‘EVs have an advantage in that when they’re not moving, they’re not consuming electricity for drive purposes,’ says John Stonier, past-president of the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association
Electric-vehicle drivers need to be as prepared as other drivers to endure winter traffic delays, such as the chaos Tuesday night that left some commuters stranded on snowy Lower Mainland highways for up to 12 hours.
However, they likely won’t have to worry about exhausting batteries while sitting idle in the snow, so long as they’ve kept their drive batteries charged, according to experts.
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“EVs have an advantage in that when they’re not moving, they’re not consuming electricity for drive purposes,” said John Stonier, an EV charging consultant and past president of the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association.
“Whereas an internal combustion engine is continually draining your tank.”
An EV will draw electricity from its drive-pack battery to heat the car’s interior, but Stonier said manufacturers have adopted state-of-the-art heat pumps to minimize the amount of energy used.
Most modern electric cars are equipped with batteries with the capacity for 50 to 80 kilowatt hours, which allows you to make a rough estimate of how long it would take to run down a battery while stranded in traffic, according to Walter Merida, an engineering professor at the University of B.C.
“If you’re doing nothing else but running a heater, you could run a two-kilowatt heater for 25 hours” on a fully charged 50-kilowatt battery, Merida said.
“I would say that unless you’re looking at being stuck for more than a day, I don’t really think that that’s an issue, Merida said. “Unless your battery, of course, is low to begin with.”
Merida said cold weather does slow down the chemistry in EV lithium ion batteries and reduce their performance, but typically at temperatures colder than minus-10 C.
The U.S. website Consumer Reports quoted a study by the Norwegian Automobile Federation that estimated cold weather can reduce an EV’s range by about 20 per cent.
However, manufacturers have designed cars to keep batteries heated to help counteract that factor, Stonier said.
And he added that EVs manufactured for Canada are fitted with features such as heated seats and steering wheels, which can help reduce heating demand.
“(Just heating seats) is much more efficient than heating the entire interior of the car,” Stonier said.
Merida said EV drivers need to be as prepared as any other driver by dressing for the weather to start with, keeping their cars charged and by carrying emergency supplies such as blankets and candles.
“Bring a source of heat that doesn’t depend on your car,” Merida said. “Even a candle can be helpful in those situations if you’re really stuck.”
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