Too cold to charge: Chicago becomes Tesla graveyard from the cold weather

[SomeGuyFromOlympia]

but electric is good
and global warming is a fact
so, this non-charging issue is Trump fake news

 

[larboc]

I agree with skyhiranger my uneducated guess is the idiot engineers did not allow the superchargers power supply to run the heaters in the battery to allow it warm up before charging. Instead they rely on the battery packs power to do this. Not enough remain power in pack to heat them up no charging. Then you toss the idiot people who choose to live in Chicago and bingo the perfect storm of not being able to charge your Tesla.

Option 2 not big enough heaters in the pack to deal with the sub zero cold.

I don't know enough about Tesla pack heating, do they rely soley on the heatpump/octovalve to heat the battery or do they still have resistive heating in the pack? The heating/cooling system on teslas is more complex, and in many ways more advanced/better than the "typical" oem's in the way they handle HVAC and a lot of that comes from the heat pump, but that obviously isn't going to work well in the extreme cold, but should still make heat, and you sure would have thought they would have considered it.


Taking a look at the cell datasheet for some 21700's in an existing project, LG says no charging at all below 32F, 0.3C from 32-76F, and has to get to 77F to charge at 0.7C. A quick google search says the S has a 6kW heater which could struggle to get to 32F at -20F if the heater is being used to heat coolant in a loop to heat the battery instead of internal battery PTC's.

Here is were I think the problem could be, similar to what you're theorizing. LG says no discharge at all below -22F. If the battery won't close contactors below -22F to protect itself (assuming the limits are similar in a tesla cell), then the HVDC bus probably can't be energized to run a HVDC heater since the charger would need the battery capacity to stabilize the HVDC bus voltage when connected to a charger. Maybe software overrides could fix this and carefully use the input caps on the components to get the party started, but that likely wouldn't be enough and even if it did it would cause all kinds of noise on a DC fast charger link that relies heavily on PLC to do the handshake to close it's contactors.

 

[kmkommes]

Looks fun. But guessing you keep it in a heated garage.

No. I test things like they should be tested. It was a high of 0F here the last few days. Today it is up to 10F.
The removable batteries were kept in the machine. I just went out there and drove it forward and backwards 6 feet. No problem discharging. Slight problem with snow depth today.

I am taking the batteries in to store/charge.

 

[Mikel]

Some data:

Tesla Fire: Digital record of Tesla fire incidents

Tesla Fire records information about Tesla car fires and other Tesla fire incidents that received news coverage.

www.tesla-fire.com

Tesla Deaths: Digital record of Tesla crashes resulting in death

Tesla Deaths is a record of Tesla accidents that involved the death of a driver, occupant, cyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian.

www.tesladeaths.com

 

[larboc]

I could if I wanted but I've skipped it. I think they'll be up next week near the calumet air force station.

I've been up there for testing when I worked at Oshkosh Truck.

I went to MTU and still have lots of family around Houghton, Freda, Toivola. I'm from Rock (grew up across the street to the west of the boney falls river basin). If you know the UP.

I generally don't roam that far south, I stay north of the bridge, lol.

These your guys?

 

[CarterKraft]

I generally don't roam that far south, I stay north of the bridge, lol.

These your guys?

Watching those YouTubers Ambition Strikes with the Toro electric blowers looks pretty awesome compared to fuckin around with a gas engine.

I don't know shit about snow blowing, plowing or shoveling so take that with a grain of salt...