trailerbikecamper wrote:
The 400 mile range is great, but I'm going to use a typical winter work day for me as an example.
I leave home at about 5:40 in the dark. Many times it is either raining or wet snow. So I need headlights, wipers and heater. I then drive about 70km on a twin highway to work. The truck will then sit for about 10-1\2hrs with out the benefit of being plugged in, since there is no plugs available, for any vehicles. I then drive home in the dark, also requiring heater, headlights and many times wipers.
My question is how do the additional loads affect the range? If I get left even once on the side of the highway, I would be done with EV's.
Hope the following helos. Please feel free to ask more questions.
I'll give it to you straight up.
I'll put up a picture of our display from our present EV (first generation leaf). They have a range of 180 KM so you'll have to extrapolate for something newer like a Tesla model 3 with a range of 500 kilometers.
Generally speaking, lights and wipers draw next to nothing compared to going down the road at 100 KMH. However, the HVAC (heating/cooling) can affect your range by as much as 35 percent...or at least for our cars.
If the car is cold at lets say minus 10 ( a cold morning where we live) the heat pump/heater will draw as much as 3 KW for the first few minutes. Cars are a small space, they heat us quick. Within about 5 minutes the draw seems to drop to around half of that and 5 minutes later it drops to about half again. We use our seat heaters more and just keep the car at around 18 degrees as we usually have jackets on and it gets hot in the car quick. We also always use our heated steering wheel.
Our longest return trip is never longer than about 110 KM so our car is fine for us. Our daily commute is shorter. Buy what suits your needs and use the worst case scenario. Electric cars are not the panacea for everyone but for those of us who they work for they are a huge improvement over gas/diesel vehicles and we could never go back. I spend about 6 seconds twice a week keeping my car charged. Beats the heck out of hanging around gas stations. And thats just one of many reasons we would never go back to liquid fuels.
The pic below shows what the climate control uses and what the other systems use on a cold morning. The first 5 minutes would have been 3 times the power for the heater. You can also see what you would get back if you turn off the HVAC. Course then you'll be cold. :)
Hope this helps.
