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.

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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.

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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.

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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?