New energy vehicles use outdoor power in winter

Norway has one of the world's highest EV adoption rates. Tests in this Nordic country found that, on average, electric vehicles lost on average 18.5% of their official driving range in cold conditions. There are also ways to reduce these efficiency losses.

Abstract: The driving range of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is greatly influenced by ambient conditions, especially at low temperatures. To address this, the battery and the passenger cabin can be preheated using energy from the electric grid. This is regarded as a strategy to reduce the energy consumption of these vehicles in winter.

This is regarded as a strategy to reduce the energy consumption of these vehicles in winter. For long trips, preheating can indeed be translated into a slight increase in the driving range. However, for short trips, the amount of energy saved from the battery does not outweigh the additional energy demanded from the grid.

In Norway, most EV owners have adopted the technical and logistical best practices for optimizing driving electric in the winter, and thus have maximized the performance of their vehicles in frigid temperatures. For example, many drivers plug in to a charger and turn on the heater for several minutes before a trip.

Meanwhile, in EVs, the battery must actively heat the vehicle while also powering the drivetrain; most of the additional energy consumed by an EV in cold weather is used to heat the cabin. When the cabin heater isn't used, fuel economy in EVs drops only by about 8% in cold weather, and range drops by only about 12%.

However, because driving on electricity is cheaper than driving on gasoline, cold weather can increase the costs of driving gasoline vehicles more than the costs of driving electric. A recent survey of EV drivers in cold regions in the United States showed that about 20% of respondents had prior concerns about driving their EVs in the cold.