The Real Story Behind Electric Cars Freezing In Chicago – Clogged Chargers, Cold Batteries, Stranded
This podcast is brought to you by star charge the largest EV charging manufacturer in the world and is also a provider of residential and Commercial battery storage and microG grid Solutions and Kim power the reliable quick and scalable EV charging solutions for everyone and [Applause] everywhere welcome back to the out of speec podcast I’m your host Francy and today I am joined by my teammates Ryan who runs ratee charge really important service for seeing how charging is going out in the field Kyle who of course runs out of spec and our special guest
Merchie Bautista chicagoan and utoba amongst many other things and today we’re covering a big story a bit of a worrisome story that has come up during the insane cold weather front that we have felt all over the US I know that I’m feeling it here including the freezing over of Chicago and the
Stranded freezing EVS that are on the the road and stuck at superchargers up there so welcome back to the out ofpc podcast thanks for coming on you guys how is it going everyone staying warm enough yep I’d been doing some cold weather testing through the night so uh
Got that nice AR tx’s jacket remember you made me buy that thing Francy and uh that thing rocks I’ve been so warm through the night it was good you found it that’s good yeah I did find it yeah I was in the Sprinter yeah Kyle didn’t
Have a winter jacket and he would go to Norway in the winter so you know thought maybe that was a good idea and Ryan and merchie thank you um so merchie thank you for coming on to the podcast you’re actually on the scene in Chicago and you’ve even ventured out to really check
It out but I want to start with a little bit about you so tell me a little bit about you and what you drive okay so I cently I currently drive a Ford Mustang Maki first edition so I’ve had her since February of 21 I’ve already got her over
50,000 miles done uh about three to four different road trips including from LA to Chicago also did one from Chicago to Toronto and recently from Chicago to New York for Dragon legic week so it’s been it’s been a great car overall I absolutely love her oh good that’s great
We love to hear a love story with your Eevee we have a lot of those on the team as well and you’re up in Chicago where it’s it’s already a cold winter there you know I’ve had friends that lived there for a while and it is you need the
Big jackets it’s also really wet cold but what specifically is happening on on the roads you know I was uh we were looking into the temperatures very very cold on Sunday and Monday it’s a holiday weekend so people are arguably out and about if they have MLK day off and um it
Was like what negative 8 degrees Fahrenheit wind chills around -30 and- 40 degrees Fahrenheit I mean clearly that’s very dangerous on its own yeah it’s a pretty dangerous condition not only that cuz you have like the fer rushes wind just like howling at the car hoing at your at your windows too like
You know I’m sleeping I was sleeping last night I could just hear that Halloween just like Halloween nonstop and you know with the dangerous conditions um you know everybody’s trying to stay warm as best as they could you know here in Chicago we’re getting the L effect weather and also
Like the all the all the all the uh Artic cold is coming from the North Pole shooting straight down at us so we’re in that pocket we we’re just gets really more C colder than most other parts of the country man it sure does and so I
Know Kyle and Ryan maybe you can tell me a little bit about you know of course when I start up my ice Subaru I let it warm up and stuff but how is that different from getting up and getting into your EV on a freezing cold morning or night or
Day right guy yeah so uh thanks yeah it’s it’s uh a little bit easier so you don’t have to wait until like your oil temperature transmission temperatures come up to speed however it’s still a vehicle there’s a lot of moving parts and when it’s really cold that changes a
Lot of material properties and it’s a good idea to take it gentle for the first few miles at least if you can and additionally an important thing to consider is that cold temperatures affect battery chemistry so that’s going to affect both your range efficiency and charge or I guess all three of those
Range efficiency and charging you should expect much worse efficiency worse range and slower charging if you’re not able to get your battery up into the right temperatures and I’ll just add really quick sorry but uh Ryan you’re totally right I did a test it’s on YouTube as of
Today when we were recording this podcast where I you know deep froze my model 3 again which I’ve already done in a previous video and it had like no acceleration and but you know you give it five minutes and it runs the battery heater and it’s ready to go we’re
Talking extreme cold now my rivan as an example well actually just got a software update it’s pretty cool when it’s plugged in it will also maintain the battery temperature all the time at a reasonable level somewhere probably around freezing where it can at least accept some amount of charge and it can
