so people who don't have garages can charge overnight, I'm licky enough to have free L1/L2 charging ar my work and L2 at the parking garage I park at but really on street publoc charging needs to become a thing asap
Was the car at 35% when you dropped it off? One of the things I wonder about is whether the car is able to estimate its remaining power when it's frozen like that.
We are in NJ this morning, 9F plugged in and saw 48kW initially. As battery warmed up saw 100kW. Usually see 145kW in warm weather. This on a new EA charger. So etron does pretty good hooked to a good charger. Range 155 @100% charge.
Sirs, I have a degree in physics and really thought it would be fun to have an electric car. I see videos like this where it takes 40 minutes or so before the car even starts charging. Range is like 180 miles on EVs in the winter. You sit in it freezing your backside off because you don't want to use heat because you will lose range. My present car is a VW Passat diesel. Starts in 3 or 4 seconds even when -25 defrees f. I honestly drive slow for the first 5 minutes or so in very cold weather. It gets 50 mpg in the winter and 55mpg in the summer. It takes 3 minutes to refuel. It's hard to do a trip somewhere past range/2 because you are sweating the recharging. When we have nuclear fusion electric power, a really good electric distribution system and better means of storing electric power then it makes sense. Green people may want to understand what the carbon cycle is also.....
We were down to 15 in the DFW area, so I thought I would drop by the 250KW S/C near the office and top off. I usually get murderously high speeds there but not this time. I was only able to precondition for about 4 miles, so I never saw over 75KW. Lesson learned. Only had to sit for about 45 mins 30% to 80%, took about 10 mins to actually get juice to the battery. A small price to pay, IMHO, for teh privilege of driving my Model 3.
I run into a similar situation, but I charged up before I parked the car, so I had about 60% charge when I started. I think it really helped to run the car for a hour in the morning to heat up the battery enough to start a charge. I still had to wait 10 or so minutes to start charging the first time, but much less time then if the car was completely frozen.
I have an interrupting electric meter on my home for the AC in the Detroit metro area, because our electric grid has brown outs at peek times . How lets everyone plug in their EV after work and see how that works 😂
Great video. Reminds me of a ski trip I took with college buddies where the next morning, only one of the cars (all ICE cars back in the day) would start so had to use that one to get the other engines to start. Oh and one guy had borrowed his brother's truck and for some reason, the coolant antifreeze was bad and it cracked the block.
Great video! Thanks for doing this test for us. I'm in Atlanta, GA and just had a small dusting of snow last night (usually happens once every year or two lol) it didn't get above 32F the past few days and my car didn't charge at my house. This taught me a lot! Heading to the supercharger now with preconditioning on 👍🏻
I also live in Atlanta. I have never had this problem. If you leave it plugged in at home in the cold it will never get cold soaked since it will just use a tiny bit of electricity to keep the pack warm. Even if you don't keep it plugged in and it does get cold soaked then go into your Tesla app and select 'schedule' category and then schedule a departure time in the morning and then select 'precondition'. It will turn on and run the climate and precondition the battery ahead of that departure time. I've never even had to do that in Atlanta though. If you try to plug in and it won't charge then just either turn on the car and leave the heat on for 30 min. to an hour and then retry charging or go into the app and do the departure 'precondition' thing. Or set the nav to the nearest Supercharger to you and it will begin to automatically precondition the battery for charging even if you aren't driving. Whatever system you use, even sitting hooked up to a Supercharger, the pack will only use 5 kWs to precondition. So might as well let your battery warm itself up for 30 min to an hour. That will only use 2.5 - 5 kWhs of energy which isn't much. Edit: The reason your home charger isn't able to charge is that it is likely trying to put more than a 5kW rate into the pack which I guess is the limit Tesla has set to protect the pack. Most home L2 chargers are in the 7-11 kW range. There is a manual setting on your Tesla screen under charging where you can select the AC max power which you could set lower to like 20 amps so it would only allow just under 5 kWs from your home charger into the pack. Then it would charge, but just slower until the pack warmed up. The Supercharger has more sophisticated software that communicates with the car and throttles back to 5 kW. Your home charger doesn't so you have to manually set it to 5 kWs or 20amp/240V.
@@flipadavis way too many variables to drive an electric car, stick with fuel type car , or a hybrid, unless you want to be stranded in the cold ~ its just that simple . .
@@kingdommusic5456 I've driven 100,000 miles across two EVs. Drove my Tesla with 3 people cross country stopping at dozens of sights. In one day that Summer we went through and stopped in Death Valley and then past Mammoth up through Tioga pass and into Yosemite where we stayed that night. Drove through a record heat wave in 121 degree temp days later coming back through Barstow. Had no problems.
@@flipadavis Yes, you had no issues, but it seems you are very well versed in the operation of your EV. Unfortunately, maybe one person out of every five (probably a very conservative guess) will be as well versed in the proper operation of their EV. That being said, the manufacturers needs to understand that not every owner will bother to learn all of the nuances, and proper operation of their EV. On the other hand, when ICE driven cars first hit the scene they weren't as simple to operate as they are today. As late as the late sixties and possibly the early seventies it wasn't uncommon for a vehicle to have a manually operated choke, which the operator had to have a basic understanding of in order to operate. If one didn't know how to operate the choke, they would never get a carbureted ICE started even in mildly cold temps. And that's just one of several things that one had to learn in order to operate an ICE in cold weather. So its a learning curve, but unfortunately we are being pushed to adopt a technology that isn't ready for the big time, yet. I feel that if we were to wait ten more years the battery technology would probably be at a point where it would absolutely, make more sense to buy an EV. However, as it stands I'm afraid all that is being done by pushing EV's on everyone before they are practical will do nothing but create a stigma for EV's that will take a long time to fade.
Yes preconditioning is very important. I supercharged in only 10 degrees warmer, but I navigated to the charger and it went from 15 to 80% in just 30 minutes
If you preheat the cabin from the app or set a scheduled departure time it will also preheat the battery. If you live in a city as you described no need to wait at the supercharger - just set it going before you leave. The app shows an orange heat symbol as well so you know its working.
@@timgurr1876 It will - I think it will turn off if it goes below 20% but you can turn it back on again. Tesla have also just added a 'pop door' function in the app to open the door when the handle is frozen.
The battery will likely push a bit more voltage as it heats, so I think Alyssa is technically correct that's it gained a bit of extra energy courtesy of the heat; the same was lost to cold and is now returning.
Electric cars are awesome... for some people. About 5% of cars being electric might be perfect, additionally 20% of plug-in hybrids might be ideal, and the rest of the vehicles should be ICE. Outright banning anything with ICE, including PHEV is insane on so many levels it makes my brain hurt.
Kyle you are truly the electric Yeti, and Alyssa you are the SheYeti, great job and extremely interesting, love all the beyond crazy cold temp videos. I myself will never plan on road tripping in any freezing temps but great to know how it may go.
Running the cabin heater would aid in warming the battery because the rest of the frame of the car would warm the battery some. It's really important to do all the heating you can.
Yeah, I think they must have made some changes since this guy got his. My 2023 Long range Y does great in North Western Alberta Canada. Starts fast charge almost instantly once I plug it in. Drives fine in the cold, one thing i will say is that it does disable regenerative braking charging occasionally for the first few minutes driving in the cold.
Dude!! Really strong video! Thanks for braving the elements and running the tests. I’s so glad i went with a Tesla. And big thanks to Alyssa LOL no way I’d have done that. Merry Christmas to you both and keep making videos!!!
Wow… do gas users really believe that gas comes from dinosaurs? 😂 Hilarious! Quick preheat on the way to the supercharger and you are ready to go when you get there. But good test though. 👍
This happened to me on accident while on vacation. We got in late and I thought I would just charge the next morning since there was a free charger a couple blocks away. BIG MISTAKE! The battery cold soaked overnight and took forever to charge on Level 2 charger. Luckily we weren't leaving that day so there was no inconvenience. Lesson learned, now I always charge while the battery is still warm from driving.
@@davetuscano5939 Pretty much, you have to plan your route, if you're driving across the country. Basically, you're going from charger to the next charger. My brother has a Tesla in CA. The interior is cheaply made (to save weight, thus extending range). He drives it at 65mph. Never speeds. Intermittently use the A/C. He parks it inside his garage, right under his condo. I fear it might burn down his place, & the next door condo. The wife can't drive for shit, so she parks outside.
My hat's off to Alyssa for being so willing to go out at 3 am in -20 temps! I don't know many wives who would do the same! I couldn't get my wife to get up and go soak with me in hot springs pools only a few steps from our room! (check out Pagosa Springs when you get a chance, the pools are awesome!)
"Extreme cold" in Chicago be like ~0°C, while in Russia the pretty average temp during winter is -17..-28°C And there is no big problems about "dead robots", lol, even on -40°C cities.
