Can't do this in an electric car

@Elessar batteries will go dead some don't even work after minus 10

@NinaTina You don't need them for igloo effect (nor the engine of the ICE car); also gasoline freezes at some point

Think of actual igloos, those don't have engines or batteries. They work because the insulate you from the exterior environment, and body heat alone warms the inside

@NinaTina He was not running his engine. If your car is buried in snow, the last thing you want to do is run the engine: you will be dead in a few minutes from carbon monoxide positioning.

The Igloo effect is from being insulated from the outside air, exactly like one would be inside an igloo.

@Elessar never thought of that👍🏽

@Northwest thank you.i admit I was wrong

@NinaTina As north said, if the engine was on the guy would've been asphyxiated 😅

@NinaTina I've lived in a part of the country (technically it's still Canada for now, but give it a couple of weeks), where I would find my car totally buried in snow.

@NinaTina Really? Which ones are they? I haven't heard of any such thing here in Norway where we have more EVs than petrol cars and almost as many as diesel.

Certainly my Tesla S doesn't have any problems at -10 C, nor at -25 C, except that range on short journeys suffers.

@ninalanyon I was wrong..sorry🙄

@ninalanyon Kudos to Norway. Nearly all new car purchases in 2024 were EVs 🙌

We get the same weather Scandinavia gets in parts of my state. I've had no problem driving my EV in -15C, and going 200+ km.

There's a ton of misinformation about EVs out there, so it's not the OP's fault.

Out of curiosity, why would you drive a Tesla instead of a Vovlo?

@Northwest My Tesla is a 2015 Model S, there were no Volvo EVs at the time I bought it in 2017. I have had two Volvos, a 1965 Amazon estate and a 1976 245 Estate. As far as I know my ancient Model S is still ahead of the Volvos, and most other brands, as far as driver assistance is concerned. But this is a very individual thing and depends on what one is used to; Tesla loaned me a brand new Model 3 for a couple of weeks in 2023 while they very slowly obtained a battery for me and I really didn't like it even though it was more capable than my ancient Model S.

There was another big reason for going for the Model S and that is that it came with free supercharging. So far I have driven about 150 thousand km at a 'fuel' efficiency of about 250 Wh/km. That's close to 40 MWh. It would cost about 3 NOK/0.30 USD per kWh to charge at Tesla (more outside Norway) so I've saved about 100 kNOK, (about 10 kUSD). If I had a different brand it would have cost a lot more to charge and even now that other brands can use many of the Tesla chargers it is still more expensive for non-Teslas than Teslas. That saving is more than 20% of what I paid for the car.

I agree it's not the OP's fault but it's still worth correcting it :-)

@ninalanyon Looks like Tesla is selective in where it offers free charging (if at all). But this sounds like a great deal for you.

In the US, no one I know of who owns a Tesla gets free charging.

I don't own a Tesla, and I rarely go to a charging station. I usually get home, plug into my 60AMP home charger and by the time I am ready to head out in the morning, I have a full charge. Our legal electrical grid is hydro-fed, so we have the lowest rates in the country, even though we're in competition now with data centers (especially that Amazon and Microsoft are both "local" home companies).

Toyota's Fuel Cell cars are shipping in volume in California, but the network is not ready in Washington State. Toyota is also offering Californias 6 year free hydrogen fuel (3 if the car is leased).

@Northwest Free charging was only offered for the first few years. I think they cancelled it in 2016 and reinstated it in 2017 for one year. It only ever applied to the Model S and Model X. I bought mine second-hand from Tesla and the free charging was a feature of the car. But now if Tesla buys back a car they remove the free charging feature before reselling it. I think Tesla offered the feature everywhere in the beginning as a way of encouraging sales. There was also a period when you could make a one off payment to add the feature to the car. In the long run it probably cost Tesla a lot of money, especially in Norway because there were no restrictions on the charging because it belonged to the car not the owner so some taxi drivers bought a Model S. Tesla Norway apparently emailed owners that were making heavy use of free supercharging to ask them to not do it at peak times so as to leave stalls available for other users; this was when there were not many chargers.

I don't understand why Toyota keep pushing fuel cell cars. Hydrogen makes no sene for private cars. It's probably only a sensible alternative for heavy equipment and vehicles that need to operate far from good grid connections. The end to end efficiency is worse than batteries, never mind the need to install and fill thousands of hydrogen tanks.

@ninalanyon we are on our second Hybrid. First was a Prius, this one a high end Camry hybrid. Can't believe it's now 10 years old and still worth almost $10k. I hope it holds out until plug in hybrids become affordable. With Biden out of the way gas powered anything will hopefully make a comeback.

@ninalanyon A prototype fuel-cell powered railway locomotive or multiple-unit train (I'm not sure which) is already being developed in Britain, where also the agricultural and earth-moving plant maker JCB has started building hydrogen-powered versions.

I don't know if JCB uses fuel-cells or direct internal-combustion but the practical difficulty for potential customers is the scarcity of supplies of hydrogen. The gas would certainly be practical for railways and other large-scale users, though.

Though fuel supply was no doubt a similar problem a hundred+ years ago when the petrol-engine started to usurp battery-electric power for cars and small goods-vehicles....

@ArishMell Hydrogen is just a way of propping up the fossil fuel industry. At the moment the only practical source of hydrogen is steam reforming of natural gas (methane).

Here is a graphic showing an outline of the process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

As you can see even the best case releases 1.5 tonne of O2 for every 1.1 tonne of H2 produced and it requires 10.2 MWh of energy to produce.

Hydrogen has a heat of combustion of 142 MJ/kg, that's 39 MWh/tonne so we can think of that as the embodied energy of the fuel. This means that the efficiency of the process is at best about 75% on the production side. Then you have to account for the efficiencies of transport and actual combustion in a heat engine subject to Carnot's law (efficiency = (Thot - Tcold) / Thot).

The auto ignition temperature of hydrogen is 500 C (773 K) and the exhaust temperature of a typical engine is probably above 100 C (373 K) so the absolutely best efficiency is 52% which is achievable for petrol powered Formula 1 cars but typical real world ICE cars are about 20% efficient.

So the end to end efficiency is definitely under 40%. and most likely about 15%.

In fact it is likely worse because this does not account for the efficiency of production of the 10.2 MWh/tonne of input energy which most likely comes from fossil fuels too and is again produced at less than 50% efficiency.

@ninalanyon Thak you for that information. I was not commenting on the efficiency of the fuel as I didn't know the figures, but that hydogen needs so much energy to produce, however it is produced, that it it is not as "green" as often suggested.

Also, if burnt in an conventional i.e. engine the exhaust is mainly water, yes, but also still nitrous oxides as produced by petrol and diesel engines. Although modern diesel vehicles now have catalysers that decompose the NOx to oxygen and nitrogen - something the more virulent anti-Diesel people seem not to know!