Still discharge a bunch it’s when you get into the negatives that pretty much you know lithium iron phosphate or nmc chemistry really struggles with discharging and recharging and like my rivan the other day when it wasn’t plugged in started in Turtle mode merchie I saw your Machi showed up as
Reduced power Turtle mode these are the things that we have to deal with with an EV and to be honest combustion cars too I’m not starting up my Pulstar one and going wide open throttle out of the driveway when it’s negative -10 out and and you know you can go wide open
Throttle in an EV but it’s not going to give you much power it there’s really nothing you can do to hurt an electric car there’s just so many restrictions so that it can protect itself from hot and especially cold one thing you can do with an electric car and we I really
Want just focus on the Chicago situation but one thing you can do with an electric car is preheat it when it’s plugged in so every morning 10 minutes 15 minutes before I head out I load up the Tesla or the rivan app or whatever my eglf doesn’t have an app but I load
Up whatever boom hit the precondition car’s warm battery heater’s been running I have full performance everything’s toasty and it’s way better than even a gas car because if I leave it for an hour well I don’t care I’ll just let the things stay warm it’s not like I’m
Running an engine because you don’t want to let a combustion engine idle for long anyway you’ll build up some moisture and that could lead to U you know premature wear inside the engine so with an Eevee it’s it’s less stressful the problem with an EV in the winter time comes from
If you can’t charge it home or you’re on the road and you need to charge and that has led to the disaster in Chicago and to be honest in Colorado this winter superchargers were down here last night um max is at Chargers today testing them he pulled up to a charge Point Station
Three of four are down so like things suffer an extreme cold so merchie what happened in Chicago so I think what’s Happening Here is a triple whammy because as of late the EV scene here has been increasing has been increasing tremendously so a lot of people are getting the EVS now
But a lot of people here don’t even have their own garages they have nowhere to plug their vehicles at home so they’re relying on DC fast charging to do the charging sort of like the their their their mindset is about the whole gas station model you’re going to call up to
The station you’re going to try to fill up and many of them do fill up to 100% And I try to educate them as I as I’m pulling up to a station but listen you want to stop at 80% but you know many of
Them I would say like I want I want to say all of them but some of them just completely ignored it and they just want to continuously charge the 100% so I really think it’s a triple one what’s happening here but also too um you have
Many people that are still going out and about Chicago is a very active City no matter what they day or time it is and people are going to be going out and about and they’re going to need to be doing the charging and so what I’ve
Noticed with my Maki is is that I’ve lost about a good 40 to 50% of my battery range and so you’re going to be needing to charge your vehicle twice as much if you’re going to be out there actively now for example I’m actually doing lift and so when I’m doing lift
Out there I have to be doing charging and normally I just charge it once a day and I’m able to do like a good 10 12 hour shift and needed to do just one charge a day um yesterday I can only I was only to do about four and a half
Hours to 5 hours before I have to recharge again and so I think that’s what’s happening in Chicago um you know many people just don’t have a place to charge or even like a garage or or some people don’t have garages because like here in Chicago many people just live in
Apartment buildings that doesn’t have garages and set stage sorry merchie to set the stage also we should mention like you’re not the only one noticing this the news organizations have been picking it up we did a rate your charge it was so bad that Ryan activated for
The first time I mean we’re only two weeks into the new year but Ryan activated the new rate your charge alert system which uh you know basically was like and we retweeted your stuff that’s that’s how we’re were like At first I was like ah it’s just Fox News doing a
Story on EVS but then like rate your charge check-in started coming and you started posting I’m like wow maybe Chicago really is a disaster and it truly was there were down Chargers everything was full and um yeah we’ll get into more about how that’s more of a
Problem but sorry to interrupt I just wanted to set that stage no absolutely that’s that’s totally fine and I think like and yeah you’re you’re even right like it’s not even just Fox News is also ABC and even our local channel WGN has actually reported about the Tesla uh
Tesla stations why there focusing on Tesla probably because like when it comes to EVS people think about Teslas they don’t think about any other EVS like the you know Hyundai or kia or even like the for Maki they always think about the Tesla because that’s like the
The big thing people always talk about but I think um so the problem is it’s not just the Teslas now it’s really just like other EVS I’m away here I wanted to stop into the charging station where uh were the closest to my parents house the