Thank you so much for the very real-world test and your dedication. I don't own a Tesla but this is another piece of info I need to make a decision. Really liked what I saw here. :)
OK, so perhaps it's my age, but I grew up here in Canada and I would never leave the driveway unless ALL windows were completely cleared off. Just a safety thing to have clear and unobstructed visibility. Just a thought. With respect to EV ownership, managing the battery in the winter is definitely part of the paradigm shift the owner would need to go through. Totally agree with the charge-up-before approach for the very thing that you experienced. In many ways, cities still need to better understand the need to provide even simple level 1 and 2 charge points for people without driveways or garages. There are light poles on every street, so it's not like on-street charging is impossible. They just need to work out how to make it accessible and fair. In northern Canada, parking lots had outlets for ICE vehicles so that people could plug in their block heaters on cold days. Its not a far stretch to do something similar for EVs.
Just a note, the cars with heat pump (I think thats an older one without) will heat up the battery quicker. The two (or one) motors will run but instead of putting it into the battery directly it will go to the heat pump which can extract more heat. It should be **a lot** faster. In case of the LFP battery you typically need 45min in Germany cold wheather with heat pump for 40°C in the battery or around 1.5hours without the heat pump. If you can it would be nice to have the exact same test with a car with heat pump too! :)
Yes, completely agree. And yes you are correct that car does not have a heat pump, they were introduced to the Model 3 in the 2021 models. I had a 2018 Model 3 without the heat pump and now have a 2021 Model 3 with with the heat pump and the difference in speed of heating the battery is very noticable. With the 2018 plugging into a supercharger with a cold battery it took MUCH longer to charge than the 2021 under very similar conditions.
@@ZebHallock Yeah, maybe we can get Kyle to scientifically test this for us. The difference really is big, but I'm really interested in how big. Looking forward to a video about that.
@@kruemelfelix Next cold snap I can see if I can get someone with an older Model 3 to park it at a supercharger overnight with my new one with a similar state of charge and we can do a direct comparison the next morning. Doesn't get as cold here as where Kyle is though. Last night it got down to 7F (-14C) which is extremely cold for this area. Almost never goes below that, but still can do a valid head to head comparison.
@@dorvinion That's why I said that the heat pump does in fact not use the surrounding air for heating but the waste heat generated by the motors. The Octovalve is the key point here.
Talk about making the case for avoiding EVs! I'm over 70, and I guarantee that I would never want to deal with this situation. A few minutes pumping gas, and a few minutes later I'm on the road and toasty warm.
Most people who have these cars don’t do this, either. They just charge at home, cold or not, and they wake up with all the charge they need. On road trips, it’s never this slow as your battery is warm while driving. This temp is also pretty extreme. These videos are interesting, but they aren’t very representative of typical owner experience.
@@house9120 In everyday situations, sure. Charge at home, commute to work, come back on the same charge. But that also means that EVs are fundamentally more limiting that gas cars when it comes to long trips/spontaneous trips. You'll literally have to theorycraft how you'll get to your destination, including chargers, expected weather, charger availability, time alloted, etc - something you don't really have to do with gas car, simply because gas stations are so common after decades of constant gas car usage.
@@fortissears5388 there can be some additional planning, sure. I’ve taken a lot of EV road trips though and the car navigation system largely takes care of the planning, finding charging stops needed to get to your destination and calculating how long you’ll need to charge there. Many of my stops are sub 15 minutes. We can expect this experience to improve a lot as charging speeds increase, charger availability becomes more dense, and navigation planning becomes more sophisticated. I think the future of this is pretty bright
Well done video. I'm just trying to figure out why you think your cold test is a little extreme and isn't a real world test. I'd call it a simple cold test that most people above the equator can expect their EVs to face. Hybrids are currently the best option, you still save on gas but you're free to get in and go no matter the temp ( not counting real extreme cases). Still enjoyed the info and sorry you had to test what Tesla should have. All Tesla owners should get a paycheck at this point for all the RnD they do for the company for free. Being charged money for something you're helping to design is mind-blowing. Stay safe out there.
Really cool that your wife went with you. She's a keeper for you. My wife and I both do stuff we are both interested in too. Totally awesome, and thanks both of you.
Makes me think of the days back in the late 60's to 80's when I was driving air cooled VWs and minivans.....this where when we got into the car which had been sitting in an unheated garage and drove somewhere just around the time we got to where we were going to park the car the the engine started to throw a little heat of course by that time our toes and hands were frozen and we had been scraping the ice off the inside of the windshield for the whole trip. Imagine now all the progress we've made😂 We even had a reserve gas tank lever. I can just see somebody hiking down the road to get to a charging station to pick up a spare battery instead of a 2-gallon gas can🎉
Respect for the dedication because that was crazy. That being said, I would probably do the same in your situation. I had my own experiments going on in the 15° temps we had in SW Louisiana an hour from the Gulf of Mexico.
Kyle: we should go out in the middle of the night at the coldest temps we can manage just to see what would happen when we try to charge this thing. Alyssa: K, I’ll film. Alyssa, the true ride or die.
Gasoline cars are getting to be old school but in a life and death situation they have more of a chance of saving your life providing you're not in the ditch somewhere
Well those closing comments certainly didn't age well. Parking the car and leaving it to turn into an ice cube....NOBODY IRW WILL DO THAT. Well a T nerd you are but a social scientist you are not.
*Respect you guys, and I Love your and Alyssa's dedication to actually freezing your A$$es up for testing a real-world scenario, Thank you very much, really appreciated !* !
This is the most ridiculous display of enthusiasm for something that is mind boggingly ridiculous. I can’t imagine traveling with this car through the northern states or Canada between November and March.
There's always one isn't there..... You realise this is a video on precisely NOT what to do. In reality, it would take as long as unplugging your car from your home charger and getting in to drive away, with a full "tank", while you're still warming up your diesel, with whatever you last had left in it. I'm not against either option, but have a little more critical thinking.
@@benwhittle7204I live far... And I am not the one who stop to recharge everywhere. I did a 1100 km trip and had to stop for a total of 13 minutes to fill up and pee. I can eat on the go. Still not sure how many electric compromise were on the way but for sure they were annoyance in the 169 and 175 going fast uphill and braking downhill... To each their own but saying you are going farther and faster in electric is a lie.
I really like your videos, it informed me of the convenience of certain EVs over others and the road trips really show me the superchargers are the best thing
Very interesting video. One has to really be committed to EV’s to endure this experience of charging in cold weather. What about those who have to park on the street and are not able to plug-in overnight? Your summary of how impressed you are with how the Tesla handled this heat warm up cycle before charging for 45 minutes and then took another 1.5 hours to charge (if I understood correctly) seems to me a little underwhelming. For those of us who have to be at work at a prescribed time in the morning I think it becomes quite problematic. You were fortunate to have another vehicle to stay warm in. 99.9% of people don’t have that option and would have to endure the really cold temperatures waiting for the car to be able to heat the cabin. You charged to 90% and then warmed up the cabin. The charge level was already at 85% when you were departing the charging station. It would interesting to know how far home you had to drive and the state of battery charge when you arrived. In the Minneapolis area in -10 to -15 F early morning temps a radio announcer of a local station indicated that her Tesla’s battery quickly depleted as she was driving to work. In fact the battery drained to zero to the point the car stopped and would not heat the cabin. She had to call someone to come out with a portable battery bank to charge her car before she could get to work. All automobiles have trouble in extreme cold temperatures, especially for those who cannot park in a garage overnight. It is a common situation in Minneapolis, a reasonably sized metropolitan area. I know I have had to have someone jumper start my ICE car when I had to leave my car parked outside. I have seen times in Minnesota where is has been -20 F on Christmas morning, -30 F on New Year’s morning, and then stayed below zero for over two weeks. If one cannot plug-in their EV, it’s going to be really hard to “drive” anywhere. Not against EV’s, but they may not be the “ideal” mode of transportation that we are being led to believe. There simply is not enough charging infrastructure to support extreme cold weather conditions. Nor do I see it my responsibility to pay for such an infrastructure through taxation under the premise that the world is going to end in 20 to 30 years, if we don’t force EV’s on the population. Let’s keep politics out of the free market. Let consumers decide what they want to drive. Let there be real truth about the advantages and disadvantages of both ICE and EV vehicles. If EV’s are the next mode of transportation for the world, let them evolve as the first cars evolved from horses and carriages.
"This is a very extreme case; something you'd never run into really in the real world - I'm just doing a test." Well, that part didn't age too well. And more importantly, the real-world scenario was worse than this one. How many people in Chicago had to get their Tesla's towed to a dealer? I think WLS Chicago said at least 10 from one charging station alone.
Here this would be every morning if you do not have a hot garage or connect it to a charger, we have long cold winters and distances that is long (longer then an EV can drive)... And the corrupt crazy bandits running this country said that from 2025 ALL sales of new cars that was not pure electric would be banned... They have now postponed that for now when they realized 2025 is in a few months and people have stopped baying EV`s 2 years ago.
We should all take a moment to thank Alyssa for filming all this when is insanely cold outside!
She's a real trooper. I also love the real "teaching" conversation going on. Really helps bring this stuff down to earth to regular folks.
Lol….she really does put up with a lot of antics….my wife would have been like…”interesting experiment, let me know how it works out and can you stop and pick up some casamigos on your way home?”
