| ▲ | xethos 2 days ago |
| > especially in models without a heat pump. Oh for- who the fuck is putting resistive heating in an EV?! What brain-dead PM greenlit that pants-on-head jackassery? Was it GM? I can see an American OEM getting that close to the goal line only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Really though, that's just disappointing; I had earnestly assumed every EV that made it to market (in North America at least) would be using a heat pump. |
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| ▲ | dghlsakjg 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Tesla, Honda, Nissan, Chevy, Fiat and Volkswagen have all produced cars with resistive heat in the past decade (not an exhaustive list, just a list that I could find on the first page of search results). So no, not an exclusively American thing. Heat pumps are expensive, complex, prone to warranty claims, and subject to additional regulatory control (refrigerants). Resistive heating is cheap and simple. I'm guessing that the development costs for a heat pump that is good enough for automotive use is well into 8 figures, and would probably take at least a year to fully test. Given all those constraints, it makes a tremendous amount of sense that many cars were built with resistive heating. |
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| ▲ | xethos a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not going to say they're ubiquitous in the automotive world (assuming non-belt-driven like you mention below), but they're hardly brand new. The battery-electric buses in my city have heat pumps, and (IIRC) other cities opted for air conditioning in their trolley-bus fleet over a decade ago. Built to automotive standards is hardly uncharted waters. Though perhaps I'm simply blown away living in a colder climate. Resistive heating if it's only to defog windows in the morning, or similarly rarely used, is reasonable. Resistive when getting started (one major hurdle, ICE -> EV, resistive -> heat pump, at a time) is reasonable. I just thought the automotive world had moved forward more rapidly than it had. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg a day ago | parent [-] | | I don’t know why they made the choices they did. You will note that I said I was guessing at development. The evidence is that engineers on greenfield projects at multiple companies on multiple continents all arrived at roughly the same solution. Make of that what you will. |
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| ▲ | eldaisfish a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | heat pumps are not magical technology. Pretty much every car sold in the West in the last three decades has one. There is only one reversing valve worth of difference between a standard auto AC and a heat pump. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg a day ago | parent [-] | | A belt driven AC powered by a combustion engine is not at all the same thing as a DC electric heat pump system. Yes they both use compressors and refrigerant, but essentially none of the expensive and hard to engineer parts are interchangeable. If that was true you could just replace your broken fridge with a car AC system, or for that matter just use a fridge to heat your house. After all they all use the same “not magical” technology. As it turns out the underlying concept/technology is pretty simple, but adapting it to be fit for purpose is where the complexity lies. If it was that easy the car companies would have done it instead of designing a novel resistive heating system that can only be used in their lowest volume cars. | | |
| ▲ | kalleboo a day ago | parent [-] | | Don't nearly all of these EVs already have DC-powered air conditioning though? Adding heat to an air conditioner is trivial. Where I live, they literally do not sell air conditioners without heat anymore. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m just speculating on why they don’t do it. The real world evidence is that many manufacturers came to the conclusion that designing an entire separate system for resistive heat was a better solution than the obvious step of reversing the cycle on the AC. | | |
| ▲ | kalleboo a day ago | parent [-] | | Yeah that's why it's weird. Maybe the existing off the shelf parts they could plug-in were air conditioning only? |
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| ▲ | MontyCarloHall 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I believe most new EVs have heat pumps [0], but this wasn't common until a couple years ago. [0] https://www.recurrentauto.com/questions/which-electric-vehic... |
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| ▲ | jansper39 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Heat pumps aren't free to run, they still require a decent amount of energy and and on shorter trips resistive heating (which is required for other reasons anyway) is quicker. |
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| ▲ | bluesquared 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes it was GM. My 2017 Bolt has resistive heating. |
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| ▲ | stetrain 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > who the fuck is putting resistive heating in an EV Tesla before 2021. |