One I normally used to used to use before for the ea uh that is right off the I55 and that site when I got there it was a complete disaster so there are there was two vehicles I got told uh 6:00 in the morning and they’re still
There and the owners are nowhere to be found and then you have other EVS that are waiting to there to charge the vehicles at the moment right now and the worst part about it is that the the EA stations three out of four of them are
Derated so there was an id4 owner that was only getting about 72 kilowatts versus uh another bolt owner he was only a to get 24 kilowatts so that’s also a problem that’s been happening here too you have to re first of all you have the reliability problem with EA but we do
Have EV go stations that most people have been using now and they’ve been more reli they’ve been Pro they’ve been proving to be more reliable which is good but um I I think the big problem here I really think what’s happening here in Chicago is that the fact that
You know people are buying EVS but they don’t have garages they have nowhere to plug their vehicles and and so it’s creating this uh problem where they’re still out and about and they’re having to charge twice as much and they’re waiting for hours I’ve had one person I
Was talking to he was waiting for a good five hours before he had to charge in his vehicle sitting in the cold for five hours I don’t doesn’t crazy and we should also mention like sure Chargers can be derated that’s one side of things but we we also did a
Video about a year ago where I deep froze a model 3 and so what was the actual temperatures in the middle of the night what was the coldest you got the coldest I got was like about 12 degrees Fahrenheit negative2 degrees Fahrenheit that’s before windchills wind chills we
Looking at 35 yeah but the windchill doesn’t affect the battery on the car it just goes to ambient the wind chill will just get it there faster um so you’re ne12 we were about the same here I actually did a video in a little bit colder temp temperatures than that last
Year where um you know I parked a model 3 Performance at a supercharger and left it for a day to freeze similar to like someone waiting five hours in line and then I you know got it to the supercharger and plugged it in and it
Wouldn’t charge and this is a lot of the stories that I’m hearing online of like I can get my car to the charger I waited in line and then I plugged it in and it didn’t work and honestly most of those conditions I would imagine are is actually not the charging infrastructure
Ructure it’s probably the car not accepting a charge and then you have to think about okay well the car is not accepting a charge because most cars are nmc chemistry especially lfb hates to charge in the freezing as well and they actually have to run the battery heater
Enough to get to the point where they can start accepting a charge and then it can run the battery heater and use the waste heat of charging to hopefully get a good session but it took almost 1 hour for my model 3 to even start accepting a
Charge at the supercharge charger um and so this is not uncommon I just think people are not so aware of what happens when you don’t precondition to a charger or you do precondition to a charger and then you wait there for five hours and on top of that the wind portion of this
Really works against you because ambient temperatures are one thing but with the wind chill or with wind flowing across that’s just harder that all the systems need to run to get the battery heated up now I am sure that there is a temperature at which an electric car
Cannot heat up its battery to accept a charge I don’t know what it would be and and a wind portion would be a factor but I’m think we probably saw some of that yesterday especially from those Tesla stories because I would imagine most Teslas there even though it’s Chicago
Are still the single motor base model 3es because they’re just such a good value and just like Ryan has one as well and Ryan we you’re doing a test tonight on this actually which will be interesting but the single motor model 3 doesn’t have much ability to heat up the
Battery quickly it has to run the heat pump with the waste heat from the motor and in a dual motor model 3 it can run two Motors worth the waste heat double the heating power and heat pumps are not very efficient in really cold temperatures Tesla stuff is pretty
Amazing they can make it work but it’s still not as great as if it’s plus 12 degrees versus negative – 12 degrees and what I think was happening especially if it was windy where probably some of these Teslas did not have enough heating power to let them accept a charge and so
You know you can call it you know I I originally looked at the story and I was like oh yeah okay Fox News hates EVS whatever all this stuff but then I’m like actually this is a real problem if you’re a user and you don’t know how to
Optimize your car in the winter time so merchie does that sound about right I know you were at some EA stations some of the new stuff was at Tesla I think that was leading to of course some of the lines some of course people just being selfish and hogging the charger to
100% especially in cold weather which can take hours even longer plus it seemed like some down Tesla equipment for sure but also some EA equipment does that kind of sum up what was going on absolutely 100% I think many of these EV owners are not educated