She’s the best ❤
I don't know a lot of women that would do that, hopefully you took her out for breakfast :-)
stfu. people work in the cold all the time. 5 minutes of recording shouldn’t necessitate a round of applause.
huge thanks to kyle and alyssa for working on content over the holidays running important experiments. your work isn't going unnoticed and is deeply appreciated!
I appreciate all your effort. The lessons of cold weather charging are very clear.
If you want to travel any great distance to Grandma's this Christmas, take an ICE car.
@@byrnc927 Hmmmm..... He wasn't travelling anywhere. It was called an experiment. Like you.
You're clearly the result of an experiment.
A FAILED experiment...
@@byrnc927 a real car
EVs junk
@@marklassanske2716 Look! Look!
A real M0re. 0n!....
Tip for those charging connectors that won’t latch…there’s a small notch on the underside of the connector that gets iced up. Blow your warm breath onto it and scrape it out so the receiving end on your Tesla can latch onto it. I was recently in Tahoe during the 5 foot snowstorm and the superchargers had a foot and a half of snow on them, and it was 9 degrees F. Had similar charging experience as Kyle did.
Tell your wife to blow on the han dle with the kids screaming in the car!
I've also had one or two experiences when snow got blown into the connector and then froze, so I had to remove the ice before the connector could be plugged into the car.
Or buy a real car
No way this is the best toy ever!
I remember the time when my history teacher told me about the good old times, where everyone had a coal or wood stove. It was so nice outside that you couldnt even breath normal and everything was dark from the soot (i hope you get the irony). Your real cars are the coal and wood stove from that time. Its time to move on to cleaner cars too. Sure they are still not perfect but give them time and you will see they are the better solution in the future and even now. Maybe in some years even you will then realise how short sighted your thinking was back then.
Never seen such spin on how awesome something so ridiculous is.
“Nobody does this better than Tesla” sure, but it is still really bad..
Yeah. This is definitely serving the metal idol instead of the car serving you. Sitting in a freezing car, with just seat warners, spending an hour of warming batteries with "waste heat" before even pushing a charge.....running back to another car with the cabin heater on to survive the night....running down the charge on the other vehicle.
What a Doc Brown nerd fest. We saw Tuesday that the cars went down to zero, just parked overnight.
he intentionally did not turn on the cabin heater for the test. you could just sit in the car normally. and normally it would precondition. and also gas cars in freezing weather need to use engine block heaters and stuff.
His closing comments didn't age well. An extreme case but it would never happen in the real world.... Chicago Chicago that toddling Town.
Any severe cold situation involves vehicles left alone and untethered to freeze up. His method on trips, also discussed, running down in his skivvys to plug in his car at the hotel charger to prewarm it....that doesn't work when the hotel is full and there are two chargers.
Or you have to dig the car out...or wait a week for a plow
For those who live right near by the supercharger, if you even turn on your tesla cabin heater on, it will start heating your battery as well, so just make it toasty before driving to supercharger and it will be way efficient charging than just showing up cold 🥶
Heat is a byproduct of most electric generation. Park near an electric plant.
I just get gas, takes me 5 minutes MAX if that, and i’m gone. over 500 miles.
@@johnnylego807 this is about doing it in -20° F. At that temperature, your vehicle is not going to even start in the first place unlike a Tesla and you're probably going to have to get an engine block heater as well as an oil heater and something to jump the vehicle and a battery blanket as well. Your rubber tiles will be dented in the area that touches the ground so you'll be going to get very low speeds until they warm up anyways but the beauty of hybrids and electrics is even in this crap of the weather they'll start and move
thanks for the tip!
@@NadeemAhmed-nv2br Lol yea ok, here in Canada I've parked my vehicles overnight at below -30C without a block heater and was still able to start them no problem. If you have an old shitty battery obviously it'll have problems starting, I guarantee an older battery in a Tesla is going to give some problems in the cold as well. I'd rather not screw around having to wait for the battery to warm up or charge the damn thing while i'm getting frostbite, and this is after messing with that charger that looks like a pain in the ass to deal with in freezing weather.
FYI: My R1T sat outside since Wednesday in CO. I plugged it into an L2 charger in my garage and it pulled 7kW for ~45min before it put anything into the battery and went up to the full 11kW.
That's like while filling you tank with gas every 5 seconds you pull out and spray a seconds worth onto the ground? What a waste of ''Paid'' energy
@@yabbadabbadoo8225 it’s not wasted.. it’s used for a heater which needs to be anyway. It’s like saying your starter motor is a waste of energy
@@SurtistuffOf course it is wasted energy. And when you compare with the starter motor, you should now that if we have a pretty beefy starter motor that is 2 kW. Then you use around 1 Wh to start the car....
@@Surtistuff Why can't they build a battery that's devoid of this process? It still seems a massive waste of power? 5kw for 45 minutes just to ''Heat'' the energy cell so that it can ''Hold'' a charge?? Times this by 1 billion some day and thats1000's of power plants just keeping batteries ''Warm''??
Combustion provides this energy for ''Free'' in gasolene motors.
@@yabbadabbadoo8225 Try starting your deep frozen combustion car, it probably won't even straight up start. Then in cold countries you start and idle the car to warm it up, and in that process you wasted a lot more energy than 13500kJ. In fact every gallon of gas you burn later down the line while driving produces at least 59400kJ of waste heat assuming you have a 50% efficient engine. I doubt your engine does anything close to that
As I sit here in New Zealand in shorts and 25c, I appreciate the sacrifice made for this video Kyle. Well done mate 👍
Just you wait till April comes around , mate...
Summertime
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 might get as cold as 3 degrees centigrade overnight for a couple of days in Auckland…
@@Telcontarnz Lucky you then.
Ditto from 37c Melbourne
I don't know much about Tesla's, but I learned so much from this video. I know now to take special precautions to keep battery warm when temps drop really low. Therefore, for those with garages should install their own chargers so they can charge it the night before with their own Tesla charger. The software applications for the diagnostics on the screen looked quite amazing.
Pack temperature is one of the most informative pieces of data for an EV driver to understand vehicle performance and it’s a shame most EVs don’t show it. I keep a min/max pack temp display on my Tesla and Rivian dash to understand how the car will drive and charge.
How did you accomplish that? (Engineer nerds want to know!!)
Or not lol
How to get park temperature in tesla?
@@avvarutheja th-cam.com/video/wOxW9qmr6-Q/w-d-xo.html
@2QRh6g1I thanks, I wish tesla could provide this info directly from their interface, but that video is great to get lot of information from car.
Thanks for running this! I am an engineer responsible for thermal systems on BEV with a large auto maker. Really helpful to see how the competition is doing.
Which car has best battery thermal management? Also, do you have any influence to improve public CCS charging?
Ccs is trash
Thanks for your hard work on EVs.
Replying to Barry, ALL OF THE CCS CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE DECISIONS ARE BASED ON THE THERMAL TESTING LAB TECHNICIANS OPINION.
@@eletrohitsbr I have not had a CCS charging problem for over 7 years.
Other good tip for overnight roadtrip stops, besides preconditioning, is to supercharge ON ARRIVAL, when the battery is warm from driving (and the pre-conditioning), and get a decent charge while still warm... vs letting it cold-soak overnight like this, and trying to charge in the morning.
And/or if you have destination charger, let it charge & stay warm all night plugged in... or you can mix both and supercharge a moderate amount on arrival, and finish charging overnight.
Then pre-heat the cabin (and battery!) while plugged in before leaving.
re the frozen latch: isn't there a recent feature to not engage the charge latch in freezing temps, so it doesn't get frozen/stuck? I've seen folks complaining of "latch not engaged" warnings in very cold temps, I think it is intentional? Made worse by a clogged/frozen plug end too, but...?
My early M3 LR RWD has this software feature to not latch the cable when below freezing. However it is for L1/L2 charging only. Supercharging would not be safe without the cable latch.
@@georgepelton5645 Thanks for clarifying/confirming!!
All of that vs stopping at the pump...... Convince me it's worth it. I'll take my 6.2L Denali any day.
@@fyrefitrt2 bigger the car, the smaller the penis
@@fyrefitrt2 I'm sure with your Denali when it's been sitting cold in -14 for two days straight you just crank it up and floor it without any warmup. Good way to damage your engine. Not to mention when you start getting down to -15 to -20 F you almost need a block heater for an ICE. An EV doesn't because it uses a minimal amount of power in the battery to keep it safe. The colder it gets the more energy it will use. With an ICE the colder it gets then you better have a block heater.
With a Tesla you simply set a timer from your phone or the car to begin a battery preheat at a certain time in the morning. You can do it 1 hour before you leave the house or whatever. Just like warming up your car. It would melt the snow and ice off the windshield for you and the battery will be conditioned when you come out and jump in.
This video is only a sensational example of what would happen if you didn't preheat the battery to show how long you would need to wait. If you are driving your Tesla in -14 then the battery will be warmed up and you won't have to wait when you stop to charge. Only when it's been sitting for days cold soaking. No different than an ICE engine like yours.
