John & Angela wrote:
"Assume heater draws 1kw that would consume 1kwh every hour. So it would take 10 hours of parking lot traffic to consume 10kwh of charge (~40 miles of range). In other words, you'd lose ~4 miles for every hour you're stuck in traffic.
That seems way too little to heat an automobile (with no engine radiated heat to help) in 0/10/20/30 degree temps like a lot of the U.S. may experience during winters ... but I haven't done an analysis.
Our car heater really puts out the heat if needed ... way more when needed than the 1500 watt 120V AC heater we use in the RV when on hookups. 1500 watts of resistance heat is around 120 amps of 12 volt RV battery DC power, which of course means that's it's not feasible to run a 1500 watt heater from an RV's battery bank. I don't know what a typical EV lithium battery bank's output voltage is. I'm pretty sure it's much more than 12 volts DC, but even so the amperage coming out of the bank has to be high to run a resistance heater.
It seems like heating an EV on, say, a three hour trip in Northern U.S. winter cold would be a massive drain on it's battery bank. An air-to-air heat pump will reduce the heating (and cooling) load somewhat, but an ATA heat pump will not heat much at all below about 35 degrees F.