Well enough to know how to operate and what to know how to use an electric vehicle as far as like preconditioning um getting your vehicles uh optimized when you’re about to go to a charging station knowing when to charge when you begin charging or when to pull out when
You’re done charging I spoken to a few more people um not only just today but yesterday as well and you know an example of what they don’t know is that I have a boat there was a boat owner I was talking to and they’re they were
Charging at a 350 kilowatt EV GO station and they’re wondering why they’re not getting the 350 and I told him that’s because it goes up to 350 your vehicle can only accept at Max 52 if you’re lucky to get 52 but that 50 and you know
There’s and and I pretty much had to show them by graph I had didn’t show them like by Google like listen your vehicle can only accept 100 up to 50 versus my Maki and I told my example for my Maki at Peak maybe 160 or 150 but
Then that’s about it and so they’re kind of getting themselves screwed but the other thing too I want to kind of want to comment about the the Tesla base model I think you’re absolutely right what’s been happening in Chicago a lot of them are the base models and that’s
Because Uber has been renting out the base model Teslas for the drivers and not only that they’re also renting out the b uh EVs and that’s the other reason too why many of these STS are getting fulled because they’re getting cloged up by the Uber drivers who are renting them
And so they’re all using them for for uh for for their daily driving when they need to when they need to work and so they’re waiting hours and hours just to get the charge just so they can get back to work so that’s the the reason why
Many of these teers are getting full too that is crazy I mean um the thing is DC infrastructure for the longest time up until right I don’t know two years ago something like this was used exclusively for long-distance driving and pretty much anyone that had an electric car
This is before there were EV rental cars or Ubers were were renting them out um you know pretty much they would everyone would just charge at home and and if you if you couldn’t charge at home or couldn’t charge at work you wouldn’t buy an electric car because it’s annoying to
Have to deal with what you’re describing but I think with the value propositions of EVS getting so good with them becoming more mainstream more usable more normal especially under normal weather conditions it’s like yeah I’ll just supercharge it once a week whatever and if it takes me an hour who cares the
Problem is in the winter time that hour can turn into a lot more and uh and this is we’re talking deep charges and and you know I think so Denver was the first or one of the first cities where Lyft used eeros and so that was like the first
Pilot of ride sharing with EVS was here and EA and sort of collaboration built a ton of CCS Chargers around the Denver metro area we actually have way more CCS Chargers than superchargers in our in our area and I knew it was going to be a problem this would happen uh like I
Don’t know two and a half years ago whenever that happened when I rolled up to a station and there was just a line of neros and I’m like no one is able to publicly charge and so what I think needs to happen is we need to obviously yes there needs to be more
Infrastructure but perhaps there needs to be a distinction between commercial use and personal use or maybe we just say hey first plug gets whoever it is there needs to be work from the automakers to improve the communication to the driver as how to optimize their car in Winter conditions there needs to
Be uh work from the automakers to have better battery preconditioning and um of course not just crap charging because even on a nice day a bolt charges like crap um so these are all of the the topics and and I think you got totally slammed by every angle at at one weekend
In Chicago and that led to a disastrous situation yeah because like at this at this point like at this point I’m actually kind of going to limit myself from doing lift this week just because it’s just a disaster Zone to charge up there but luckily I have my charging uh
Plug downstairs in my condo and I’m just going to charge her up until like maybe 80 90% And then maybe I’ll do a couple hours of lit but that’s about it normally i’ be out there for about 10 12 hours but this week is just a disaster
Zone I don’t want any part of it because this really bad out there no it’s definitely kind it’s a storm of a lot of things coming together at once and I think it is interesting that the Tesla story was covered because not only does Tesla do the supercharger
Network but also the EVs and I saw the opinions of drivers that are calling Tesla maybe knowing that it might not be the car’s fault but not getting the response from Tesla so it is a unique position that they come from as well where you know it’s the EV and the
Infrastructure paired together not working so yeah as of now they’re still l there are cars that are like just abandoned stranded need to be towed have been towed still really cold don’t really see a resolution real quick but um I think this does like you were
