Tesla charging stations become ‘car graveyards’ as batteries die in subzero temperatures, abandoned cars left in the lot after cars wouldn’t charge

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• maniel@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve been seeing this surfacing a lot lately, two curious things:

  • Fox - right wing, republican and conservative media known for being against global warming, renewables and electric cars
  • Only happening in Chicago, people in other regions with the similar conditions report no such issues

  ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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  • zurohki@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It sounded like a bunch of things combined: chargers going down, long queues at the working chargers as people take much longer than usual to charge, Uber drivers with rented EVs who don’t really know about charging in the cold, etc.

    So people who did do the right things and turned up at a charger with a warm battery ready to charge found themselves on the end of a five hour queue, and by the time they got a turn their cars were cold so they needed a long time on the charger to warm up before they can even start charging.

    If you don’t have enough working chargers at very low temperatures it can all just kind of snowball. That’s not really an EV issue, it’s an infrastructure problem. Strangely, you won’t hear Faux News advocating for more chargers.

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    • maniel@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m not saying an event like that didn’t happen, but as far as we know a single event is blown out of proportions by Fox, it’s reported out of the context all over the world, giving people the feeling it’s a common occurrence

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• markr@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is part of the ‘EV apocalypse’ FUD campaign.

  AFAICT one super charging site in Chicago had more than one non-functional chargers. Why they were not functioning is not known. Quite a few Teslas queued up there in the cold and some of them ran their batteries down to zero. Each regurgitation of the this event has the same pictures of the same cars at the same place.

  It is a fact that EV range decreases with cold, and that decrease can be significant. Drivers unaware of this, and who don’t monitor their battery levels, can indeed find themselves effectively ‘out of gas’.

  We need much better urban charging infrastructure. Street level L2 charging should be ubiquitous, and that can be easily achieved using the existing street level power line infrastructure.

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  • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The problem is teslas. Better designers have non-engine reliant heating systems, that you can use to warm your battery enough to hold a charge, so it can run your engine and keep itself warm.

    Teslas dont have this. So when they go cold, they are stuck cold.

    You dont need to redesign the charging infrastructure to cater to the poorly designed car. You need to fix the shit car.

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• fosforus@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • lovesickoyster@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    from what I understand from the article the problem is that people are queuing and because of long waiting times batteries die.

    I honestly don’t understand why people are buying EVs if they don’t have the option of home charging.

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    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ooh, ok. That makes quite a lot of sense. Especially if one uses the miles/km number to show battery state, people are gonna get screwed by the cold. I changed that thing to percentages pretty soon after I got the car.

      I honestly don’t understand why people are buying EVs if they don’t have the option of home charging.

      Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense.

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    • Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Elektrek did summer articles about this. The superchargers are overwhelmed because the grid cannot provide enough power. In the well known tropical paradise of Norway, no such problems occur.

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    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah I live in an area with winter weather. I still want an ev (and a subcompact one at that) but I live in an apartment without home charging so not yet. The wife and I have been discussing a plug in hybrid though basically as a “we need an internal combustion engine now and want an EV later, but don’t want it to be a car commitment away”

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    • SuperIce@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why are people buying gas cars if they don’t have at home fueling?

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    • tmjaea@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Are long waiting times really a thing? Here in Germany even the charging areas next to the autobahn have a maximum of 1-2 waiting cars if at all

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  • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    after remembering how Americans cannot science and 0F =~ -18C

    Just because Americans grew up with and are largely stuck with the Fahrenheit system doesn’t mean they can’t science. Come on. It’s an inferior system of measurement, sure, but no one even in America uses Fahrenheit for science anyway.

    (Don’t get me wrong, I wish we’d all switch to Celsius over here. I did. It’s so much better. But it took a WHILE to reach the point where it felt natural, and during that time involved a lot more math than the average human is willing to do. Converting systems of measurement that are ingrained in your culture is HARD.)

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    • Zedd00@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Fahrenheit is a shit system for science. It is a great system for humans. It’s basically the percent of heat humans can maintain. 0% or below is too fucking cold. 100% or above is too fucking hot. 72% hot is about room temperature. Fahrenheit degrees are about the smallest change humans can detect.

