Naturally, cold weather makes the battery even colder than normal, so charging without preconditioning will be slower than normal. Once earned up, the battery should charge just as quickly as it does in warmer weather – so long as the charge station is also working inside its optimum temperature window.
Yuasa, a producer of 12-volt car batteries, says: “Cold temperatures directly affect the performance of car batteries. In fact, at zero degrees celsius a battery will lose about 30 per cent of its cranking performance. If your car will not start it’s usually because there is an issue with your battery.”
“It is a problem to have batteries in cold weather, and we have a pretty cold climate, one of the coldest in North America,” said Stretch Blackard, owner of Tok Transportation, which contracts with the local schools. When the temperature hits zero, his cost to run Tok’s electric bus doubles.
Some experts think that self-heating batteries could be another way to help EVs beat the cold. In 2018 scientists at Pennsylvania State University announced they had created such a battery by incorporating a nickel foil that intercepts electrons when the battery dips below room temperature.
The scientists say this could let batteries quick-charge even at temperatures as low as –58 degrees F (–50 degrees C). Other approaches, such as harnessing pulses of electric current from the car’s motor, can also warm up batteries for faster charging in the cold.
“Extreme cold introduces safety risks for charging batteries,” says Paul Gasper, a staff scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Electrochemical Energy Storage group. Scientists generally consider lithium-ion batteries safe to use in a relatively