I was chatting with someone today about this. He tried to make it an "aha" moment, as in "Aha! See how impractical EVs are!" I pointed out that equivalent or similar cold weather accomodations exist for ICEVs, it's just that he's used to them and/or they're invisible to him. For example, fuel (especially Diesel fuel) is formulated differently in cold weather. And some far-north states and countries need block heaters - to keep their ICEs warm with electricty, so they'll start with electricity!
In a properly designed EV, cold worries shouldn't be a big deal. The EV's battery should have thermal management, maybe even a heater for extremely cold weather operation. In fact I would argue that EV battery thermal managemetn is elementary compared to the complex, computer controlled millisecond-by-millisecond adjustment of fuel mixture, spark timing, and even valve timing in ICEVs. Every ICEV driver takes that stuff for granted now, but in the days of the Model T and its ilk, all those adjustments had to be made on the fly by the driver. By the time I was aware of Things Automotive, spark advance was handled by centrifugal and vacuum devices. However, I'm old enough to remember (and to have used) manual chokes. One day you young whippersnappers will get to say something similar. "I remember when you had to check your EV's battery temperature before charging. Can you believe it? In fact, in my first EV, I actually had to put WATER in the batteries once a month." David Roden EVDL Administrator http://www.evdl.org/ _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
