I pulled into a Supercharger with my LFP-battery EV last winter. The temperature outside was -15C and I had not set the navigator so there was no pre-warming activated.

By the time I had finished my coffe, SoC had gone from 30-ish to 90-ish percent.

LFP tech anno 2023 is perfectly good enough for road tripping in large cars in severe winter conditions. For almost everyone.

>That's a hack, not a solution.

Why do you say that? It sounds like a simple solution to me.

After market electric engine heaters and remote starters are typical for ICE vehicles in cold climates (e.g. Alaska). Not sure why you consider this to be a hack for EVs if its builtin to the battery pack design.

Isn't starting a fire under your engine to get it to start a hack too? I mean they could add a heater to the engine. Wait.

I don't see why a built-in heater is worse than aiming a torch at a car to get it to start. Seems like a major oversight for gasoline cars.

Also, a tiny fraction of the population will ever need to start their cars in Alaska, Mongolia, and Northern Russia. The small city worth of people living in these insane environments can stick to their wood-fueled diesel cars while the rest of the world just uses normal vehicles.

> Does the heater handle real winters, like they have in Alaska, Mongolia, and parts of Russia north of it? Or just European and American "winters" where -20°C is considered hardcore?

It handles "real winters" [1] where large portions of the human population live. [2][3][4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/e4ff248622e19fa303d72e25...

[3] https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/

[4] https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/

Alaska, Mongolia and Russia are extreme edge cases that I don’t believe hold much weight in an argument. It’s like those arguments where folks try to attack solar or wind, “solar won’t work on northern Alaskan winter”. Ok great that’s such a small slice of the population that it’s ok.

Are you a car ad where you're selling the most extreme off-road experience for the person who just wants to go to the grocery store?

Come on man. If you're in an extreme environment, get the tool appropriate for that environment. People in mountain environments tend to have 4WD or AWD cars because it's appropriate. Doesn't mean a non-AWD car is useless.

If you live in the extreme 5%, get something that works there. If you're in the rest of the 95%, other solutions work fine.

Those are quite niche environments. The success of LFP won't hinge on whether it works below -20C, obviously.

You can discharge the battery to power the heaters, at significant cost in energy. The temperature becomes a serious problem when charging (will physically destroy the battery through dentrite formation!), and under very high power draws (battery can’t keep up chemically).

It can be solved, but at a cost, and makes the tech much more dangerous - you could end up in a situation where you freeze to death somewhere more easily in the climates it is a problem.

It’s similar reasons why diesel isn’t a great idea in Alaska and the like too, and people tend towards gasoline even in situations where it is more costly and less efficient (like industrial trucks). It can be mitigated with chemical additives (‘heat’), tank and block heaters, etc. but has similar risks.

I'd agree if you could stick them in the containers discharged, but you can't. This means that even safer chemistry like sodium battery is still hazardous cargo.

There are multiple variables, claiming weight is important is wrong.

Volume is important because the more volume the more space there is for batteries.

Aerodynamics is important because at common highway speeds this is the dominate energy cost. This is a factor that goes up by the square of speed, so at low speeds it doesn't matter but at high speeds it does.

Weight is least important because it has a linear change and is a small factor in efficiency.

There are real safety concerns with SUVs, but their larger size means there is more space for batteries and so they can overall go farther then a Sedan in normal driving despite the other costs.

For me in Europe the Y is a huge monstrosity... I'd want something about 16 inches shorter to get to normal crossover size.

I think he means less power per total overall volume of the vehicle. SUVs are certainly less efficient per mile, but their power requirements don't scale linearly with volume so you have a lot more "extra" room to place batteries, even if it is still entirely within the frame. So you can get away with less space efficient batteries.

Drag scales by frontal area (and the coefficient of drag tends to actually be lower on longer objects), so as long as the SUV is longer than a sedan, it'll tend to have less aerodynamic drag proportionally (rolling resistance scales with weight, though, so you still have to pay that cost).

An observation is the amount of power needed is proportional to some log of size and weight.

> Charging is the problem.

Which also occurs while driving, whenever you're decelerating.

Fusion is one of those things that will probably not be done in my lifetime (the hype cycle on that has been forever, remember cold fusion from U of Utah?). I'm much more optimistic about solid state batteries.

If by here I meant planet Earth I think it is well qualified. Yes, they aren't using self driving car tech for ice trucking during winter down from Purdhoe Bay yet (another form of goal post moving), but the biggest challenges have already been solved and only capital and societal barriers remain.

Yes it was that plus iirc another by Nissan as well. One site reported Chinese are walking back on some of the more optimistic claims and now it's 2030+ not next 2 years. By then I guess Na ones will be old news.

I too felt Japs were taking EV quite casually pushing all others but I wouldn't underestimate their ability to move once they decide that's what it is. They have the same concept as China, move as one nation but much higher tech depth

Btw anyone ever heard of those fuel cell ones? Toshiba hyped it like you slot in a fuel cartridge and have months of use etc.

Toyota does have a conventional BEV, so they can do it if they want. They just don’t seem to be enthusiastic about it.