OK, an all electric – in Norway ?
Geez, you probably have to choose between getting home or not freezing your @ss off but probably can’t do both at the same time ! lol
Michael wrote:
Geez, you probably have to choose between getting home or not freezing your @ss off but probably can’t do both at the same time ! lol
18% of new cars sold in Norway this year are all electric 
Besides, there are fast chargers everywhere and I charge for free at work, and when I enter my eup in the morning or afternoon it’s already warmed up and cozy, even at -30 C
LeSving wrote:
when I enter my eup in the morning or afternoon it’s already warmed up and cozy, even at -30 C
That’s cool, errr “hot” – so you can program the cabin pre-heater when it’s on the mains ?
But seriously, an electric heater must really pull down the battery in -30 .
My VW Touareg diesel doesn’t have any problem in warming up the engine or the cabin either at -20 degrees OAT
Michael wrote:
so you can program the cabin pre-heater when it’s on the mains ?
Yes, I use an app, scheduled and unscheduled heating VW has this “e-remote, car-net” system that use the mobile network I think. It also works on battery alone, but then you will shorten the reach.
My BMW starts to show “low on fuel” when it is about 150 km left. My eup doesn’t run more than 150 km when fully charged, if I’m lucky (160 km is the absolute max in perfect conditions). It sends a “warning” when there is 30 km left. Then at 20 it turns off heating and restrict power. At 10, the “low on fuel” starts to light. It feels strange the first week, but then you get used to it and there is no problem parking it in the garage with only 2-3 km battery power left.
We officially have got a new sort of anxiety due to electric cars: “rekkevidde-angst” or “reach-anxiety” loosly translated to english. It’s simply another measure that differentiates the boys from the men (and girls from women I guess )
Range anxiety in an aircraft feels much much worse than range anxiety in an electric car. Believe me, I’ve had both
achimha wrote:
Range anxiety in an aircraft feels much much worse than range anxiety in an electric car. Believe me, I’ve had both
He he. I’m already looking forward to electric airplanes, a combination of both.
achimha wrote:
Range anxiety in an aircraft feels much much worse than range anxiety in an electric car. Believe me, I’ve had both
+1
Heating is a major challenge in electric cars and it will be a much bigger one for electric planes IF they are ever going to become technically possible (meaning: if they find some amazing way to make batteries store at least 10 times more energy) because of the naturally lower ambient temperatures encountered, and the need for light weight precluding the use of decent insulation. All the electric planes I have seen were stripped down to the absolute bare skin, to save weight.
Heating while connected to the mains is obviously trivial, but it changes the equation only on short drives.
FWIW my diesel VW takes about 5x longer to start generating useful heat than any petrol car I have had, and that includes a 1995 3 litre Lexus/Toyota Soarer which started heating about 3 minutes after leaving the house. AFAIK they do this on diesels because delaying the onset of the diversion of engine heat for space heating improves the MPG figures; a hotter engine is more efficient presumably because the mixture can be leaned more/earlier. The engine itself makes as much heat as any other but the mfgs let it heat up to (in my case, the final controlled water temp of) +90C, or fairly close to it, before they open the heater. All in the name of better economy figures in the brochures. Plus they seal the driver in with duct tape and remove the mirrors, for collecting MPG data… I don’t really mind because I am immensely fortunate to have a garage which joins to the house.
This evening I did another 4 hours flight at FL150. Temperature was -23C most of the time and as it was night there was no sunlight. I went into a store and bought some snowboarding clothes. It turned out that it was a bit too much with the heater full on. But then I also figured out how to operate the air outlets in the cabin properly. You close the rear ones so that the warm air is used completely at the front. And I discovered that the foot warmer outlets were actually closed. Opening them helped against the cold from the floor.
But there is no way to fly at an OAT of -23C with the same clothes you would wear at 12C in direct sunlight, which was the temperature at the origin. At the destination it was 2C.
My take-away for now is that the heater does prevent you from freezing but it doesn’t really make a warm and cozy cabin at that kind of OAT. And in the decent it does get cold too :-)
