Electric car owners’ harsh foe: the cold

CHICAGO — With Chicago temperatures sinking below zero, electric vehicle charging stations have become scenes of desperation: depleted batteries, confrontational drivers, and lines stretching out onto the street.

“When it’s cold like this, cars aren’t functioning well, chargers aren’t functioning well, and people don’t function so well either,” said Javed Spencer, an Uber driver who said he had done little else in the last three days besides charge his rented Chevy Bolt and worry about being stranded with a dead battery — again.

Spencer, 27, said he set out Sunday for a charging station with 30 miles left on his battery. Within minutes, the battery was dead. He had to have the car towed to the station.

“When I finally plugged it in, it wasn’t getting any charge,” he said. Recharging the battery, which usually takes Spencer an hour, took five hours.

With more people owning electric vehicles than ever before, cold snaps this winter have created headaches for electric vehicle owners, as freezing temperatures drain batteries and reduce driving range.

And the problems may persist a little longer. Chicago and other parts of the United States and Canada this week have been stunned by bitterly cold temperatures. On Tuesday, wind chills plummeted near minus 30 degrees across much of the Chicago area, according to the National Weather Service. Dangerously low temperatures and waves of snow are expected to stick through the end of the week.

Why does cold weather drain electric vehicle batteries?

Unlike cars with internal combustion engines, an electric vehicle has two batteries: a lowvoltage and a high-voltage. In particularly cold weather, the lower-voltage, 12-volt battery can also lose charge, like it does in traditional vehicles.

When that happens, the EV cannot charge at a fast charger until the low voltage battery has been jump-started, said Albert Gore III, a former Tesla employee who is now the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, which represents automakers including Tesla and has released a tips sheet for operating electric vehicles in cold weather.

The challenge for electric vehicles is the two sides of the battery — the anode and the cathode — have chemical reactions that are slowed during extremely cold temperatures. That affects both the charging and the discharging of the battery, said Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

“It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions,” Brouwer said. “You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

They don’t have these problems in Norway.

As people in the industry study what went wrong in Chicago, some suggest that the charging infrastructure may have been simply outmatched by the extreme cold weather.

“We’re just a few years into EV deployment at scale,” Gore said. “This is not a categorical problem for electric vehicles,” he added, “because it has largely been sorted out in other places.”

Some of the countries with the highest usage of electric vehicles are also among the coldest. In Norway, where nearly 1 in 4 vehicles are electric, drivers are accustomed to taking steps, such as preheating the car before a drive, to increase efficiency even in cold weather, said Lars Godbolt, an adviser of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association, which represents more than 120,000 electric car owners in Norway.

Charging stations in Norway see longer lines in the winter than summer since vehicles are slower to charge in colder weather, but that has become less of an issue in recent years since Norway has built more charging ports, Godbolt said, citing a recent survey of members. Also, the majority of people in Norway live in houses, not apartments, and nearly 90 percent of electric vehicle owners have their own charging stations at home, he said.

Around the world, 14 percent of all new cars sold in 2022 were electric, up from 9 percent in 2021 and less than 5 percent in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, which provides data on energy security.