Tesla charging stations become ‘car graveyards’ as batteries die in subzero temperatures, abandoned cars left in the lot after cars wouldn’t charge::undefined
I’ve been seeing this surfacing a lot lately, two curious things:
- Fox - right wing, republican and conservative media known for being against global warming, renewables and electric cars, is the only source of this, all other media link back to Fox
- Only happening in Chicago, people in other regions with the similar conditions report no such issues
#¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It sounded like a bunch of things combined: chargers going down, long queues at the working chargers as people take much longer than usual to charge, Uber drivers with rented EVs who don’t really know about charging in the cold, etc.
So people who did do the right things and turned up at a charger with a warm battery ready to charge found themselves on the end of a five hour queue, and by the time they got a turn their cars were cold so they needed a long time on the charger to warm up before they can even start charging.
If you don’t have enough working chargers at very low temperatures it can all just kind of snowball. That’s not really an EV issue, it’s an infrastructure problem. Strangely, you won’t hear Faux News advocating for more chargers.
I’m not saying an event like that didn’t happen, but as far as we know a single event is blown out of proportions by Fox, it’s reported out of the context all over the world, giving people the feeling it’s a common occurrence
This is part of the ‘EV apocalypse’ FUD campaign.
AFAICT one super charging site in Chicago had more than one non-functional chargers. Why they were not functioning is not known. Quite a few Teslas queued up there in the cold and some of them ran their batteries down to zero. Each regurgitation of the this event has the same pictures of the same cars at the same place.
It is a fact that EV range decreases with cold, and that decrease can be significant. Drivers unaware of this, and who don’t monitor their battery levels, can indeed find themselves effectively ‘out of gas’.
We need much better urban charging infrastructure. Street level L2 charging should be ubiquitous, and that can be easily achieved using the existing street level power line infrastructure.
The problem is teslas. Better designers have non-engine reliant heating systems, that you can use to warm your battery enough to hold a charge, so it can run your engine and keep itself warm.
Teslas dont have this. So when they go cold, they are stuck cold.
You dont need to redesign the charging infrastructure to cater to the poorly designed car. You need to fix the shit car.
Huh? Tesla scvanges heat from all over the car https://youtu.be/Dujr3DRkpDU
And a Tesla is more than capable of charging when left out in the cold and not preconditioned (although it was initially very slow) https://youtu.be/i-c8AUeKs5c
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Dujr3DRkpDU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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You have no idea what you’re talking about
This is easily explained like most anti EV articles.
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Don’t forget about alternate motivations (money and power). We know that there is an extreme amount of money put into tricking the public to not buy EVs from many organizations (Political, gas and oil companies, countries depending on gas and oil production… Etc). Check the source - it’s Faux news… Red flag
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does this make sense, do we have a comparison? Surely this can’t be the first time EVs were cold. I live in Europe, and I know the Nordic countries have tons of EVs. When I was in Iceland during the winter, I rented a EV and it was fucking cold. Mine was fine, they all are fine despite likely worse conditions… This article may have some seeds of truth somewhere but sounds like bullshit.
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I was initially confused but after remembering how Americans cannot science and 0F =~ -18C this made a bit more sense.
My Tesla worked fine through several days of -35C though, but the battery efficiency was a bit shit. I think I spent something like 6-8% just to get the cabin warm, but starting the car or driving generally speaking was never a problem.
from what I understand from the article the problem is that people are queuing and because of long waiting times batteries die.
I honestly don’t understand why people are buying EVs if they don’t have the option of home charging.
Ooh, ok. That makes quite a lot of sense. Especially if one uses the miles/km number to show battery state, people are gonna get screwed by the cold. I changed that thing to percentages pretty soon after I got the car.
I honestly don’t understand why people are buying EVs if they don’t have the option of home charging.
Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense.
From what I’ve seen/heard, people think they’re trying to beat the system by using which ever free network was included when they bought the car. Thus, never charging at home for the 2 free years.
Sigh that sounds awful. Like the biggest perk of evs is no more gas stations
Elektrek did some articles about this. The superchargers are overwhelmed because the grid cannot provide enough power. In the well known tropical paradise of Norway, no such problems occur.
Yeah I live in an area with winter weather. I still want an ev (and a subcompact one at that) but I live in an apartment without home charging so not yet. The wife and I have been discussing a plug in hybrid though basically as a “we need an internal combustion engine now and want an EV later, but don’t want it to be a car commitment away”
Are long waiting times really a thing? Here in Germany even the charging areas next to the autobahn have a maximum of 1-2 waiting cars if at all
The story I heard was that charging is taking far longer than usual because of cold batteries, and people are having to change much more frequently for the same reason, and between the two the demand for chargers has shot up
Why are people buying gas cars if they don’t have at home fueling?
gas cars generaly, from what I’ve been told, don’t use said gas while beeing shut off to keep the car in operational condition. But maybe yours is different.
While the post above yours is a bit of a hot take, the better answer is because it only takes 5 or 10 minutes to refuel your car. Which is why it would be a lot more difficult to use an EV if you couldn’t charge it at home.
The obsession with dick measuring over which ruler you use will always be funny
Do you really have nothing of genuine merit to be proud of? All you have is your thermostat?
Do you really have nothing of genuine merit to be proud of? All you have is your thermostat?
No, that’s it. That’s my whole identity and existence. Spring is coming, send help.
Pretty sad bud
It’sF° is a British unit, stfu alreadyIt’s a rest of the world unit. Fahrenheit is only used by America, the Cayman islands and Liberia
Imagine actually caring. It’s always the euro trash complaining about measuring units.
Ok, sorry for leaving them out. Americans and Brits cannot science.
I thought ev batteries had heating and cooling to prevent exactly this? Maybe they couldn’t heat enough through the cold to get charging again?
It’s people having their battery die while they wait for an open charger.
It was a domino effect. When a car with a cold battery tried to charge, it had to wait for the heaters to get it up to a working temperature. This meant a 20 minute charge became 20 (initial) + 10 (heating time) + 10 (replacing extra power lost to heating). A 20 minute charge then takes 40+ minutes. The next car has the same issue. Once this happens a few times, even cars that were warm have cooled down, while queueing.
It’s the EV equivalent of the petrol panics that happen to ICE cars. They idle in the queue until they run out of fuel. It’s an infrastructure problem combined with people learning the limits of a new technology.
And don’t forget that this constant charging means that the supercharger’s own batteries are probably depleted, limiting them to what they can pull from the grid, which IIRC is 350kW per 4 stalls. So instead of 250kW max per stall, they can now only do ~90kW.
The problem is that charging does not work on Telsas if the battery is completely dead, you can’t even open the doors
Then the battery heating should work from the external energy.
I don’t know why they made it that way, but you have to jump start the battery from the service port before anything can happen
I don’t know why they made it that way,
I think it has to do with Hanlon’s razor
It does. It literally does this.
FUD bullshit
I saw a clip where a car was plugged in but hadn’t charged “for three hours”. If this was one specific charging station then obviously it was having issues - not the cars.
/Tesla owner (until lease is up next month) in Sweden
What are you getting after the Tesla?
They would get towed pretty soon.
The nearest charging station to me (I don’t use it, just noticed) has a car that’s been abandoned since November. Someone even wrote “tow, abandoned 11/1/23” on every window yet it’s still there.
Don’t know if this is a common occurrence or not.