Who besides me is watching this in 2024 after hearing about the new from Chicago
It’s so funny especially with everything he says in the first 3 mins about not charging in the cold being nonsense
What is new? Sorry I’m from Denmark
what news is that?
@@oddjobsandrandomprojects also don't forget - they let their teslas run on next to no battery power too. That's like me complaining about how shit my Buick Regal Grand Sport is, because I ran it to mere fumes and moaned that it wouldn't start in the cold.
This Test is a bit Dodgy, who preheats one car and goes sit in another warm car 🤔🫣
I mean what happens when you try to preheat your Family inside the car & Batteries at the same time, is there enough eat for both, Cabin & Car 🤔 what happens if you only have a rwd motor and is - 20 can the Single Motor preheat car & cabin
When I drove my Model 3 cross country this time last year, when it was 0F basically as soon as I unplugged one supercharger it started preconditioning for the next. Very neat to pull into the next one and get normal charging rates.
That battery has enormous thermal mass. Enormous. Loved watching this full-geek test😊
Can you explain thermal mass?
@@SimRan-ur5nl Thermal mass is the capacity material have to absorb, store and release heat.
Your question was great, because its not clear why a enourmous thermal mass would do any good for that EV without good gravimetric energy density and low thermal inertia.
That EVs battery could have great thermal mass but still be useless after one cold night if it had high thermal inertia and even more so if the nominal energy would be low.
@@SimRan-ur5nl The specific heat depends on the material, but for batteries with copper foil, steel, carbon, plastic, some solvents and the cooling water, it should average about 0.45 Jules/degree C per gram. So heating a 770 kg battery + 20 kg water from -20 C to +20 C would take: 0.45 * 40C * 790,000g = 14,220,000 Jules of energy. dividing by 3600 seconds in an hour and by 1000, that is about 4 kWh to warm the battery up, or 5.25 kW for 3/4 hour. (assuming the battery and cooling system is perfectly insulated, which is isn't)
@@philipriesling3897 you can just answer the damn question, people like you make me sick
Its thermal mass would be very low aside from chemical reactions it will reach ambient temperature quickly.
Try dealing with 50+ Teslas in these conditions all self-draining due to the cold and only having 2 Superchargers powered by a generator at your disposal for charging them… I dealt with that working at Tesla in Minnesota 🥶🥶
I hope you make the tesla owners sit next to the generator exhaust the entier time they charge. You should rig up some seats that if their ass leaves, their car stops charging. they should have to huff that beautiful exhaust gas the entire time they charge so they KNOW where this comes from.
What facility do you run? Gas station? Hotel?
Yikes, why do they have to be powered by a generator?
@@Pythonzzz there wasn’t a way to have a grid connection fast enough
Generator? Are you sure?
That sucks!!!
Even with the preface, the comments are still loaded with bad takes.
This was an extreme test that basically doesn’t happen in the real world. Any amount of driving to a supercharger will speed up battery heating. Blasting cabin heat to the floor will help heat the battery a bit and not slow down preconditioning. The car used mains power to heat the battery when plugged in, so the percentage of charge lost between parking the car and charging it was a software temperature correction, not actual energy lost. In the real world, you tell the car where you want to go via the nav system and it figures out and handles the rest. The car will charge at full speed even in the cold if you drive 50 miles or more before the first charge stop.
I’ve been driving EVs for 12 years. Cold weather charging is not a problem.
Took my 2020 model 3 to MN over the holidays from CO. Once the outside temps dropped below 5 degrees, the efficiency really started to take a hit, and even when navigating to a supercharger the battery wouldn't warm up enough to take a full power charge right away. Also encountered a LOT of snow/ice clogged charging heads, especially in Central Minnesota, as well as cables that had been knocked down by the wind, then filled with snow.
We traveled from northwest Ohio to Chicago on I 80/90 in northern Indiana. Many Supercharger cables were blown down in the wind and snow covered. It is unfortunate that the Supercharger stations don't have shelters over the units and the units don't have automatic heaters and sitting on top of the shelters that don't have a combination of solar panels and small wind turbines. We have a way to go yet. There is so much opportunity nonetheless.
@Stephen Orr I think they need a more secure latching system. Hope they get enough feedback to consider it.
@@kdjorgensen98 I agree with that whole heartedly. I have trouble with these Superchargers putting the handle back into the correct position all the time. Not intuitive for a klutz like me.
A has car is way better!
@@Frank-sy3li was that a gas car or a has-been car? sorry.... but not better for everything, just some things, and EVs are in their infancy. Many of their negative quirks will be worked out over the next decade or two. The government should not force folks to move to EVs, but eventually EVs will be so compelling and cost effective that most folks will want them. If I want to sleep in my car (Tesla Model Y) when visiting friends/relatives or traveling, I can do so comfortably with no fear of dying from car exhaust while the car stays warm in the winter or cool in the summer overnight. Most folks wouldn't care about that feature, but it appeals to me. Making sure I can always charge the car takes a little planning, but not much effort and I find it fun. Folks how prefer their blackberries and flip fold phones from the 90s over modern smart phones will probably continue to prefer gas cars and I'd bet that gas cars, at least used ones, will be available in sufficient number to scratch their itch for several decades, though eventually they may become subject to increased tax and registration fees as the government or even HOAs will be pushing for cleaner air in places where folks like to enjoy the outdoors.
When connected to a Supercharger you can turn on the cabin heater to heat the battery quicker. It'll pull juice from the charger to run the heatpump (or PTC heater depending on model) and then reuse that heat for the battery coolant loop as well.
Not anymore, now it's 10kw of heat to the battery, 7 from motors, and 3.5 from heat pump...
If you want heat inside cabin, it'll be deducted from what the battery get
I was wondering why the car didn’t run the heater and dump it all into the battery pack as opposed to futzing with trying to make heat with the motors. Or at the very least include “turn on the heater” as a tip along with “next time navigate to the supercharger”. Really cool test though.
@@theonetruestripes it does, new ones uses 3.5kw for each motor, and heat pump, for a total of 10+kw of heating...
@@theonetruestripesTesla’s use heat pumps now. So to heat the cabin in conditions like this, it would use power to generate heat in the motors, and then use the heat pump to move that heat into the cabin. So that would mean less heat going from the motors into the battery in this case.
So who is right guys I don’t know who to listen to.?
Great video. I know the BMW i3 uses similar telemetrics to regulate and pre-heat for charging. They just never thought people would want to see any of the data involved, but it is all available via detailed OBD data viewing.
Damn, that's gonna increase the queues at the superchargers in the cities on a cold winter morning
Nah, most people will be smart enough to use the Pre-conditioning features. All it takes is 40 Uber drivers who have no clue how to drive the car to ruin it for everyone, though.
@@IsaacNewsome
yeah, true enough.
@IsaacNewsome you'll be waiting behind some of them
We found this out when heading home from FL to IA winter of 2020. Stayed overnight at a supercharger hotel. But parked with 30ish % overnight. Plugged in in the AM and it took an extra 45 min. Personally I suggest just charge it to 80% on the SC while the family is checking in the night before; But it’s a personal preference I suppose. I really Appreciate these style of videos !
Better reason to charge the night before instead of the morning.
I woke up in the morning to a dark hotel.
Mile away the supercharger also lost power along with the gas station it was located at.
Since I charged the night before no issue.
Or set it to warm up for 45 minutes to precondition the battery and cabin before everyone is up and packed and checking out.
@@flipadavis - why spend the additional time in that town, multiplex. (preference ≠ logic, it doesn't have to be)
@@kadmow It's not additional time if you set it to warm up while you are still in bed and not up, packed and checked out yet. If you are planning to get up to check out at 6am set your car in the app to turn on and run the cabin heat and precondition the pack at 5am before you even wake up.
Right in the phone app there is a 'schedule' category where you can set the departure time and a button to select to precondition which means to set the climate and precondition the battery. This is exactly why this app exists. No need to do like in the video and go out and sit in the cold car for 45 minutes. If you have access to the weather forecast you know how cold it's going to be.
@@flipadavis : sorry - I must have misunderstood, not having stayed at a supercharger hotel (they don't exist in my "neck of the woods", I didn't realise that you could park all night in a supercharger stall.... kind of relegates it to merely a charger - slow charge overnight is definitely better for battery longevity.
Thanks for bringing issue of “no home charger” and “rely on supercharger” issue to attention. I don’t understand why can’t they just add a “Pre-condition” button to controls instead of having to defrost the entire cabin, which is a huge issue when you are in ice cold conditions unplugged.
Great video
I’m in MN and we just had a stretch of sub zero weather. I charge overnight in an underground heated garage. Standard 110 outlet. I have a 35 mile commute with the car parked outside for 10 hours. Took about 10-12% each way instead of the 8-10% during non sub zero. Also I lost about 7-8% while parked outside all day.
