Technology

I agree with you that most people driving trucks probably don't need to be driving trucks. My home vehicle is a nice little Corolla that gets great gas mileage.

But reality is that for a lot of workers, the show must go on, rain or shine, heat wave or cold snap. I've had to be that guy -- coldest day of the year and some piece of critical infrastructure is broken, the boss says "I don't care, we need it working, get out there". Temperatures that cold you literally start to feel death's caress. It starts to soak into your meat, and it at some point it doesn't matter what you're wearing.

Days like that, even a diesel is pretty scary, but pretty much no vehicle ever turns off. If it's a gas vehicle at least the block heater can let you start the thing.

Except that generally speaking, your gas tank doesn't really change capacity that much based on the weather -- the fact you have to idle it is obviously a concern, but typically your fuel economy doesn't dramatically change because the weather outside changes. By contrast, I've heard and seen an EV in very cold winter weather basically become a brick until it spends some time in a nice heated space, and then it only wakes up until you bring it back outside and the battery freezes again.

I've done really long road trips in extraordinarily cold weather. I used to live in the far north, and I still work up there occasionally. You're not losing 80% of your travel capacity or anything like that.

We'll see.

Everything I keep on hearing says that these things become basically worthless the moment you're not driving under perfect conditions. I've personally witnessed EVs become basically useless in winter, or when there's a few too many hills. I've even heard that you're going to want a heated garage to go with your fancy EV in real winters. I'd also like to know what toll real winters have on the overall lifespan of a battery on a $100,000 truck -- it'd suck if you have to send your expensive vehicle to the junkyard in just a few years because you don't live in an ideal climate. I guess I should also point out that -20 is not -40, and the work doesn't stop because it isn't warm out.

I've been eyeing an EV for running around town, but the risks hold me back.

Living in tropical climates it would be understandable that the mechanics of more extreme latitudes wouldn't be immediately obvious.

The closer you are to the equator, the more consistent your days and nights are throughout the year, and the more direct sunlight you're getting. As you get closer to the poles, the winter days get shorter, the summer days get longer, the winter sun is less intense, and the Summer sun is more direct. The extreme of this is when you get up to the Arctic where the sun can be up for months at a time and then down for months at a time. As a result, you also see some massive temperature swings. There are regions that will see +40 and -40. It's highly unusual tomreach either extreme, but Iroquois Falls, Ontario has seen official temperatures of as high as +41C in summer and as low as -58C in winter. In winter, you go to work in the dark and go home in the dark, and in summer you can wake up to bright sunshine at 5am and fall asleep in bright sunshine at 11pm.

This combination of factors means that solar power is not appropriate for winter weather the closer to get to the poles. As as a country as a whole, in Canada in 2022, solar panels produced 105,000MW-h of energy in January, 404,000MW-h of energy in July according to statscan, the federal government's stats arm. That's an aggregate including regions such as southern Ontario, which is significantly further south than most of the country and do not see the extreme temperatures I'm talking about.

Air conditioning is not comparable to heating. Air conditioning moves cold to hot areas and hot to cold areas. Heat pumps like this are capable of efficiencies above 100% since you use just a little energy to move heat from where it's unwanted to where it's wanted. By contrast, resistive heating can only achieve 100% efficiency because it needs to generate the heat that's in use. That's a massive drain on batteries. You might ask "well why not use a heat pump like air conditioning?", But heat pumps become inefficient for heating at low ambient temperatures. Most heat pumps don't work below -10C ambient, and cold climate heating pumps are a new product that can operate down to -30 but there can still be efficiency issues.

Not to mention that if the sun isn't sending enough energy to warm the environment to more than -40, then thermodynamically you can't use solar power to heat something like the inside of a vehicle or the battery of an EV without massively derating the solar panels so you'd need a massive solar panel compared to what you were trying to do.