[vel0city]

I'll add another feature I really like: preconditioning while still parked in my garage. Its super hot here in the summer. My garage will still be like 90F in the morning. I've set my car to cool itself down when its time to leave though and it does it all from the wall power so it doesn't even sacrifice any range. So while my ICE would still be >90F inside when I first hop in, my EV is 70F and ready to go. I can't do this with my ICE as it would emit tons of carbon monoxide.

They're also not nearly as wasteful energy-wise. As mentioned its stupid hot out here. Sometimes I need to park and wait for something such as drive up to go or waiting on my spouse to just run into a store to grab something quick or waiting out front of someone's house while I'm picking them up. I'm going to want to keep the AC running, because its like 110F at a high humidity outside with a bright sun beating down. In my ICE, its wasting tons of gas sitting there idling, probably less than 10% of the energy being consumed is actually going to cool the cabin. Most of it is just spinning metal around, pushing fluids through things, and throwing off tons of waste heat (I don't need any more heat, its already hot outside!). Meanwhile my EV could sit running the AC for a long time without making a pretty big dent in its energy usage. And when its sitting there running the AC and the radio, almost all the energy is being used running the AC and the stereo. This makes the per-minute cost of idling massively cheaper, a cost a lot of people don't think about.

[giardini]

"Preconditioning" an EV in the garage is foolish: you're transferring heat from inside the car to the garage and you're heating up the battery, too!

[vel0city]

The battery is in the cooling loop; I'm pretty sure its involved in the preconditioning if necessary.

You're right I'm adding a bit of extra heat load to the garage. I'm not about to sit in my garage for a bit though, I'm only stepping into it for a few minutes. And then the sun is going to rise and bake it back up to almost 100F again in an hour or so anyways. Making the temp go from 90F to 92-94F in there just doesn't make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

And it is definitely a useful thing to do, as it takes a lot of work to get the car cool, energy that now doesn't have to come from the battery. Its an extra kWh or so that doesn't come from the battery.

[cptskippy]

> In my ICE, its wasting tons of gas sitting there idling...

This was surprising to me, Tech Ingredients tested the fuel consumption of idling ICE vehicles and found them to be incredibly efficient while idling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNiapuA0yTQ

For example you'd waste more gas dropping your kid off at practice, driving home, and returning to pick them up then if you just sat idling in the parking lot waiting for an hour.

FWIW, I own 2 EVs and seeing people idling in their ICE vehicles still annoys me.

[vel0city]

> found them to be incredibly efficient while idling.

Its not really that they're incredibly efficient, its that the energy needed to move you home and back again overall is massively more than what you'd use idling. Its still a very inefficient use of energy, from the perspective of the amount of energy in the gasoline being burned versus the actual useful work you got out of it in the end.

In that video the 2012 Mazda 3 used $1.53 in energy cost to do pretty much nothing at all. There was some snow on the ground but it was otherwise sunny, so I doubt it really needed to try and heat that much but I don't really know the air temp. That pickup used $4.10 in energy cost to once again also do practically nothing. The Outback used $2.95.

My EV has a 68kWh useful battery pack. Idling for two hours in extreme heat might use 10%, but I doubt that. I'll regularly precondition for 15-30 minutes when its hot outside to bring it down to temp (way more work bring it down from 100 than keeping it 70) and it normally only eats a few percent of the battery, but we'll err on the high side it'll be fine. I pay ~$0.10/kWh. 68 * 10% * $0.10 = $0.068. And even then, if it was a decent-ish day outside (sunny, not cold wind or extreme heat, probably like in the video) my EV would have used probably less than 2% keeping the stereo and DRLs on for a couple of hours.

My EV is pretty similar to that Outback. So for about the same idling that Outback would cost almost $3 while my EV would cost less than $0.10.

[cptskippy]

I wasn't attempting to say an ICE more efficient or as efficient as an EV, we all know they are no where near approaching similar efficiency. I was just pointing out that for an ICE idling is their most efficient state next to being shut off and is significantly more efficient that when moving.

We tend to think of ICE efficiency in terms of MPG and naturally assume that their idling efficiency to be similar to their maximum driving efficiency and that's incorrect.