Shownotes
In this episode of The EV Musings Podcast, Gary discusses the impact of cold weather on electric vehicles, focusing on battery performance, heating solutions, and practical tips for driving in winter conditions.
He explains how cold temperatures affect battery chemistry, leading to reduced range, and offers insights into efficient heating methods, including the use of heat pumps and heated accessories.
The episode concludes with essential tips for maximising EV performance in cold weather.
The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.
Links in the show notes:
Episode produced by Arran Sheppard at Urban Podcasts: https://www.urbanpodcasts.co.uk
(C) 2019-2026 Gary Comerford
Support me:
Patreon Link: http://www.patreon.com/evmusings
Ko-fi Link: http://www.ko-fi.com/evmusings
The Books:
'So, you've gone electric?' on Amazon : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07Q5JVF1X
'So, you've gone renewable?’ on Amazon : https://amzn.to/3LXvIck
Social Media:
EVMusings: Twitter https://twitter.com/MusingsEv
Instagram: @EVmusings
Octopus Energy referral code (Click this link to get started) https://share.octopus.energy/neat-star-460
Upgrade to smarter EV driving with a free week's trial of Zapmap Premium, find out more here https://evmusings.com/zapmap-premium
Mentioned in this episode:
Zapmap
The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence. Zapmap is free to download and use, with subscription plans for enhanced features such as using Zapmap in-car on CarPlay or Android Auto, and discounted charging across thousands of charge points. Download the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store or find out more at www.zapmap.com.
Global Women in EV Day
This episode is supported by Global Women in EV Day, an international movement founded by Gill Nowell to celebrate and accelerate the women driving the EV transition. Launching globally on 10 February 2026, the campaign brings the sector together around visibility, equity and action. More info: gillnowell@hostedbygill.co.uk
Transcripts
Hi I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. And on the show today we'll be looking at driving your EV in the cold weather.
Gary Comerford (:Now our main topic of discussion today is the weather. Now, it's fact of life, especially amongst the English, that the weather is a topic of conversation in just about any circumstance. It's a neutral topic that can be broached by anyone and with anyone. A bit windy today, Vicar. sun's cracking the flags where I am, I wouldn't say it was cold, Your Majesty, but I saw a couple of brass monkeys walking around looking for spot welders. That sort of thing.
But if you've got an electric vehicle, the weather is one of those topics that opens up a whole can of worms. And that's what we're going to be discussing today.
In particular, we're going to be discussing the cold weather and what that does to electric vehicles. One of the best little EVs out there at the moment is the Kia e-Niro. Friends of the podcast, Knoll, Warren Phillips and Andrew Till all drive them. And one of the reasons they like them is because in the height of summer with a bit of judicious driving, they can cover 300 miles from a reasonably small battery. Now that's phenomenal efficiency and if you're looking for a second hand EV, an e-Niro can't be beat. But once the temperature drops, that range can disappear quite quickly. It can drop down to 230 or 250 miles. So why does cold weather do that to an EV? that's what we'll be looking at today.
We'll cover little bit about battery chemistry and what the code does to it. And then we'll move on to cover tips and tricks for extending your range in an EV in the cold.
Time for a little science.
A battery basically consists of three different parts of the anode and the cathode, are the positive and negative terminals, and the electrolyte, which is the bit that sits between the two. Now electrons pass from one terminal to another via the electrolyte. Usually the anode and cathode are made of something nice and solid, such as carbon or iron or manganese and cobalt, but the electrolyte is a soup of chemicals which is almost literally liquid.
And we all know what happens to liquids when they get cold. That's right, they freeze. Now, the chemistry behind that is somewhat more complicated than I've said here. If you want a more detailed discussion, then corner battery electrochemist, Dr. Ewan McTurt, next time you see him and ask him about it and you'll get chapter and verse on it.
But basically one of the issues with cold is that it makes the electrolyte hard to pass the electrons through and this reduces your power which reduces your efficiency which reduces your range and it's a simple link between the three. So how do you stop this happening?
