Are electric cars really useless in winter?

Not only that, the cold temperature has also greatly weakened the discharge efficiency of lithium batteries in new energy vehicles, leading to more obvious endurance anxiety of new energy vehicle owners. Many vehicles with a nominal cruising range of 500km cannot even drive 300km. It seems that electric cars are really useless in winter.

At first, that's what I thought. Poor charging efficiency, coupled with the discount on battery life brought by cold weather, make electric car owners reluctant to turn on air conditioners to increase the temperature inside the car. However, with the increasing number of charging piles in residential quarters, shopping malls and office parking lots, and the gradual popularization of heat pump air conditioners, I feel more and more that electric vehicles are not useless in winter, because in some scenarios, electric vehicles are more comfortable than fuel vehicles in winter. Don't contradict me in a hurry, and then look down and you will know!

Whether it is an electric car or a fuel car, the cold temperature inside the car in winter is an important factor that affects our experience. Therefore, after we get on the bus in winter, we must hope that the vehicle can blow out warm air immediately to raise the temperature inside the car. For electric vehicles, because vehicles are generally equipped with PTC electrothermal air conditioners, warm air can be blown out soon after being turned on.

But the situation of gasoline cars is different. When you get into a cold car, you want to turn on the air conditioner to get warm air. Unfortunately, when you press the air conditioning switch of the vehicle, you can't hear the sound of the blower running, and there is no warm air flow at the air outlet of the head or feet.

The reason why this happens is mainly related to the working logic of the automatic air conditioner equipped with new cars at present. In the past, the manual air conditioner of the old car, whether it was cold or hot, must be blown after it was turned on. Even if the current automatic air conditioner is switched to manual mode, the engine coolant temperature used to provide warm air will be detected first, and the blower will not be started until the coolant temperature reaches the temperature that can provide warm air.

The reason for this logic is that the warm air heat of the fuel truck is obtained from the engine coolant, and it cannot generate enough heat to blow out the warm air before the temperature of the coolant rises. More importantly, during the period when the engine is just started, the primary goal is to heat all parts of the engine to reach the ideal working temperature. At this time, heat is transferred through the flow of coolant between different parts, which helps the engine oil to heat up quickly and prevents friction and high idle fuel consumption caused by too thick engine oil at low temperature. In this case, the vehicle will give priority to ensuring that the heat of the coolant is used to warm up the engine, rather than distributing the heat to the air conditioning system.

At this time, there must be many gasoline owners who say that since the air conditioner will not emit hot air when the car is cold, I will use remote start to preheat the car in advance, and the temperature inside the car will be very comfortable when I get on the bus. Theoretically, using remote start to warm up the car in advance can really alleviate the problem of hot air to some extent, but the question is how long do you need to start the car in advance to make the temperature inside the car very comfortable?

As we said before, the premise of warm air blowing for gasoline vehicles is that the engine coolant must be hot. This means that, compared with new energy vehicles directly blowing electric heating wires with blowers or heat pump air conditioners, gasoline vehicles must first heat the engine if they want to get warm air. But the engine and coolant have been frozen outdoors all night, and it is difficult to heat up.

More importantly, most of the current new car engines have high thermal efficiency, and less heat is "wasted" when the engine is hot. At the same time, due to the low load when the engine is idling in place, it will also lead to insufficient extra heat and slow down the engine speed.

According to the winter test of a well-known media, after standing at-15℃ for 24 hours, start the vehicle at idle speed and turn on the warm air 15 minutes. The temperature in most gasoline cars is between 0-5℃, and the best temperature in gasoline cars is only 14.3℃ ... You should know that-15℃ is not a very low temperature in winter in the north, so it can be seen that even if the car is warmed up 15 minutes in advance by remote starting, compared with the "electric heater" that can basically be turned on immediately. At least according to my personal experience, remote startup will be more useful in summer.

According to experience, if you turn on the air conditioner when you get on the bus, the driving speed is always high, and it takes at least 10km to make the car reach a relatively comfortable temperature. In addition to the difficulty in heating up the car, idle fuel consumption and carbon deposition are also issues that gasoline vehicles have to consider in winter. When the engine is cold, it is difficult for gasoline to change from liquid to gas because of the low temperature in the cylinder. Therefore, in order to ensure the combustion stability of the engine at idle speed, engineers will let ECU inject more gasoline when the engine is cold, so as to increase the evaporation of gasoline per unit time, so as to achieve the effect of sufficient oil-gas mixing with air in a single power cycle. But in this way, the gasoline sprayed without volatilization is actually wasted. At the same time, due to the insufficient combustion of gasoline when idling in situ, the engine is prone to carbon deposition, which will lead to engine jitter and increase fuel consumption over time.

Although the power consumption of electric vehicles will increase in winter due to the poor activity of low-temperature batteries and high energy consumption of electric air conditioners, the current charging cost of electric vehicles is really too cheap. Even if the warm air is blown at idle speed for a long time, the electricity consumption will not make people feel distressed, and there is no need to worry about carbon deposition and tail gas pollution.

In winter, the average fuel consumption of gasoline vehicles will increase by more than 1L, which is equivalent to an increase of about 0.65,438+0 yuan per kilometer. This is definitely a big expense for a car that travels tens of thousands of kilometers.

Besides the difference in heating and energy expenditure, there are also great differences in low-temperature driving experience between fuel vehicles and electric vehicles.

This is mainly because the low temperature will make the gearbox of gasoline vehicles cold. Speaking of cold protection, the CVT gearbox is definitely the first thing that everyone can think of.

In fact, AT gearbox with hydraulic torque converter will also be cold-proof in cold winter.

This is because the transmission oil temperature is low, the oil viscosity is very high, and the torque converter can not effectively absorb the shift impact, and then the shift is frustrated. At this time, in order to alleviate the frustration caused by this shift, ECU will increase the speed as much as possible to prevent the gearbox from upshifting, and quickly stir the oil through the hydraulic torque converter to improve the oil temperature of the gearbox, but it will reduce the transmission efficiency.

The consequence of this is naturally an increase in fuel consumption and a deterioration in power. If you drive an AT gearbox in the cold winter, you must have encountered the cold situation that the gearbox does not upshift and the vehicle accelerates slowly.

For electric vehicles, because the single-speed fixed-tooth gearbox used has no shift structure and does not need power transmission structure such as hydraulic torque converter, electric vehicles can also get a smooth power experience at low temperatures.

At the same time, the motor doesn't need a hot car like a gasoline engine at low temperature, so in the cold car stage, the driving experience of an electric car is also to beat a gasoline car that is flustered and noisy.

It is true that the short battery life and slow charging of electric vehicles in winter are unacceptable shortcomings in the eyes of many people. However, everything has two sides. The electric car doesn't need a hot car, but it has warm air and no cold protection when it is started, which makes it have a far better experience than the fuel car when it is used in winter. As a big fan of fuel cars, I prefer to drive an electric car when I go to work. After all, charging piles are becoming more and more popular now. As long as charging is not a problem, electric vehicles still have many advantages visible to the naked eye. Therefore, everyone should look at everything rationally and objectively, and don't kill it with a stick. Nowadays, electric vehicles are so popular, really not only because of policy support. ......