Jalopnik / Go Media always is one for clickbait titles, but as per Rule#5, I’m not changing their clickbait title or adding my commentary to it.
The actual article is about how various EVs are down 30% in range due to this summer heatwave. Teslas included.
Small ev owner here, definitely noticed a drop in range but that’s less to do with driving temperature and more to do with charging temp.
My car charges at work on a 120v outlet. I live in the Dallas Texas area and lately we’ve been seeing around 110 consistently. This means my car has to run an ac compressor more frequently for the battery. I check on the car every day at lunch (people also plug into the same circuit and pop the breaker) and noticed today a 10% drop in usual state of charge.
This is a two fold observation because on one hand I had slightly more driving to do this morning (around 8% more battery usage) but at the same time I started charging later in the morning when temps were closer to 95 and my battery needed more time to get settled into the correct temperature and since I only have 1.2 maybe 1.4kw going in every minute running the compressor for the battery is a minute spent not really charging the battery.
Bottom line my car only has 80 miles of range to begin with and lately that’s a bit more like 60 (other factors play in) but if you’re on the fence I wouldn’t worry about it too much as even with my tiny ev I managed 20k miles last year.
Worth noting that if you’re on the fence and shopping in cold climates I did struggle a bit on extreme cold…again due to popping breakers preventing me from charging in the first place.
If you have any questions feel free to message me, I’d be happy to answer them.