I found that I would get better overnight charging if I navigated to the super charger near my townhouse then plug in at home. This way my battery was already warm
I charged to 93% overnight instead of the normal 83%. During the 10 day stretch of sub zero I “topped off” at a super charger twice - because I was actually making a Target run and they have Super Charging. I’m new to EV with my 22 M3 LR. I love it. Like I mentioned before I just charge with 110 and haven’t had any problems. One thing to note-make sure no moisture is in the charging port. It throws my GFI on the wall outlet. Had that challenge when we had a warm wet snow and everything was slushy. Some snow got in the port.
Thanks again for the video
As a person with Reynaud Syndrome I am always amazed at people whose hands never get uncomfortably cold at any temperature.
Love these testing videos Kyle, can't wait for the arctic circle roadtrip video
Just a few more days and part 1 will be up on Out of Spec Motoring
Awesome! Can’t wait.
Reinforces what you have been telling us - on-route battery pre-conditioning is a really important feature for an EV.
Tesla has said as much as a 25% reduction in charging time with proper pre-heat procedures. #Wow
Glad I don't have these problems with my ICE vehicle! Never will. 😃
@@rkeith4442 I preheated (and charged) an ICE car for 30 minutes last week at -20C (-4F) because it would not start (weak battery).
Replaced the battery in those temperatures because I needed to drive the next day at -30C (-22F). Pre-heated the car for 2 hours for that trip.
@jamesphillips2285 My ICE F-150 never had that problem! I replace the battery ever 3 years or so, well worth the money.
Kyle and Alyssa, thank you so much for making this video! You have no idea how close to my situation this is. I live in South Lake Tahoe, where we have a SuperCharger at the Hard Rock, an Electrify America station, and slower EV Go chargers. The wait during a holiday week is insane for them. My HOA does not allow EV home chargers, so those public stations would be my only options. I have consulted with my electric company, and the grid can only support one 11kW charger for the entire duplex. That's including my replacing the electrical panel to double my available amperage, which would mean my neighbors would be stuck with what they have. I might be able to get the HOA to change its rules, but the grid where I live simply cannot support wide-spread EV charging.
After test-driving Tesla, Genesis, and BMW EVs, I wanted an i4 or iX, but with a two-year wait, I bought a gas car. I had entertained the thought of a second car Model Y, Fisker Ocean, or fantasy Rivian R1T, but your videos confirmed it's not viable for me while I live where I currently reside.
We have just had several feet of snow, so my car sat for 2 days. I dug it out today and started it, but the roads were still too bad to go anywhere. Even if I charged an EV to 100%, I would lose considerable power before being able to go back to a charger. I would lose power warming the car and pre-warming the battery. The traffic from my home to the charging stations is impossible with the accidents and stuck vehicles of tourists. I would likely be waiting 5 days- not 2- to go back to the charger. Even the solar roof of a Fisker Ocean wouldn't offset the cold weather power loss. Parking is a tandem hassle. The whole point would be to have a vehicle with a lot of ground clearance so I wouldn't just leave the car for 10 days until the snow melted. If I did, I'm sure it would be an ice brick. Even as a second vehicle, an EV doesn't make sense where I live.
EVs are awesome if you have a garage to prevent extreme temperatures or at least a home charger. For the rest of us, hopefully the electrical grid can be upgraded. Eventually, I hope that solid state batteries will provide the answer...
??? *HOA can't tell you that you can't have an EV home charger! That's like telling you you can't have a refrigerator! SUE them, take them to court, you'll win hand down. Usually HOA wins on stupid things, but they won't win on this because EV home charger is the future. All new homes will have built in EV charger.*
@@radicalrick9587he also said the electrical grid in his area could not accommodate him having a charger, even if he upgraded his home electrical panel. Although I believe you are correct about the hoa can’t prevent you from getting one, but then you make yourself a target for them to get revenge on you.
It’s beyond me why ANYONE would even consider buying into a hoa neighborhood.
I will never purchase an EV and your video helped convince me I've made the right decision.
As an old leaf owner I eagerly await the cold soak leaf test. I imagine it'll be similar but start charging earlier at like 1 or 2kw. We saw -10C recently but home charging and cabin preheating made it a non-issue. I don't think the battery even got to the blue section of its temperature gauge.
Awesome, very nice. Really nice. Can't get cable to plug in. All while waisting energy to only heat the battery. Great environmental protection 👍
Cool video, worth mentioning when Bjorn Nyland did similar tests he found out driving the car first for a bit helped a lot with heating it up faster.
Yep.. the motors can only run so much to waste heat, the way to make them run more is to.. actually drive.
So true. One of the issues I will run into since I’m an apartment dweller with no garage and I live in the Northeast corner of the US
Running interior heater should not reduce heating to the battery. Might actually help to start charging faster
Cool experiment, thanks for braving the cold to do it. Questions: How much did it cost to heat up the battery before it was able to charge? If you'd have run the HVAC to keep the car warm while charging, would that have added to the cost or time to get to 90%? That's probably a more realistic scenario, as few folks in this position would have a second car to hang out in to keep from freezing. Thanks!
@oscarpaisi4037
Wouldn't want to forget a bunch of bull 💩 you just made up.
@oscarpaisi4037 huh?? Lfp battery Tesla says charge to 100%. Yes, below 20% and it won't precondition battery for SC but it will charge fine. You probably own a 2005 Civic.
It would have been amazing to see the "scan my tesla" info live during the video. Looking at the battery temps and motor temps would be great. Time to get a new adapter?
Love EV's and love my Model 3, but winter road trips are definitely a limitation compared with ICE for now.
We see it a lot in Sweden every winter when EV drivers are queued up outside every charging station for hours on their way to the mountains. In the Summers EV’s seem super fun and functional, but for winters diesel is definitely king here
Thanks for sharing. Me too, I've got nothing else to do but sit in a frozen vehicle and watch the battery charge.
I think you will encounter this in the real world. It’s on the news and if it’s to cold some EV cars won’t even move or just stop on the side of the road. Electronics and batteries don’t like cold and the last few days where I live it’s been -11 at night and a high of like 10 Fahrenheit. Good ole V8 starts right up and is warm in 10 minutes.
That happens with the battery in your fire breather too.
@@johnphelps2941 My "firebreather" starts at -40 no issue, and then it doesn't just quit and fail to restart when I'm on the TransCanada Hwy. My buddies Tesla fails this way weekly in the winter.
Garage kept, no doubt. Lead acid batteries don't like cold weather either. But you won't hear about this problem when sodium ion batteries take over. That's already started. The dinosaurs are going extinct. ICE is dying. we'll see if your kids thank you for climate change.@@brentlloyd7908
@@johnphelps2941 yeah but every 3-5 years I need to replace it and it costs me anywhere from 100-150 dollars. Not 17,000 and I can put it in myself with a couple of tools and 5 minutes of my time. Really no comparison.
My gosh. The best EV channel out there.
I keep saying "wow" when i see some of Kyle's video ideas, but this deserves the "wow" whole heartedly. Great job of recording this video in such frigid temperatures and of course Alyssa for helping with the recording. When you can see your own breath while INSIDE the car, its got to be COLD. Kudos to you both. Keep it up - looking forward to the Leaf videos and I'd be interested in another CCS cold storage type test if you do it, but as Kyle said, this is really edge case testing.
I live in Fairbanks Alaska we recently hit -41 and I have seen minus 71 in the 14 years that I have lived here. I was extremely interested in seeing what your video reflected. I am impressed with your expertise and knowledge of the Tesla and really appreciate the information that you shared. I would definitely like information as to how efficient the Tesla ran at the negative temperatures. How much did it diminish the distance you could travel. Look forward to seeing more of your videos
If I were you, I wouldn't trust ANY fully electric vehicle to get you across the Dalton Highway - even in summer.
Thank goodness for fossil fueled motors.
I just read of a story where a brother and sister rented a tesla from Orlando to Kansas when they hit the cold weather, they had to charge 6 times in 1 day
I am in Canada and I can tell you that on a negative 30 day my range will be half. It’s not so much that you use more to travel it’s that it is heating the battery and keeping the cabin warm. So normally on a nice day with my spirted driving I could get about 400kms in the winter it’s around 200- 250. I am debating trying a few things to improve that. I am thinking insulating the glass roof might help. I might try this next cold snap.
Keep in mind that if you have your Tesla plugged in just like your regular car you can pre heat the battery and interior before even leaving your house. So you can get a bit more range doing the preheating while still plugged in. The coldest my car has been was -42 and even at that temperature it still worked. But I would say just like a gas car if you hoop in on a -42 day and don’t pre heat or have the block heater going. It’s not going to be great for either gas or electric vehicles.
Oh one more little note I don’t believe there is a good way to get to the main land of the US from Alaska at the moment. Definitely not on the super charger network for sure. I feel like it could be done but not in the winter I would say and difficult in the summer. Definitely not a seamless experience.
@@davidkinch2100 ona boat... but is the car chargers 4 electric on the ferry ride. N u can still go by land.
Wow. Sounds like a dream. Being able to add only a couple of hours to drive home from work.
Yeah. Most current EV owners will tell you how much they love their EVs and that's because they are delusional enthusiasts and owning an EV is basically their hobby. These people are literally sitting around in a freezing cold car so it will charge faster and it took over 45 minutes before it would even start charging. Lol.
