But with public charging infrastructure still patchy in rural Minnesota and the Dakotas and significant battery life reduction in frigid temperatures, many in the region may wonder how practical electric vehicles are during the coldest months of the year.
It’s generally accepted that most electric vehicles can expect to see their range reduced by about 40% when the temperature dips to 20 degrees or below. The issue is primarily driven by increased power draw from running things like heating and the defroster.
With the average range of vehicles soaring over the last decade and improvements to heating systems, the range issue is becoming less relevant by the year. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated the average electric vehicle topped 250 miles of range in 2020.
Newer vehicles in the $50,000 range will top 300 miles on a full charge, meaning a driver will be able to travel long distances even in the coldest of conditions.
Electric vehicle owners Tyler Bundy of Starbuck, Minnesota, and Brian Kopp of Dickinson, North Dakota, say they are often met with skepticism about their vehicles’ performance in the winter. Bundy, an IT network technician who frequently travels to South Dakota and Iowa for work in his 2021 Tesla Model 3, says cold weather should not be a concern if you have the right model.
“(It’s) not as bad as people like to think it is as long as you make sure to preheat the car beforehand — but that goes for any car," he said. "It handles well and it heats up much quicker than my gas car before."
On a frigid day this December, Bundy decided to make a roughly 300-mile round trip from his home near Alexandria to the eastern Twin Cities suburb of Woodbury. It was around 5 degrees and he only needed to stop for about 15 minutes to charge. Bundy said the vehicle was at about 65% charge when he started and for most of the trip, he had the heat cranked as he cruised at high speed on the interstate.
The Chevy Bolt he and his wife bought used a few years ago for around $17,500 has a listed range of about 240 miles, though between winter driving struggles and fewer rapid charging options, they tend to use it for short trips. Bundy said it can take up to an hour to fully charge at a non-rapid charging station.
"You could probably get 200 miles of range out of it if you baby it, but in the winter with winter tires and snow on the ground it is 120 miles on a good day," he said.
Kopp, an electric vehicle advocate who lives in western North Dakota not far from the heart of the Bakken oil patch, owns a computer business and spends his days traveling around the region visiting clients. He says cold is mostly irrelevant to his travel planning as his Tesla Model 19S travels more than 200 miles on a full charge in frigid conditions. In warmer weather, it gets around 330 miles, he said.
Tyler Bundy of Starbuck plugs in his Tesla electric car at a charging station in the Target parking lot in Alexandria on Dec. 9. Lowell Anderson / Alexandria Echo Press
It was much harder to get across North Dakota in an EV a few years ago before rapid charging became more widely available in the state. Recently Tesla installed rapid charging stations every 100 miles on Interstate 94, opening North Dakota up to more travel.
Jukka Kukkonen, chief EV educator and strategist for Shift2Electric, a Minnesota-based EV consulting company, said electric vehicles have come a long way in the past decade. When Kukkonen’s family started driving electric vehicles in 2012, they had a range of only 73 miles in ideal conditions. As of 2021, an increasing number of vehicles have ranges of 200 or even 300 miles.
"It's a different discussion ... and that's the thing that people don't realize,” he said. "They get much more nowadays because they have bigger batteries than they used to.”
"I would still say if you want to be on the safe side, 40 percent is a good number to think about," he said of winter driving. "So, if you have a 250-range car expect in the worst-case scenario 150 miles on the coldest days."
Battery drain from heating in cold weather is not as big of a concern as it used to be either, according to Kukkonen, who said vehicles get better at managing heating power consumption each year.
Charging station availability remains patchy in rural parts of Minnesota. Nine counties in the state's rural northwest and counties along much of the state's western border have no charging stations, according to a Minnesota Department of Transportation map. Naturally, many of the state's 1,171 chargers are concentrated in metropolitan areas where there are more electric vehicles to begin with.
Tyler Bundy of Starbuck stands next to his 2021 Tesla at a charging station in the Target parking lot in Alexandria on Dec. 9. Lowell Anderson / Alexandria Echo Press
Still, Kukkonen says drivers with concerns about patchy charging infrastructure needn't worry too much, as many EV drivers do the vast majority of their charging at home. Bundy, the Minnesota Tesla driver, said he rarely uses public charging and hadn't used the Tesla charging station in nearby Alexandria in six months before visiting it earlier in December.
The days of patchy charging infrastructure in rural areas could be numbered. Tesla continues to expand its charging network, and the recently passed federal infrastructure bill devotes billions of dollars to building half a million charging stations across the U.S. — of which $68 million is designated for charging stations in Minnesota.
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