With temperatures in Chicago dipping below freezing, electric vehicle charging stations have turned into scenes of despair: dead batteries, crashed drivers and lines stretching out into the street.
“When it’s cold like this, cars don’t work well, chargers don’t work well and people don’t work so well,” said Javed Spencer, an Uber driver who said he had done little else in the past three. days apart from charging your rental Chevy Bolt and worry about being stuck with a dead battery — again.
Mr Spencer, 27, said he set off on Sunday for a charging station with 30 miles left on his battery. Within minutes, the battery was dead. The car had to be towed to the station.
“When I finally plugged it in, it wouldn’t charge,” he said. Recharging the battery, which normally takes Mr Spencer an hour, took five hours.
With more people owning electric vehicles than ever before, this winter’s cold has created a headache for electric vehicle owners as cold temperatures drain batteries and reduce driving range.
And the problems may persist for a while longer. Chicago and other parts of the United States and Canada this week have been rocked by blindingly cold temperatures. On Tuesday, wind chills dropped to nearly -30 degrees across much of the Chicago area, according to the National Weather Service. Dangerously cold temperatures and flurries of snow are expected to linger through the end of the week.
“It’s kind of like, I don’t really want a Tesla.”
Vehicles use more energy to heat their batteries and cabin in cold weather, so it’s normal to see energy consumption increase, Tesla reminds users in a post on its website, where it offers some advice for drivers: Keep the charge level above 20 percent to reduce the effects of freezing temperatures. Tesla also recommends that drivers use the “scheduled departure” feature to register the start of a trip in advance so the vehicle can determine the best time to start charging and preparing. This allows the car to run at peak performance from the moment it starts.
In a bitterly cold Chicago parking lot on Tuesday, Tesla drivers huddled in their cars waiting for a charge.
That morning, Nick Sethi, a 35-year-old mechanic in Chicago, said he found his Tesla frozen shut. He spent an hour in minus 5 degrees fighting the locks.
Eventually, he was able to pry the trunk’s built-in handle open, climbing inside and driving the Model Y Long Range SUV five miles to the nearest gas station. He joined a long line of Tesla drivers.
All 12 charging bays were occupied, with drivers slowing the process slightly by staying inside their vehicles in the sweltering heat.
“It’s been a rollercoaster ride,” Mr. Shetty, who moved to Chicago from Dallas last spring, said of owning a Tesla on a series of brutally cold days. “I’ll spend the winter and then decide whether to keep him.”
A few charging spots down, Joshalin Rivera was also experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse. He sat with the heat blasting inside the 2023 Tesla Model 3 as he removed the battery.
“If you’re waiting in this line and you only have 50 miles, you’re not going to make it,” Ms. Rivera said, gesturing to the line of vehicles stretching down Elston Avenue. He said he saw a Tesla run out of battery shortly after a driver tried to cut the line.
Under normal conditions, Ms. Rivera’s car can travel up to 273 miles on a single 30-minute charge. This week, Ms. Rivera said she woke up to find about a third of her car’s battery drained from the cold overnight. As temperatures plummeted, he spent hours each morning waiting in line and recharging the battery.
“It’s like, I don’t really want a Tesla,” he said.
Why does cold weather drain electric vehicle batteries?
Unlike cars with internal combustion engines, an electric vehicle has two batteries: one low voltage and one high voltage. In particularly cold weather, the lower voltage 12 volt battery can also lose its charge, as it does in traditional vehicles.
When that happens, the EV can’t charge on a fast charger until the low-voltage battery kicks in, said Albert Gore III, a former Tesla employee who is now the executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, which represents automakers including Tesla . and released a leaflet with advice on operating electric vehicles in cold weather.
The challenge for electric vehicles is that the two sides of the battery – the anode and the cathode – have chemical reactions that slow down at extremely low temperatures. This affects both charging and discharging of the battery, said Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
“It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions,” Mr Brouwer said. “You can’t charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no natural way to get around.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
They don’t have these problems in Norway.
As industry insiders study what went wrong in Chicago, some suggest the charging infrastructure may have simply been overcome by the extreme cold.
“We’re only a few years into developing EVs at scale,” Mr Gore said. “This is not a categorical problem for electric vehicles,” he added, “because it has largely been settled elsewhere.”
Some of the countries with the highest use of electric vehicles are also among the coldest. In Norway, where almost one in four vehicles are electric, drivers tend to take measures such as warming up the car before driving to increase performance even in cold weather, said Lars Godbolt, adviser to the Norwegian Electric Association. Vehicles. which represents more than 120,000 electric car owners in Norway.
Charging stations in Norway have longer lines in winter than in summer because vehicles are slower to charge in colder weather, but this has become less of a problem in recent years after Norway has built more charging ports, said Mr. .Godbolt, citing a recent survey of members. Also, the majority of people in Norway live in houses, not apartments, and nearly 90 percent of electric vehicle owners have their own charging stations at home, he said.
Worldwide, 14 percent of all new cars sold in 2022 were electric, up from 9 percent in 2021 and less than 5 percent in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, which provides data on energy security . In Europe, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Denmark had the highest share of electric vehicles in new car registrations in 2022, according to the European Environment Agency.
Cold weather is likely to be less of an issue as companies update electric vehicle models. Even in recent years, companies have developed features that allow newer models to be more efficient in the cold. “These new challenges are emerging and the industry is innovating to solve not fully but at least partially many of these issues,” Mr Godbolt said.
All vehicles, including those powered by diesel or natural gas, perform worse in cold weather, noted James Boley, spokesman for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a trade association representing more than 800 car companies in Britain. He said the problem was less about the ability of electric vehicles to perform well in cold weather and more about the inability to provide the necessary infrastructure, such as charging stations.
With a car that runs on natural gas or diesel, drivers have complete confidence that they’ll find gas stations, so they’re less focused on their reduced performance in cold weather, he said. “If there’s no electric vehicle charging infrastructure, it might be more of a concern.”
Mr. Spencer, the Uber driver, said the economics of driving an EV for a ride-sharing service might not work in Chicago winters. Uber said in a statement that it offers fee discounts for its drivers, but Mr Spencer remains concerned.
“The payment is the same, but the cost to the drivers, with all these extra fees, is much higher,” he said.
Ivan Penn and Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed to the report.
The sound is produced by Tally Abecassis.