@@michaelhill6451 They're too busy patting themselves on their backs to argue with you.
@@oddjobsandrandomprojects Yeah, that’s really great for long distance driving. The last time I filled up my ICE vehicle it took 4 minutes.
Listen to how nice tesla is given him data as his ass is frozen
Homecharging is unheard of for you right?😢@@michaelhill6451
In the extreme winter, ABC, per Bjørn. Even trickle charging will provide a bit of heat to the pack overnight, though L2 and garaging is preferred.
Watching you look out the frosted fogged up windows and seeing your breath made me really appreciate my internal combustion engine; thanks for the video.
Tesla needs a cast-iron wood-burning stove for heating :)))
He could have just turned on the heater though, and been warm in a minute or two. At those temperatures that takes an ICE forever.
@@Adriaaan It only takes my Expedition 5 minutes to warm up enough to put out heat. And I've owned and operated ICE driven cars that put out usable heat much quicker than that.
If you can't make it 5 minutes without heat, you should probably stay inside your house anyway.
@@Adriaaan And he would have filled up his tank and driven off in 90 seconds instead of sitting so long it warranted a video. EVs are a friggen joke and everyone knows it.
@@Leester-70 Sometimes, I 'Like" comments sarcastically.
I’d love to see you do a deep freeze charging station check in Harlem at 2am in the morning….
In the U.K.?!………should be fine. 😉
Stay safe!! Pew pew
Or any other neighborhood of poor to middle class .cause we kno unless ur armed or from that hood an kno the people u are not gonna wanna hang out to do a deep charge cause the only charge u gonna get is the one police slap ur attackers with or u for defending ur self
it looked like he was near the projects
@@dennissmith7214 You don't have as many maniacs...
'That pretty much will never happen in the real world...' LOL!
Except it does. Currently we're in negative temps once again, and almost every day over the past 2 weeks we've seen negative temps. Same goes for last year as we had a 2 week stretch of nothing but negative temps.
It happened to hundreds of people in Chicago , it won’t happen in the real world ( my a$$ ) !……
People are dumb, they don't know how to condition the battery.
@@leerman22What type of battery, and how to you condition it?
@@MassBoost It's a battery heater, you press a button, that way you don't have frozen electrolyte capping the power draw or charge. You do use some energy in the battery to heat itself like a couple space heaters of power draw worth.
Kyle and Alyssa, your last two “sub zero” episodes illustrate why Out of Spec is the definitive American EV channel. Keep warm and have a merry Christmas with the dogs!
Would have been interesting if you had ScanMyTesla running on it. You could have watched all the internal temps of battery and motors, coolant flows, etc. Also the heat pump on the newer cars may not provide much help at these very cold temps.
P.S. You did mention that as I was typing this. ScanMyTesla is a really valuable app for us data nerds. You can see everything that is going under the skin.
We have a 2013 Model S P85 which is primarily parked in an unheated, detached garage. In winter, its pretty common for us to have little to no regen due to a cold battery. If we know we're going to drive somewhere, we'll do two things about an hour or so before we leave: we bump up the charge level to get it to start charging (which is really just heating the battery), and we'll turn on the cabin heater. This usually will get half or most of our regen back, if we give it enough time.
The battery pack represents a fairly big thermal mass, takes time to change its whole temp!
Sounds ideal!
What if you only had street parking too far to plug in, what would be the solution then?
@@DigiDriftZone you mean like in a city? Where they say they’re the best option?
@@smelltheglove2038 Yes, around half the population in London don't have any way to plug in at home, so no pre-conditioning possible and public chargers are 80p / kWh ($1 / kWh). So you're looking at $70 + 1 hour to charge with pre-heating? - that's more than double per mile vs diesel if you don't value your time and don't count the cost of that costa :(
@@DigiDriftZone Not own one unless it can plug at work, or home.
I can’t imagine owning a Tesla in the winter without having a home charger. Absolutely great car when you can wake up and it’s charged every morning, but dealing with charging a cold car and having to wait for your car to precondition… nah.
Me too
Did you not watch or listen? The Tesla will condition the battery and charge normally, you'd have to deliberately not do this to have a problem...
@@bellshooter I live about 20 minutes from a charger. I have forgotten to plug my car in overnight, navigated to a charger so it was preconditioning the whole way, and it still didn't charge at full speed and told me my battery was too cold. I'm guessing if you live in the city and drive one block to a charger your battery is not going to be very warm when you arrive at the charging location. So no, it's not quite that simple.
@@RionPhotography definitely why if they want EV adoption to move faster they need to start installing level two chargers at street parking and in parking garages so people who don't have garages can charge overnight, I'm licky enough to have free L1/L2 charging ar my work and L2 at the parking garage I park at but really on street publoc charging needs to become a thing asap
You can precondition the car without it being plugged in
Was the car at 35% when you dropped it off? One of the things I wonder about is whether the car is able to estimate its remaining power when it's frozen like that.
@@Cupid_Stuntcar literally doesn't use any battery if it's not being used.. what are you on about? 😂
@@777jrg extreme cold and extreme heat rob power.
@@777jrg A Tesla in this cold will use up to 1-2% of battery per day in this cold while sitting there, I know because I own one
We are in NJ this morning, 9F plugged in and saw 48kW initially. As battery warmed up saw 100kW. Usually see 145kW in warm weather. This on a new EA charger. So etron does pretty good hooked to a good charger. Range 155 @100% charge.
Imagine vehicles with no battery heating. No other have preconditioning on the way to a charger.
THANK YOU TESLA !!
Sirs, I have a degree in physics and really thought it would be fun to have an electric car. I see videos like this where it takes 40 minutes or so before the car even starts charging. Range is like 180 miles on EVs in the winter. You sit in it freezing your backside off because you don't want to use heat because you will lose range. My present car is a VW Passat diesel. Starts in 3 or 4 seconds even when -25 defrees f. I honestly drive slow for the first 5 minutes or so in very cold weather. It gets 50 mpg in the winter and 55mpg in the summer. It takes 3 minutes to refuel. It's hard to do a trip somewhere past range/2 because you are sweating the recharging. When we have nuclear fusion electric power, a really good electric distribution system and better means of storing electric power then it makes sense. Green people may want to understand what the carbon cycle is also.....
yeah diesels👌
We were down to 15 in the DFW area, so I thought I would drop by the 250KW S/C near the office and top off. I usually get murderously high speeds there but not this time. I was only able to precondition for about 4 miles, so I never saw over 75KW. Lesson learned. Only had to sit for about 45 mins 30% to 80%, took about 10 mins to actually get juice to the battery. A small price to pay, IMHO, for teh privilege of driving my Model 3.
I run into a similar situation, but I charged up before I parked the car, so I had about 60% charge when I started. I think it really helped to run the car for a hour in the morning to heat up the battery enough to start a charge. I still had to wait 10 or so minutes to start charging the first time, but much less time then if the car was completely frozen.
OK ... Who has an hour to spare in the morning ?
@@cathie9614 You can set the car to warm up by a certain time.
You guys freaking rock. Your videos are so informational it’s ridiculous.
I have an interrupting electric meter on my home for the AC in the Detroit metro area, because our electric grid has brown outs at peek times . How lets everyone plug in their EV after work and see how that works 😂
Great video. Reminds me of a ski trip I took with college buddies where the next morning, only one of the cars (all ICE cars back in the day) would start so had to use that one to get the other engines to start. Oh and one guy had borrowed his brother's truck and for some reason, the coolant antifreeze was bad and it cracked the block.
I dont own an EV, however this is eye opening for me thanks for your good work, please stay safe! :)
Great video! Thanks for doing this test for us. I'm in Atlanta, GA and just had a small dusting of snow last night (usually happens once every year or two lol) it didn't get above 32F the past few days and my car didn't charge at my house. This taught me a lot! Heading to the supercharger now with preconditioning on 👍🏻
I also live in Atlanta. I have never had this problem. If you leave it plugged in at home in the cold it will never get cold soaked since it will just use a tiny bit of electricity to keep the pack warm. Even if you don't keep it plugged in and it does get cold soaked then go into your Tesla app and select 'schedule' category and then schedule a departure time in the morning and then select 'precondition'. It will turn on and run the climate and precondition the battery ahead of that departure time. I've never even had to do that in Atlanta though.
If you try to plug in and it won't charge then just either turn on the car and leave the heat on for 30 min. to an hour and then retry charging or go into the app and do the departure 'precondition' thing. Or set the nav to the nearest Supercharger to you and it will begin to automatically precondition the battery for charging even if you aren't driving. Whatever system you use, even sitting hooked up to a Supercharger, the pack will only use 5 kWs to precondition. So might as well let your battery warm itself up for 30 min to an hour. That will only use 2.5 - 5 kWhs of energy which isn't much.
