Every winter, mountains EV owners watch their range estimate fall and wonder whether the battery is going. Almost always, it is the heater.
This page is about telling those two things apart, because they look identical from the driver's seat and they mean completely different things.
Cabin heating is a real, large drain
An electric vehicle has no waste engine heat to warm the cabin with, so heating comes out of the pack. On a cold mountains morning that is a substantial, continuous draw — and unlike acceleration, it does not stop when you stop.
Add a cold battery that is working at reduced efficiency until it warms, limited regeneration for the first part of the trip, and shorter journeys that never get anything up to temperature, and the winter range figure can look alarming.
None of that is capacity loss. It is consumption. The energy is leaving the pack faster; the pack is not smaller.
Three things that help, none of which involve a workshop
Precondition while plugged in. Warming the cabin and battery from the wall rather than from the pack is the single biggest improvement available, and it costs you nothing in range.
Use the heated seat and steering wheel in preference to the cabin heater where the vehicle has them. Heating a person is far cheaper than heating the air around them.
Expect the figure to recover in spring. It will, because nothing was lost.
How to tell if it is actually the battery
The dashboard range estimate cannot answer this. It is a prediction built from recent driving efficiency — it moves with weather, speed, load and how the last few hundred kilometres were driven, and two identical vehicles can show ranges 40 km apart on the same morning with identical batteries.
State of Health is a different number entirely, and it does not move with the weather. It lives in the battery management system, it is not displayed anywhere in the vehicle, and it measures capacity relative to when the pack was new.
A measurement in July and a measurement in February on the same vehicle will give the same figure. That is what makes it worth having when the dash is telling you a seasonal story.
What Hazelbrook does the rest of the year
Mid-mountains, heavily treed, cooler than the plains below and cooling down properly overnight. Heat is what permanently removes capacity and there is comparatively little of it here. Most housing has a garage or carport. Local vehicles generally have a genuinely easy thermal life and tend to measure accordingly.
Where we come to
Hazelbrook, Lawson, Woodford, Linden, Bullaburra, Wentworth Falls, Faulconbridge and Springwood. Home garages, driveways and seller addresses.
Booking
Online booking is open for all mid-mountains postcodes. $249, no travel surcharge. Phone 02 7252 1390 to arrange it by voice.
EV battery testing across the Blue Mountains · Lawson · Work out a vehicle's real range · Book a test — $249