Well the short answer is to warm the battery and the easiest way to do that is to pre-condition the car by either getting in and switching it on using the app if you've got one or letting the inbuilt timer warm the car depending on which option your vehicle has. Now this sucks energy from the battery and it starts the process of warming it up. It won't heat it up a lot but it will do enough to offset some of the impact of the cold weather. Now some vehicles such as the Teslas and some of the newer Kias have a battery pre-conditioning function. This specifically warms the battery up, ostensibly sets it up for maximum charge speed, but it warms the battery as a result which achieves the desired effect. Another way to warm the battery is to actually charge it, especially if you can rapid charge it at a high kilowatt rate. This heats up the battery, gets the electrolyte moving, so plug it into a nearby charger for a few moments and enjoy what happens to your range.
Now the third way to heat it up is to actually drive it. Now I did a journey recently in my Polestar 2, leaving home with a temperature around minus 3 Celsius, which is 28 Fahrenheit. And as I left, the range of the car was about 160 miles with the state of charge I had. Now I wasn't at 100%, nowhere near and the efficiency was showing up at around 1.8 miles per kilowatt hour. Now as I drove it and the battery warmed, the efficiency started to increase and within about five miles, it was up to three miles per kilowatt hour. The range was still around 160 miles, even though I'd driven some distance. But by far the biggest drain on your battery and hence your range while cold is switching on the heating, which is kind of required when you're driving somewhere in the cold, am I right?
But why is that? I mean, it doesn't drain the range in an internal combustion engine car. What is it about an EV that causes cold weather heating to be an issue?
Well it's all about efficiency. Now let's go back and look at the internal combustion engine for a moment. As Roger Atkins is fond of saying, the four stroke cycle of suck, squeeze, bang and blow has been around for ages. Air and petrol mix is sucked into the cylinder, it's squeezed together to increase the density, the spark ignites pushing the cylinder back down and the exhaust gases are sucked out as the cycle starts again.
Now the key thing about these exhaust gases is that they're actually quite hot, as is the rest of the engine with these little explosions going on hundreds or thousands of times per second.
This is all contributing to the inefficiency of the internal combustion engine.
If you're very lucky and everything is well oiled, well sealed and brand new you might get an efficiency of around 25%. In other words, every pound of petrol that goes into the engine, only 25p is actually used to push the car forward. The rest is lost in noise and heat.
But the good news for ICE cars is that this waste heat can be harvested, passed through a fan and piped in the car to warm it up. So the inefficiency of the internal combustion engine is actually the one and only benefit of an internal combustion engine, meaning you can leverage the waste heat to make the car warm. Because the electric motor is far more efficient, there's very little energy lost to heat, which means to heat up an EV, you physically need to create that heat somehow.
And this is generally done in one of two ways. Firstly you use a resistive heater and take energy from the traction battery to warm it up. Think of this as a more efficient type of one of those old one or two bioelectric heaters that your grandma used to have. The battery warms the heater and the heat is passed into the car. Now the other way is via a heat pump.
Now heat pumps are like little miracles in modern science. They can take a small amount of energy and convert it into a much larger amount of heat.
As an example, one kilowatt hour of electric energy pushed into a resistive heater will result in around 0.85 kilowatt hours of heat being produced. The rest is lost to inefficiencies in the system. But one kilowatt hour of electricity used in a heat pump can create three or four kilowatt hours of heat because it's much more efficient. As a result, heating a car with a heat pump uses less energy than heating the same car with a resistive heater. Now, quick sidebar, a heat pump feels like a magic, but in reality it's not. With a resistive heater, you're physically creating heat from electricity and electrical resistance. With the heat pump all you're doing is taking heat that's already in the air, and there's always heat unless the temperature is absolute zero, and using electricity to gather that and compress it down to the point where there's enough to warm the car.