Edit: The reason your home charger isn't able to charge is that it is likely trying to put more than a 5kW rate into the pack which I guess is the limit Tesla has set to protect the pack. Most home L2 chargers are in the 7-11 kW range. There is a manual setting on your Tesla screen under charging where you can select the AC max power which you could set lower to like 20 amps so it would only allow just under 5 kWs from your home charger into the pack. Then it would charge, but just slower until the pack warmed up. The Supercharger has more sophisticated software that communicates with the car and throttles back to 5 kW. Your home charger doesn't so you have to manually set it to 5 kWs or 20amp/240V.
@@flipadavis way too many variables to drive an electric car, stick with fuel type car , or a hybrid, unless you want to be stranded in the cold ~ its just that simple . .
@@kingdommusic5456 I've driven 100,000 miles across two EVs. Drove my Tesla with 3 people cross country stopping at dozens of sights. In one day that Summer we went through and stopped in Death Valley and then past Mammoth up through Tioga pass and into Yosemite where we stayed that night. Drove through a record heat wave in 121 degree temp days later coming back through Barstow.
Had no problems.
@@flipadavis Yes, you had no issues, but it seems you are very well versed in the operation of your EV.
Unfortunately, maybe one person out of every five (probably a very conservative guess) will be as well versed in the proper operation of their EV. That being said, the manufacturers needs to understand that not every owner will bother to learn all of the nuances, and proper operation of their EV.
On the other hand, when ICE driven cars first hit the scene they weren't as simple to operate as they are today. As late as the late sixties and possibly the early seventies it wasn't uncommon for a vehicle to have a manually operated choke, which the operator had to have a basic understanding of in order to operate. If one didn't know how to operate the choke, they would never get a carbureted ICE started even in mildly cold temps. And that's just one of several things that one had to learn in order to operate an ICE in cold weather. So its a learning curve, but unfortunately we are being pushed to adopt a technology that isn't ready for the big time, yet. I feel that if we were to wait ten more years the battery technology would probably be at a point where it would absolutely, make more sense to buy an EV. However, as it stands I'm afraid all that is being done by pushing EV's on everyone before they are practical will do nothing but create a stigma for EV's that will take a long time to fade.
Tell the people in Chicago how great EV's are.... good luck
Funny the people of Chicago keep voting for those that will one day force them to buy EV's.
Yes preconditioning is very important. I supercharged in only 10 degrees warmer, but I navigated to the charger and it went from 15 to 80% in just 30 minutes
If you preheat the cabin from the app or set a scheduled departure time it will also preheat the battery. If you live in a city as you described no need to wait at the supercharger - just set it going before you leave. The app shows an orange heat symbol as well so you know its working.
Will it preheat the battery and cabin in extreme cold conditions if it is not plugged in?
@@timgurr1876 It doesn't need to be plugged in, but obviously you need to have the battery capacity to heat it up.
@@timgurr1876 It will - I think it will turn off if it goes below 20% but you can turn it back on again. Tesla have also just added a 'pop door' function in the app to open the door when the handle is frozen.
The battery will likely push a bit more voltage as it heats, so I think Alyssa is technically correct that's it gained a bit of extra energy courtesy of the heat; the same was lost to cold and is now returning.
Yes
Electric cars are awesome... for some people. About 5% of cars being electric might be perfect, additionally 20% of plug-in hybrids might be ideal, and the rest of the vehicles should be ICE. Outright banning anything with ICE, including PHEV is insane on so many levels it makes my brain hurt.
Great video! Thank you both for enduring the pain of that cold weather to give us all this extremely good info! 🙏🏼
Kyle you are truly the electric Yeti, and Alyssa you are the SheYeti, great job and extremely interesting, love all the beyond crazy cold temp videos. I myself will never plan on road tripping in any freezing temps but great to know how it may go.
Yeah, I'll just keep enjoying filling up my 22 civic for 30 bucks once a week. I have enough stress in my life.
18 Accord Twice a Month (aprox 30mile round trip to work and back )
my car is full in the morning and when i leave from work. Never have to use time at the pumps :D
Running the cabin heater would aid in warming the battery because the rest of the frame of the car would warm the battery some. It's really important to do all the heating you can.
And it wouldn't have slowed charging anyways since the car would just draw extra from the charger to run the cabin heater
In Western Canada, -20 C to -35 C is normal during the winter.
Yeah, I think they must have made some changes since this guy got his. My 2023 Long range Y does great in North Western Alberta Canada. Starts fast charge almost instantly once I plug it in. Drives fine in the cold, one thing i will say is that it does disable regenerative braking charging occasionally for the first few minutes driving in the cold.
@@christiankrause1150, one main thing being the heat pump. His earlier Model 3 doesn't have one.
Good reason to stay with gas.
@@davehenderson6896 why? christian just said it works flawlessly in the Canadian cold
It takes a hour to charge your car, and you lose range when it gets really cold.@@reahs4815
Dude!! Really strong video! Thanks for braving the elements and running the tests. I’s so glad i went with a Tesla. And big thanks to Alyssa LOL no way I’d have done that. Merry Christmas to you both and keep making videos!!!
I would love to see this same test but with a heat pump car.
HVAC off ... it won't matter.
Wow… do gas users really believe that gas comes from dinosaurs? 😂 Hilarious!
Quick preheat on the way to the supercharger and you are ready to go when you get there. But good test though. 👍
LUDICROUS
This happened to me on accident while on vacation. We got in late and I thought I would just charge the next morning since there was a free charger a couple blocks away. BIG MISTAKE! The battery cold soaked overnight and took forever to charge on Level 2 charger. Luckily we weren't leaving that day so there was no inconvenience. Lesson learned, now I always charge while the battery is still warm from driving.
Remember from the app to precondition your car before you get into it and go to charger that will fix the battery
@@pureluck8767it's pathetic that anyone needs to worry about that after spending 70k
@@johndodo2062 why is it pathetic that you have to read the owners manual I don’t think Mercedes-Benz owners or BMW say that
So the car tells you when to charge it, what route to take, f$#k that👺
@@davetuscano5939 Pretty much, you have to plan your route, if you're driving across the country. Basically, you're going from charger to the next charger. My brother has a Tesla in CA. The interior is cheaply made (to save weight, thus extending range). He drives it at 65mph. Never speeds. Intermittently use the A/C. He parks it inside his garage, right under his condo. I fear it might burn down his place, & the next door condo. The wife can't drive for shit, so she parks outside.
My hat's off to Alyssa for being so willing to go out at 3 am in -20 temps! I don't know many wives who would do the same! I couldn't get my wife to get up and go soak with me in hot springs pools only a few steps from our room! (check out Pagosa Springs when you get a chance, the pools are awesome!)
Wtf? You're implying that women are weaker than men. How odd
'Dead robots': Chicago's extreme cold knocks out Tesla cars
"Extreme cold" in Chicago be like ~0°C, while in Russia the pretty average temp during winter is -17..-28°C
And there is no big problems about "dead robots", lol, even on -40°C cities.
@@BANDERAZZ07RUSKeep telling yourself that. We're experiencing the same issues in Iowa as they are in Chicago.
have you looked at chicago weather before commenting ? its -25c right now @@BANDERAZZ07RUS
The media is playing it's usual games, bad mouthing Tesla while cheering for green. For whatever reason Tesla isn't left enough for them. Go Elon😊
No problems. Precondition first. 😂
Thank you so much for the very real-world test and your dedication. I don't own a Tesla but this is another piece of info I need to make a decision. Really liked what I saw here. :)
what decision LOL...
Cars are junk, things a joke... worried about mpg? hybird.
Kyle what dedication, the real world information you provide is fabulous!!
Wow! Really interesting test! I was astonished, that you could open the doors that easy and that the windows moved! 😉
Thank you for the test!
You know when the window works I am sold
Real world. Tell that to someone Evs SUCK stop 🛑 with the shit INTERNAL combustion is the greatest invention Of all time junk the ev
About 100 things I don’t have to worry about with a V8!
Yeah you only have to worry about 1000 other things.
OK, so perhaps it's my age, but I grew up here in Canada and I would never leave the driveway unless ALL windows were completely cleared off. Just a safety thing to have clear and unobstructed visibility. Just a thought.
With respect to EV ownership, managing the battery in the winter is definitely part of the paradigm shift the owner would need to go through. Totally agree with the charge-up-before approach for the very thing that you experienced. In many ways, cities still need to better understand the need to provide even simple level 1 and 2 charge points for people without driveways or garages. There are light poles on every street, so it's not like on-street charging is impossible. They just need to work out how to make it accessible and fair.
In northern Canada, parking lots had outlets for ICE vehicles so that people could plug in their block heaters on cold days. Its not a far stretch to do something similar for EVs.
No one cares bud
@@ccgb92 it is also the law
@@KarlDahlquist irrelevant. only thing wrong with teslas is: ain’t got no gas in it.
@@ccgb92 begone troll
Just a note, the cars with heat pump (I think thats an older one without) will heat up the battery quicker. The two (or one) motors will run but instead of putting it into the battery directly it will go to the heat pump which can extract more heat. It should be **a lot** faster. In case of the LFP battery you typically need 45min in Germany cold wheather with heat pump for 40°C in the battery or around 1.5hours without the heat pump.
