Name: "Electric Cars Suck in the Winter"
Uploaded: 2026-02-18T21:36:44.000Z
Duration: 9 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

All right, let's talk about living with an electric car in the winter.

The imperative

So I've been seeing a lot of people saying electric cars are bad in the winter and that's why they could never own one.

It's actually a pretty common thing that I hear talked about a lot and I wanted to talk a little bit about that.

I've been driving and living with an electric car for a bunch of winters now.

This here is my tried and true tested Gen 1 Rivian R1T and a couple, I think three or four winters now at this point.

For those who don't know, in New Jersey winters get down to like the twenties, sometimes the tens, the teens, even single digits.

That's Fahrenheit by the way, for Celsius people.

I think when I got in the car this morning it said it was like 7 degrees or something like that.

It's cold enough that when you first get in the car and fire it up, you get that little message down in the corner that says, hey, it is so cold that you can expect your range to be limited and performance to be a little bit less just because of how freezing it is.

But now that I've been living with this EV in the winter for like I said, a couple of years now, my maybe hot take is I prefer driving the EV in the winter over the gas cars.

And there's definitely pros and cons, there's upsides and downsides to it.

So I figured I'd just walk you through that.

What it's like owning and living with an EV when it's very cold and there's real winter and whether or not you can do it too.

So the number one thing that obviously everybody kind of already knows about electric cars in the winter that I said already is your range will be worse.

So for example, this Rivian R1T I've had, it's got like 20,000 miles on it or something like that on a full charge.

But in the winter as I'm driving, I've noticed it's closer to 230 to 240 miles of range if I drive the exact same way.

And when it gets really, really cold, it can plummet down to like 200 or even less than that.

So yes, you are definitely affected by range.

And this is probably the number two factor, aside from literally how you're driving, how fast you're driving, the aerodynamic resistance, all the normal factors.

This is like if it's cold, you're gonna have a big hit to your range.

And then number two, right alongside that is charging can be slower.

I just recently did a video on the Ioniq 5 XRT, this little off road version of the Ioniq 5.

Testing it in the winter and driving it, really liking it.

But one thing that came up was that it was slower charging.

And it could have been partially because it is so cold out here, not entirely because of the cold, but

The battery pack wants to be a certain temperature to charge at its best, most efficient rates.

And if it's not, it has to spend extra energy getting up to that temperature or if it's hot, down to that temperature.

I think for a lot of owners, here's the other side of that coin, is if you are able to charge in a garage, obviously a lot of people do street parking and they don't have a garage, but

if you live with an EV and you're able to charge in a garage, then you're powering up every night to 80 or 90 or 100% charge.

And so you start every single day with a full battery, which is enough for your regular drive or your commute.

And so whether you have 300 miles of range or 200 or 100, as long as it's more than you need that day for your commute, and

then you drive home and then you charge up overnight and you get back to where you started, then it doesn't actually affect the day to day too much.

If you have a long drive, that's when it becomes more of a planning issue, more of a challenge, especially when it's this cold.

But I've actually found that I don't mind that particular downside very much because I have charger in the garage.

Of course, if you don't, that is a much bigger concern.

Never having to go to a gas station again is really such a double edged sword because obviously when it's freezing outside, you don't want to go to a gas station, get out and pump the gas and have to stand out there for a minute or two or three or four or whatever it is.

Actually in New Jersey you don't have to do that, but that's beside the point.

But that also means that for road trips it is the worst case scenario.

I get why there's a lot of people that have like one gas car and one ev, because for the road trips, the gas car is still going to make so much more sense when it gets this cold and when it's wintry and when your range starts dropping that much and it takes longer to charge, it just, it compiles over time.

And if you have multiple charging stops and you're sitting and you're waiting even longer than usual to charge, it makes road trips even worse than they already were compared to gas cars.

So it's just, it diminishes the road trip fun factor so much when it gets super cold like this.

But for every other normal commute or everyday driving, it's so much better to not ever have to go to a gas station.

But now here's some other things you probably haven't heard about owning an EV in the winter because they don't get talked about as much.

The first thing is you can preheat it anywhere, no matter what, whether it's in an enclosed garage or outside.

There's a lot of gas cars that you can preheat too.

You have remote start and you can heat them up for wherever.

But if it's in a garage, you don't want to do that because then you're burning gas in an enclosed space.

You can preheat an EV from anywhere, wherever, whenever.

It gets the battery also preconditioned and it gets it ready to go and warmed up before you actually get in and drive.

So you get into a warm car with everything heated up and ready to go, and

even if you don't preheat it, I found that in the winter, the three to five minutes that it takes for your gas engine to start to warm up and get things going and then for the heater to start blowing hot, hot air.

In an EV, that's more like 15 to 30 seconds tops.

Usually a couple of seconds you can get into a totally ice cold EV and turn up the heat and it's almost instantly blowing hot air.

in the winter, when you want your hands on the, you know, heated steering wheel and all that, and

the heated seats, like that's, that's a pretty big thing.

And then the next thing is actually driving.

So if you're just driving on pavement, on regular streets, you probably don't have to think about this too much.

if there's a lot of snow, if there's A lot of ice, sleet, random other weird road surface things that happen in the winter like they do here.

Ev's actually great for this because they have incredible levels of traction control.

They are heavier so you're not trying to corner or do anything sporty.

But because electronic traction control from an EV can adjust the motors hundreds, sometimes thousands of times per second, you have much more precise levels of TC and and much more precise levels of control over how it drives.

So if I'm just in normal mode in this Rivian, for example, it can hold traction or get me out of conditions that a gas pickup truck sometimes can't.

There's videos I've seen online of people with Rivians pulling F150s out of the snow, pulling semi trucks out of the snow because they have this incredible level of traction control.

So I thought that was really interesting.

And then also since it's a computer on wheels, you have these modes built in.

If you fire this up, you have snow mode, obviously just did the video on that xrt.

Hyundai's also got a snow mode, all these all terrain modes that can really modulate the level of slip and the level of traction control that you want.

And yeah, the computer on wheels just does its thing.

So I have found EVs to be much better at being under control in horrible road conditions like active snow, blizzards, whiteouts and stuff like that.

Now you might have noticed I mentioned that this is a first gen Rivian R1T and I've done a video both on this first gen and also the second generation Rivians.

And one of the big differences between them is the second generation Rivians have a heat pump.

So the front trunk in the second generation Rivian's is a little bit smaller than this first gen because right in the back here is a slightly bigger heat pump.

And that heat pump is used to be much more efficient and heat up more quickly in the winter when it's cold.

So I found the second generation can handle extreme cold a little bit better.

To me it still heats up pretty quick and still does an okay job in this Rivian.

But the newer ones with the heat pumps usually do even better.

in the winter in an electric car you can just get in the car and just go.