We're reading news stories that dispel the myths about electric vehicles, especially in cold weather, but it still may be difficult to buy a Ford F-150 Lightning without a reservation.
At the Alexandria Echo Press--and papers across the Forum chain-- there's Alex Derosier's Driving electric in winter less challenging as ranges continue to grow:
ALEXANDRIA, Minn. — In the next few decades, millions more Americans are likely to drive electric vehicles instead of the internal combustion engine-driven ones most get around in right now.
But with public charging infrastructure still patchy in rural Minnesota and the Dakotas and significant battery life reduction in frigid temperatures, many in the region may wonder how practical electric vehicles are during the coldest months of the year.
It’s generally accepted that most electric vehicles can expect to see their range reduced by about 40% when the temperature dips to 20 degrees or below. The issue is primarily driven by increased power draw from running things like heating and the defroster.
With the average range of vehicles soaring over the last decade and improvements to heating systems, the range issue is becoming less relevant by the year. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated the average electric vehicle topped 250 miles of range in 2020.
Newer vehicles in the $50,000 range will top 300 miles on a full charge, meaning a driver will be able to travel long distances even in the coldest of conditions.
Electric vehicle owners Tyler Bundy of Starbuck, Minnesota, and Brian Kopp of Dickinson, North Dakota, say they are often met with skepticism about their vehicles’ performance in the winter. Bundy, an IT network technician who frequently travels to South Dakota and Iowa for work in his 2021 Tesla Model 3, says cold weather should not be a concern if you have the right model.
“(It’s) not as bad as people like to think it is as long as you make sure to preheat the car beforehand — but that goes for any car," he said. "It handles well and it heats up much quicker than my gas car before."
"You could probably get 200 miles of range out of it if you baby it, but in the winter with winter tires and snow on the ground it is 120 miles on a good day," he said.
Kopp, an electric vehicle advocate who lives in western North Dakota not far from the heart of the Bakken oil patch, owns a computer business and spends his days traveling around the region visiting clients. He says cold is mostly irrelevant to his travel planning as his Tesla Model 19S travels more than 200 miles on a full charge in frigid conditions. In warmer weather, it gets around 330 miles, he said.
It was much harder to get across North Dakota in an EV a few years ago before rapid charging became more widely available in the state. Recently Tesla installed rapid charging stations every 100 miles on Interstate 94, opening North Dakota up to more travel.
Jukka Kukkonen, chief EV educator and strategist for Shift2Electric, a Minnesota-based EV consulting company, said electric vehicles have come a long way in the past decade. When Kukkonen’s family started driving electric vehicles in 2012, they had a range of only 73 miles in ideal conditions. As of 2021, an increasing number of vehicles have ranges of 200 or even 300 miles. . . .
Read the rest at any Forum newspaper.
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