What's worth remembering is that if your car has a resistive heater like mine, you'll lose more range when you turn it on than if you're in a car with a heat pump like the top model E Nero's. The difference can be quite stunning. Now my old ID.3 did not have a heat pump installed and in winter when I switched the heating on, the range on the GOM, the gasometer, would drop by 12 or 15 miles instantly.
But the car I had prior to that, the Kia Soul, did have a heat pump and turning on the heating would only drop around four miles off the range. Granted, these vehicles had completely different sized batteries and ranges, but the difference could be quite startling. Now, this is no different to if you wanted to heat your home using electric heaters. They're quick and they produce a lot of heat from a small unit, but they're less than 100 % efficient and they'll take a lot of energy to heat that air by using electrical resistance.
I'm adding a link to a site that has run tests on various EVs to see how the range is altered when the heating is turned off. Check that out in the show notes.
But it's worth remembering that the loss you'll experience is related to the battery chemistry, the efficiency and the type of heater, the temperature you set your car to and the length of time you keep the heat on.
But to close, I want to give you a few tips to minimise the drain on your battery from heating the car. These hints come in the form of two words, heated accessories. Now I've been driving for over 40 years and none of the cars that I previously drove had the ability to heat the seats and the steering wheel.
The first electric car I got, aforementioned Kia Soul, had both of these and I realised immediately that these are lifesavers and I now won't consider an EV unless it has heated seats and a heated steering wheel. In fact I found out recently that the Polestar model I drive has heated seats both front and back, which is very nice. My nephews and nieces appreciated that immensely. Now the reason I like these is that you can switch them on and you can use the localised heating to keep yourself warm.
If you're in the car by yourself, this is often all you need unless it's really, really cold.
But ideally you need to couple that with something we've already talked about, is preheating. Before you get into the car, ideally while it's still hooked up to a charger, set the car to preheat. This will heat the car up before you get in and if you're on a charger, it will do so without draining any power from your battery.
When you get into the car, you'll find it's nice and warm and you can keep your body and hands warm using the heated accessories we've already discussed.
Now, another side note here I learned recently, that there are cars out there or vehicles out there that can either charge your car or run the heating while you're at a rapid charger.
The example I learned about was the Chevy Silverado EV truck in the States. It's got a huge battery. It charges at over, well, almost 300 kilowatts, and unless you turn on the heater or air conditioning, and then it drops the charge speed right the way down to around 40 kilowatts. So keep an eye out on your car to see if the charge speed is affected by heating or air conditioning. The vast majority of them will be fine, but occasionally you'll find one that isn't.
So that's driving an EV in cold weather. Did you learn anything you didn't know? Did anything surprise you? If it did, leave a comment if you're watching on YouTube or send me an email info at evmusings.com.
I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. One of the shorter ones I think you'll agree.
If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmusings.com and on the socials I'm on bluesky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at EV Musings where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. So why not follow me there?
Thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon on a monthly basis and through coffee.com on an ad hoc one. If you enjoyed this episode, why not buy me a coffee? Go to coffee.com slash EV Musings and you can do just that. K.O. dash F.I. dot com slash EV Musings. Takes Apple Pay too.
Now regular listeners will know about my two ebooks. So you've got electric and so you've got renewable. First one of those has had a recent update. You'll see it with the bright red image on the front, just like I'm showing on the screen here. Both of those are 99p each or equivalent, and you can get them on the Amazon Kindle store.
Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as the links in my regular evening musings newsletter and associated articles. Now I know you're probably driving or walking or jogging or in the shower or washing the car but if you can remember and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes please, it really helps me out. I did go out and go in and have a look recently at some of the most recent reviews. Thank you very much for those who took time to do that for me.
Now if you've reached this part of the podcast and you're still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me at musingsv.beastguy.social with the words, some like it hot. Hashtag if you know you know, nothing else. And thanks as always to my co-founder Simon. He's been very quiet this week. Hopefully he'll be back again soon. Thanks for listening. Bye.
