Electric vehicle owners in the Midwest faced challenges due to frigid temperatures, leading to issues such as decreased performance, weaker battery life, longer charge times, and crowded charging stations.
The cold weather impacted the ability of electric vehicles to charge properly, requiring battery preconditioning for optimal temperature.
As temperatures dropped, charging stations became overwhelmed, with some vehicles needing to be towed for service.
“It’s been a little frustrating,” one woman said. “I had to charge like multiple times every day the last couple days. I had to wait for like 45 minutes for a charger and then I pull in. It doesn’t work, and then I pull out and then someone else takes the next charger. And then I had to wait again.”
“I was at 50% when I got here, usually from 50 to like 80, 90% it will take like 10, 15 minutes. It’s taking an hour and 20 minutes,” one electric vehicle owner said.
“It’s not plug and go. You have to precondition the battery, meaning that you have to get the battery up to the optimal temperature to accept a fast charge,” the Chicago Auto Trade Association’s Mark Bilek said.
“It’s just frozen,” a Tesla owner stated. “And so I’m now getting it towed to the Tesla Service Center because that’s my only option at this point.”
O’Leary Ventures Chairman Kevin O’Leary highlighted the limitations of electric vehicles in cold weather and emphasized the need to find alternative methods for generating electricity.
“The adoption rate and the limitations of EVs in Europe and here domestically are evident,” O’Leary said. “We’ve never actually had this kind of cold. So now we’re testing the battery longevity and everybody’s learning about lithium batteries and freezing cold weather.”
“The bigger issue here is when you consider yourself going green, buying an EV, it’s also coming to the fore that you have to make that electricity. And right now, we burn a lot of coal to make that electricity. So in the long run, if this is going to work, we have to find other ways of making electricity,” he said.
“This whole thing is a very complicated equation. In addition to that, you’ve heard the market rule. At Hertz, they’re dumping them. This morning, from Davos, the CEO of Uber claimed that it would be great if we can get more people to buy EVs, that they would drive in them. But if people don’t want to do that as drivers, they are not going to do it. So we’re at an inflection point.”
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