"Nothing. No juice. Still on zero percent," said Tyler Beard, who has been trying to recharge his Tesla at an Oak Brook Tesla supercharging station since Sunday afternoon. "And this is like three hours being out here after being out here three hours yesterday."

"Like any new technology, there’s a learning curve for people," said Mark Bilek of the Chicago Auto Trade Association.

Lmao, no my dudes, it's pretty well understood that you need to keep the battery warm enough to be able to charge. This is not some fucking unexplored field of science!

I'm absolutely cackling at the radio silence from Tesla + dozens of Tesla owners just sitting around cluelessly wondering why their car hasn't charged at all in over 3 hours. Maybe another 3 hours will do it, keep trying stalin-approval

Also, a cursory Google search leads me to believe that the Model 3 has no dedicated battery warmer that could be used for this very situation, but instead some system that "runs the motor inefficiently to heat up the battery". Doesn't sound like this can work when the car is stationary, I guess tesla engineers forgot about the Midwest when cutting parts to save on production costs michael-laugh

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Lmao, no my dudes, it's pretty well understood that you need to keep the battery warm enough to be able to charge. This is not some fucking unexplored field of science!

    Anybody who owns a phone knows that charging a lipo heats it up; it's natural - and mostly correct! - to assume that charging when cold works. What these people don't know is that charging far below freezing damages the battery, which is why the firmware presumably is disabling charging altogether in such cold temperatures. If your EV is at 30% in the extreme cold, use some battery energy to warm it up a little (e.g. by driving) and then charge. If it's at 0%, you're stuck until you get it warm somehow.

    instead some system that "runs the motor inefficiently to heat up the battery". Doesn't sound like this can work when the car is stationary

    why not? isn't an electric motor just a big resistor? Give it less than the inrush current, so there's power spent but not enough to move. Obviously it'd be better to have the waste heat generated at the battery instead of at the motor, but discharge heating is better than nothing and battery resistance looks similar to phase resistance so it won't be too lopsided.

    Teslas are some of the worst EVs out there but my ICE is also eating shit right now without a block heater (which are usually aftermarket and require an outlet to plug into). The engineering omission was not including a battery heater with external power - perhaps they assumed that if you were able to drive to a charging station you'd have enough power to warm the battery.