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  • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The obsession with dick measuring over which ruler you use will always be funny

    Do you really have nothing of genuine merit to be proud of? All you have is your thermostat?

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  • NightAuthor@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • bjorney@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s a rest of the world unit. Fahrenheit is only used by America, the Cayman islands and Liberia

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    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ok, sorry for leaving them out. Americans and Brits cannot science.

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• PolyLlamaRous@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is easily explained like most anti EV articles.

  1. Don’t forget about alternate motivations (money and power). We know that there is an extreme amount of money put into tricking the public to not buy EVs from many organizations (Political, gas and oil companies, countries depending on gas and oil production… Etc). Check the source - it’s Faux news… Red flag

  2. does this make sense, do we have a comparison? Surely this can’t be the first time EVs were cold. I live in Europe, and I know the Nordic countries have tons of EVs. When I was in Iceland during the winter, I rented a EV and it was fucking cold. Mine was fine, they all are fine despite likely worse conditions… This article may have some seeds of truth somewhere but sounds like bullshit.

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  • Dremor@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The problem with Tesla cars is that they uses two batteries. One is the main one, which is used for propulsion, and the other one, a conventional car battery, is used for most of the critical electronic.

    Problem is, both are independent from each other, which mean you can have a full main battery, and still be locked out of your car if the secondary on is out.

    You can have a similar results with gas car, where the ignition won’t happen because of the cold, but at least you can recharge it easily with another car that happens to pass by. For Teslas, you can’t. Because those fuckers decided that it was too unsightly to see the bare battery, and bolted a plastic turd over it to make sure the only person to ever be able to change it is a Tesla tech.

    All other car manufacturers, which happens to have a bit more experience than those asses, understood that being able to have an unified battery, that happens to be thermally insulated (and often in the nordic countries, heated), to make sure you actually use them, even in cold weather.

    Tesla cars are a perfect example of a product that only survive out of hype. They are overall badly designed, arguably ugly, their only redeeming quality was their autopilot, but even that is starting to crack.

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    • leds@feddit.dk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My Kia also has a normal 12v battery for normal car stuff in addition to the main battery pack. But it uses the main battery to charge the 12v if that ever gets low while parked

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    • r00ty@kbin.life ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It's true, our plain old dinosaur fuel car was notably slower in turning over on the -5 and colder days we've had recently.

      But since tesla bother to heat the propulsion battery why don't they either 1: have a 12v power supply to provide ancillary power from the propulsion batteries if the 12v supply fails, or 2: also heat that battery too?

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• echo64@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I thought ev batteries had heating and cooling to prevent exactly this? Maybe they couldn’t heat enough through the cold to get charging again?

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  • _danny@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s people having their battery die while they wait for an open charger.

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  • cynar@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It was a domino effect. When a car with a cold battery tried to charge, it had to wait for the heaters to get it up to a working temperature. This meant a 20 minute charge became 20 (initial) + 10 (heating time) + 10 (replacing extra power lost to heating). A 20 minute charge then takes 40+ minutes. The next car has the same issue. Once this happens a few times, even cars that were warm have cooled down, while queueing.

    It’s the EV equivalent of the petrol panics that happen to ICE cars. They idle in the queue until they run out of fuel. It’s an infrastructure problem combined with people learning the limits of a new technology.

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    • SuperIce@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And don’t forget that this constant charging means that the supercharger’s own batteries are probably depleted, limiting them to what they can pull from the grid, which IIRC is 350kW per 4 stalls. So instead of 250kW max per stall, they can now only do ~90kW.

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  • ugjka@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The problem is that charging does not work on Telsas if the battery is completely dead, you can’t even open the doors

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    • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Then the battery heating should work from the external energy.

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• troed@fedia.io ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I saw a clip where a car was plugged in but hadn't charged "for three hours". If this was one specific charging station then obviously it was having issues - not the cars.

  /Tesla owner (until lease is up next month) in Sweden

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• Etterra@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Pour one out.

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• NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They would get towed pretty soon.

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  • Entheon@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The nearest charging station to me (I don’t use it, just noticed) has a car that’s been abandoned since November. Someone even wrote “tow, abandoned 11/1/23” on every window yet it’s still there.

    Don’t know if this is a common occurrence or not.

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