Until it has gotten better, I will stay away from full electric cars. And it may not happen in my lifetime.
Right you are, MikeSimon! There really hasn't been a whole lot of
significant battery technology changes in the last decades. Oh yes, they've refined Li-Ion batteries in terms of energy density, they've done some changes to the charging technology with controllers, but fundamental issues probably having to do with molecular physics provide a hard wall that's tough to breach. Batteries in cars don't like the cold and they don't like the heat. I don't know if its true for every electric car, but many must have battery heaters to keep the batteries warm in the winter, and they also must have a cooling system because they don't like the heat either. The Chicago situation is living proof of the former. For the latter, simply take your smart phone (which probably has some form of lithium battery inside) and place it in the sun on a summer days. Soon you'll get a warning about the heat.
When we had a PEH car, the one hard failure we had (which rendered the car inoperable) was a part called the "auxiliary battery heater". It's not rocket science to figure out what that part did on the car. Unfortunately for us at the time, Ford knew of defects in the design of that part, and ours failed before "Rev A" came out, and we waited over a month for delivery of the part.
Rodd also had it right about planning ahead. Yes, these folks should have had their cars in Chicago "topped off" prior to the cold snap. However, being in Chicago, I bet there are a number of these Tesla owners that are city dwellers that don't have a garage and thus no place to even install their own Level II charger. In my small suburban subdivision of about 30 homes, we now have six Teslas, a Rivian, a Jeep 4xe, a Mercedes EQE, and a Nissan Leaf. Each owner has a garage and each has a 50-60A, 240V Level II charger. They can charge overnight in a garage. One owner has 20 solar panels and she charges during the day when she's not buying power. City dwellers have little of that luxury. I remember my Mercedes test drive in a SmartElectric. They ran the test drive in Brooklyn, NY. The presentation included information on how great this little car would be in a place like NYC. However, looking at the densely populated neighborhood, I wondered how and where they would charge it? The Mercedes folks had an advance team install temporary Level II chargers on the sidewalk, blocked off street parking for this event, then they had the power running into a building. Yeah, not happening in Brooklyn today.
Meanwhile, hybrids seem to be an option with little issue. The technology (think Toyota Prius, whose fundamental tech has been licensed to others) is mature now. Each one of our three hybrids gets between 30-60 mpg, about 2-4x the efficiency of the equivalent ICE-only models.
Like MikeSimon, I will stay away from full electric, for now at least. Let the early adopters deal with the limitations.
