In a car with a combustion engine, it is easy to understand why it takes quite a long time for the interior to warm up in winter. After all, the engine first has to heat up the cooling water. It’s different in an electric vehicle: Here the heat comes from the electric heater, so it should actually be much faster, right? Not really. Sometimes it feels like an eternity.
Fans of eternal ice can already try the heated flops Fiat 500e, Renault Zoe, Tesla Model Y and VW e-up! deal with They are the losers in the ADAC comparison test, which parked e-cars in the cold chamber at minus ten degrees. The above-mentioned frostbite took more than 30 minutes until 20 degrees prevailed in the front seats. Warm air blows out of the vents fairly quickly on all candidates tested – that just has a different effect. Blessed are those who get into a BMW iX after a bitterly cold winter night can get in. A feel-good atmosphere prevailed here after just 20 minutes. The VW ID.3 and Hyundai Kona Elektro needed more than 20 minutes for this. Particularly noticeable: Some vehicles did not manage to get the rear warm even after 30 minutes of continuous heating. The manufacturers sometimes economize on the air vents or pursue inadequate heating strategies. Differences in insulation There are also differences in heat insulation: In some vehicles, the temperature drops much more slowly than in others. This is important for short stops, because less energy is required to heat it up again, which means that the range is protected more. In the test, BMW and VW performed best in this regard – with an interior temperature of 16 and 15 degrees after five minutes of engine standstill and 10 and 9 degrees after a half-hour break. The other cars cool faster and further. Because of the excess heat from the waste heat from the engine in combustion vehicles, thermal insulation has not been a relevant requirement in vehicle construction up to now. Electric cars, however, have to use the energy from the drive battery for heating, which is then no longer available for driving. This is at the expense of increased consumption and thus a lower range. Heating increases the range It has also been shown that all of the cars examined require around 1.5 to 2 kW of power to keep the interior at 20 degrees at a frosty minus 10 degrees outside temperature keep. So if you had to endure 10 hours in a traffic jam in extreme cases, you would need 15 to 20 kWh of energy from the battery to stay warm all the time less consumption work. Some vehicles offer a “driver only” mode, in which the driver’s area is specifically heated. The Eco mode also saves on heating output, but also on consumption.By the way: every electric car has an auxiliary heater as standard and can be preheated, controlled via an app, for example. If the vehicle is connected for charging, the power for pre-heating is also taken from the power grid instead of the battery and thus does not affect the range.
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