If you can it would be nice to have the exact same test with a car with heat pump too! :)
Yes, completely agree. And yes you are correct that car does not have a heat pump, they were introduced to the Model 3 in the 2021 models. I had a 2018 Model 3 without the heat pump and now have a 2021 Model 3 with with the heat pump and the difference in speed of heating the battery is very noticable. With the 2018 plugging into a supercharger with a cold battery it took MUCH longer to charge than the 2021 under very similar conditions.
@@ZebHallock Yeah, maybe we can get Kyle to scientifically test this for us. The difference really is big, but I'm really interested in how big.
Looking forward to a video about that.
@@kruemelfelix Next cold snap I can see if I can get someone with an older Model 3 to park it at a supercharger overnight with my new one with a similar state of charge and we can do a direct comparison the next morning. Doesn't get as cold here as where Kyle is though. Last night it got down to 7F (-14C) which is extremely cold for this area. Almost never goes below that, but still can do a valid head to head comparison.
At those temps the heat pump is not going to be any more effective. It uses other methods to augment the heat pump
@@dorvinion That's why I said that the heat pump does in fact not use the surrounding air for heating but the waste heat generated by the motors. The Octovalve is the key point here.
It would be interesting to see the results with LFP batteries.
LFP batteries can't be charged when frozen and since they have more mass per kWh they will take longer to warm than the small li cells in Teslas.
I thought all 3s were lfp?
I haven’t had this issue in Mach-E which is LFP in the -20 to -30
Talk about making the case for avoiding EVs! I'm over 70, and I guarantee that I would never want to deal with this situation. A few minutes pumping gas, and a few minutes later I'm on the road and toasty warm.
Most people who have these cars don’t do this, either. They just charge at home, cold or not, and they wake up with all the charge they need. On road trips, it’s never this slow as your battery is warm while driving. This temp is also pretty extreme. These videos are interesting, but they aren’t very representative of typical owner experience.
@@house9120 In everyday situations, sure. Charge at home, commute to work, come back on the same charge. But that also means that EVs are fundamentally more limiting that gas cars when it comes to long trips/spontaneous trips. You'll literally have to theorycraft how you'll get to your destination, including chargers, expected weather, charger availability, time alloted, etc - something you don't really have to do with gas car, simply because gas stations are so common after decades of constant gas car usage.
@@fortissears5388 there can be some additional planning, sure. I’ve taken a lot of EV road trips though and the car navigation system largely takes care of the planning, finding charging stops needed to get to your destination and calculating how long you’ll need to charge there. Many of my stops are sub 15 minutes. We can expect this experience to improve a lot as charging speeds increase, charger availability becomes more dense, and navigation planning becomes more sophisticated. I think the future of this is pretty bright
ah the 98% problem, where people really care about the 2% very rare edge cases, but put a second priority to the extra benefit of the 98%
Well done video. I'm just trying to figure out why you think your cold test is a little extreme and isn't a real world test. I'd call it a simple cold test that most people above the equator can expect their EVs to face. Hybrids are currently the best option, you still save on gas but you're free to get in and go no matter the temp ( not counting real extreme cases).
Still enjoyed the info and sorry you had to test what Tesla should have. All Tesla owners should get a paycheck at this point for all the RnD they do for the company for free. Being charged money for something you're helping to design is mind-blowing. Stay safe out there.
Really cool that your wife went with you. She's a keeper for you. My wife and I both do stuff we are both interested in too. Totally awesome, and thanks both of you.
Such a cool video. Love your and Alyssa's dedication in making these videos.
Makes me think of the days back in the late 60's to 80's when I was driving air cooled VWs and minivans.....this where when we got into the car which had been sitting in an unheated garage and drove somewhere just around the time we got to where we were going to park the car the the engine started to throw a little heat of course by that time our toes and hands were frozen and we had been scraping the ice off the inside of the windshield for the whole trip. Imagine now all the progress we've made😂 We even had a reserve gas tank lever. I can just see somebody hiking down the road to get to a charging station to pick up a spare battery instead of a 2-gallon gas can🎉
Respect for the dedication because that was crazy. That being said, I would probably do the same in your situation. I had my own experiments going on in the 15° temps we had in SW Louisiana an hour from the Gulf of Mexico.
Kyle: we should go out in the middle of the night at the coldest temps we can manage just to see what would happen when we try to charge this thing.
Alyssa: K, I’ll film.
Alyssa, the true ride or die.
..."Alyssa: K, I’ll film"...from inside the warm truck!! 🤣👍
Gasoline cars are getting to be old school but in a life and death situation they have more of a chance of saving your life providing you're not in the ditch somewhere
It’s like going back to the Stone Age. My gas car would be warmed up already. Blowing hot air.
You run your car off of gas? Do you use like a a gas bottle for that? I've only had petrol and diesel cars but I know what you mean
Well those closing comments certainly didn't age well. Parking the car and leaving it to turn into an ice cube....NOBODY IRW WILL DO THAT.
Well a T nerd you are but a social scientist you are not.
*Respect you guys, and I Love your and Alyssa's dedication to actually freezing your A$$es up for testing a real-world scenario, Thank you very much, really appreciated !* !
This is the most ridiculous display of enthusiasm for something that is mind boggingly ridiculous. I can’t imagine traveling with this car through the northern states or Canada between November and March.
Well other than that one specific instance of traveling cross country it does very well. Most people don't drive long distances in the cold.
Half an hour later, a diesel would have been full, toasty, and 30 miles away.
Even in cold temperatures my diesel warms up quite fast.
There's always one isn't there.....
You realise this is a video on precisely NOT what to do.
In reality, it would take as long as unplugging your car from your home charger and getting in to drive away, with a full "tank", while you're still warming up your diesel, with whatever you last had left in it.
I'm not against either option, but have a little more critical thinking.
@@benwhittle7204I live far... And I am not the one who stop to recharge everywhere. I did a 1100 km trip and had to stop for a total of 13 minutes to fill up and pee. I can eat on the go. Still not sure how many electric compromise were on the way but for sure they were annoyance in the 169 and 175 going fast uphill and braking downhill... To each their own but saying you are going farther and faster in electric is a lie.
@@northman77 that's not what I said at all and you entirely missed the point, but then that's not really surprising.
Chicago residents didn't seem to watch this video.
I really like your videos, it informed me of the convenience of certain EVs over others and the road trips really show me the superchargers are the best thing
Very interesting video. One has to really be committed to EV’s to endure this experience of charging in cold weather. What about those who have to park on the street and are not able to plug-in overnight? Your summary of how impressed you are with how the Tesla handled this heat warm up cycle before charging for 45 minutes and then took another 1.5 hours to charge (if I understood correctly) seems to me a little underwhelming. For those of us who have to be at work at a prescribed time in the morning I think it becomes quite problematic. You were fortunate to have another vehicle to stay warm in. 99.9% of people don’t have that option and would have to endure the really cold temperatures waiting for the car to be able to heat the cabin. You charged to 90% and then warmed up the cabin. The charge level was already at 85% when you were departing the charging station. It would interesting to know how far home you had to drive and the state of battery charge when you arrived. In the Minneapolis area in -10 to -15 F early morning temps a radio announcer of a local station indicated that her Tesla’s battery quickly depleted as she was driving to work. In fact the battery drained to zero to the point the car stopped and would not heat the cabin. She had to call someone to come out with a portable battery bank to charge her car before she could get to work. All automobiles have trouble in extreme cold temperatures, especially for those who cannot park in a garage overnight. It is a common situation in Minneapolis, a reasonably sized metropolitan area. I know I have had to have someone jumper start my ICE car when I had to leave my car parked outside. I have seen times in Minnesota where is has been -20 F on Christmas morning, -30 F on New Year’s morning, and then stayed below zero for over two weeks. If one cannot plug-in their EV, it’s going to be really hard to “drive” anywhere. Not against EV’s, but they may not be the “ideal” mode of transportation that we are being led to believe. There simply is not enough charging infrastructure to support extreme cold weather conditions. Nor do I see it my responsibility to pay for such an infrastructure through taxation under the premise that the world is going to end in 20 to 30 years, if we don’t force EV’s on the population. Let’s keep politics out of the free market. Let consumers decide what they want to drive. Let there be real truth about the advantages and disadvantages of both ICE and EV vehicles. If EV’s are the next mode of transportation for the world, let them evolve as the first cars evolved from horses and carriages.
Think You got it wrong, he could press a button on his phone app and warm up the car but he chose not to do so for this experiment
Thanks for the Nerd Level 9000 videos. Great stuff!
"This is a very extreme case; something you'd never run into really in the real world - I'm just doing a test." Well, that part didn't age too well. And more importantly, the real-world scenario was worse than this one. How many people in Chicago had to get their Tesla's towed to a dealer? I think WLS Chicago said at least 10 from one charging station alone.
Here this would be every morning if you do not have a hot garage or connect it to a charger, we have long cold winters and distances that is long (longer then an EV can drive)... And the corrupt crazy bandits running this country said that from 2025 ALL sales of new cars that was not pure electric would be banned... They have now postponed that for now when they realized 2025 is in a few months and people have stopped baying EV`s 2 years ago.