Summing it up Kyle EV 101 is so important and dealerships have to be given more and more tools to do that I don’t really know like what the solution is besides that the touch points that we have with EV customers are limited but I don’t know it’s it’s a whole learning
Curve which it shouldn’t be that hard but with Winters getting more more cold Summer’s getting hotter and hotter uh it of course goes back to manufacturing and interoperability and all that stuff but also yeah giving the drivers information that they need to try have the best experience but seems like everyone
Should just stay home if they can well yeah and but the thing is your car should never limit you this is what frustrates me is I can live with an electric car in all climates because I know how it works I would never expect some random person who’s rented one rent
Ed a bolt to drive Uber for a week to understand how it works you should be able just to plug it in and use it as a normal car and to be honest we are still too EVS are still weird and they’re still quirky and they are not as easy to
Operate as gas in these extreme situations so Ryan why don’t you give us some final thoughts you’re someone who owns one of these Bas Teslas you’re one of those guys dying at the supercharger what would you do in that case what what is Ryan’s top tip if you’re five hours
In line at a supercharger and you’re low on charge what would you what would be the first thing you would look at uh well I think the first thing I I would try to do is plan around this generally speaking we know when bad weather’s
Coming in and if possible if it’s like – 27 degrees if you can try to stay inside um but if you do have to go out I think especially with how bad it are it it tends to be with City centers between all the different charging stations it’s
Still just so congested Ed it may still be worthwhile to you know save an extra 15ish 20% state of charge and drive 10 or 15 miles out of the city to get to a charger that has some availability I think a lot of it really
Comes down to trying to plan for it the unfortunate thing is if you run up to a charger it’s very full and you don’t have enough charge to get somewhere good there’s not a lot of good options yeah maybe just looking on plug share to find a level two and going to grab
A hot dog I don’t know I was gonna say grab a beer but we can’t recommend that while driving so you grab grab something and uh you know just just wait while your car level two charges ultimately if you’re at really low state of charge and
It’s really cold out this is worst case scenario for your battery pack too so you want to think about protecting your battery at all costs and it’s like okay if it dies for a few hours and it’s cold they all have bottom brick protect protection you’re okay just don’t leave
Them dead in Freez temperatures for too long that is uh my recommendation yeah a lot of good advice here maybe we need charging stations and greenh houses so that we can keep them all everyone warm while we’re charging as things get colder and colder uh but yeah great advice crazy story we’ll have
To see how I mean I guess it’s just waiting for it to warm up we’ll see thank you merchie so much for not only like tweeting about it and going out there putting yourself out there to check it out actually and see it firsthand and also of course for coming
Out of the podcast we really appreciate it it’s been a pleasure it’s it’s an honor thank you so much guys for for this of course and we’ll definitely have all your links in the show notes so everyone please go check out merchie and all the cool stuff that he does uh thank
You Ryan and Kyle everyone listening please stay warm say stay safe and uh let us know what questions you have about this that we might be able to figure out thank you and we will see you next time on the outpec podcast
Join Francie, Kyle, Ryan & special guest Merchy Bautista (AKA @TheRealMerchyBautista) as they cover the recent story of freezing EVs in Chicago. The team goes into the details, asks Merchy about his first hand experience driving an EV in the city, the imperative tasks of preconditioning batteries and warming up EVs, the pressure on public charging, where the responsibility lies for charging operators and EV manufacturers, and get to the truth behind the story!
– Merchy’s Links (give him a follow, like, and subscribe!)
Youtube https://youtube.com/@ChargingtheRoad?si=ZQ2WzPRr-LxNFtMW
Twitter (whats X?) @TheRealMerchy
Instagram @chargingtheroad
– Rate Your Charge X post: https://twitter.com/RateYourCharge/status/1747077669915697208
– Merchy’s X post: https://twitter.com/TheRealMerchy/status/1747069547532685723 The
– Cybertruck Guy’s X post: https://twitter.com/cybrtrkguy/status/1747312760424124822?s=42
– Kyle’s Cold Testing on @OutofSpecReviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iooPeJLkXo0
Shoutout to our sponsors for more information find their links below:
– Star Charge:
https://www.starcharge.com/charging?id=20
– Kempower:
Find us on all of these places:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/outofspecpodcast
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/out-of-spec-podcast/id1576636119
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tKIQfKL9oaHc1DLOTWvbd
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/473692b9-05b9-41f9-9b38-9f86fbdabee7/OUT-OF-SPEC-PODCAST
For further inquiries please email podcast@outofspecstudios.com
#coldweather #tesla #evcharging
