I’ve never seen an electric motor with coolant. A hybrid, yes, but no EVs that I’ve seen.
…and gear oil lasts a lot longer than engine oil.
OK, I can see your point. Currently you can probably get around 16 or 17 hours worth of running the heater from a (by today’s standards) long-range electric car if you aren’t driving it at the same time. Realistically that’s gonna give you probably a full day worth of heat because you don’t need to run it constantly to maintain temperature - especially if you’re smart and turn it down to survivability levels rather than completely comfortable levels.
But yeah, if I were in a situation right now where I ran the risk of getting stranded for a couple of days and I wanted an electric car, I’d… Well wait, I’d probably just not drive on those days. 
For those who must, well, a couple of things: Those are edge cases and they don’t have to get an electric car yet. And that’s an indication that we need to rethink work in our society, because if you run the risk of getting fired for not trapping yourself on a blizzard-closed highway for 2 days, something’s severely screwed up there, and it’s not you.
That said, 500 mile range Teslas are just over the horizon, there’s also a 150kwh battery on the horizon which will give you a 50% boost in heater time over what’s available now, and that’s just near-future stuff. As @MikeInNH pointed out, what’s available 10 or 15 years down the road is going to blow everything we have now out of the water. If anything, he was too conservative in assuming the average range will only be 500 miles. By then I’d fully expect us to be chuckling at the idea that we used to have to stop and pour flammable carcinogens into a tank every 300 miles instead of getting our battery packs wirelessly topped up every time we pull into the garage.
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Wondering if tow trucks are being equipped with chargers or if an ev battery is dead they would just tow it.
Having only a battery driven vehicle would not be something for us . What I would like is a second vehicle that is better than the LSV ( Low Speed Vehicle ) that were the rage a few years ago . Something that could do 50 to 60 MPH and have a range of at least 150 miles.
Frankly I can’t grasp the fact that I can’t license a Golf cart type vehicle that would do this . Certainly no more dangerous to the driver than the Motorcycles here in Oklahoma than anyone over 21 can ride without a helmet .
The motor controller (inverter) usually has coolant, sometimes the battery.
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He seems to be a good candidate for all-electric.
My coworker owns Prius Prime and says car “knows” when to start burning fuel which is about to go stale, so it’s not really gloom&doom scenario here, unless the car manufacturer was not smart enough to plan for this use-case.
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Fortunately the newspaper column can be located, and a person can read it if he or she wants.
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Tell my daughter who lives in Albany how rare it is to be stuck on the Thruway for days. It has happened to her Twice, coming home for the holidays. The snow belt between Buffalo and Ripley is no picnic either.
I never said the Thruway did not do a great job of plowingm it is just that the very limited access and the large traffic volume makes getting things unsnarled after a major storm more difficult. Just a few years ago the state made the decision to close the Thruway early so masses of people would not be stranded so long. Why wait for the inevitablepileup to shut the road down and endanger so many people. Now when a major storm starts, they stop people from getting on.
I’m surprised, but not shocked, that people are still getting stranded on the Thruway after what happened in the Blizzard of '77. You’d think they’d learn to stay off the roads in those kinds of conditions. We’re good enough at weather forecasting that this shouldn’t happen anymore.
Normally people do not plan to get stuck in a snow storm. It may start quickly. You may be out already and trying to get home. You may decide to take a chance to make it to an event, and so on. Bad luck, bad decision making, or just fate. Back in the big one in the Mid-west, guys were out duck hunting in their shirt sleeves and never made it home it came up so fast. Lotta people died.
Many newer hybrids address this by running the engine occasionally whether the ICE is needed or not to address the stale gas issue. The Pacifica PHEV does this.
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We’ve previously discussed a product by a company called blink, the mobile unit weighs 350lbs so it’s more likely to be in a truck that does roadside assistance. Not to mention the estimated $4,500 price.
Missed it I guess, so for $4500 I could put one in the back of my suv and offer service, $100 a pop?
One article I found suggested that it was probably cheaper than that but they didn’t have an update, the local towing company that’s a AAA battery provider would likely get one if they see the demand, if they don’t already have something similar.
You don’t have to tell me about the Blizzard of 77, I experienced it. Technically it was not even a snowstorm, It was a windstorm that roared down Lake Erie with bitter cold and winds that did not drop below 50 mph for three days. The wind picked up the snow off frozen lake Erie and dumped it on the Buffalo area. My now son in law was stuck at our house, the furnace never shut off and never got the temp over 60 degrees. I was a city driver at the time and and out picking up freight when driving became impossible. an 18 foot high underpass filled to the top and the ezpressway wasw wasw already blocked so I took my tractor trailer through my own neighborhood and managed to get into our terminal. My wife had our only car and was afraid to come and get me and they were closing our terminal.
I jumped in a tractor, drove my tractor to my house, had my wife follow me back to the terminal and then I drove us back home.
People froze to death in front of their own homes sitting in their car waiting for the wind to drop because opening the car door was instant pain. When the wind finally dropped my son in laws Ford wagon would not start. When he cranked it the distributor as full of white wind packed ice so strong the the rotor that could not turn stripped the distributor drive gear off the camshaft. Of the 4 cars at our house, the only one that started was my sons 64 Valiant.
We had freight trains we did not find until April.
To clear the main streets in Buffalo, after the storm, they were using payloaders and pump truck plus big plows to push snow into the Niagara river which never freezes. Many cars were never found, they think they went into the river. The first day the mayor gave up, he had every street entering the city plowed shut and sent everyone home and imposed an absolute travel ban. He appeared on TV and told everyone the stay home and drink a six pack.
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I’m a warm weather kind of guy. Living through that would make me want to move somewhere else right away.
My mother grew up in Minnesota and has stories of Grandpa bringing the car battery inside so it wouldn’t freeze and spending 3 hours shoveling the driveway. As soon as she was of age she moved to sunny CA and never looked back.
I would rather have a blizzard like that every year than live through a Florida or Southern California Summer. That is how much I hate heat.
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I hear you. Precautions get put in place. Working at GFAFB ND in winter we had minimum requirements for gear in the car for winter, the best one a candle, along with blankets water and I don’t remember what else. You called and told them you were coming, being mission essential personnel, and if you did not arrive within 10 minutes of when you were supposed to get there they would send out a search party. Pre cellphone days.
A 120VAC or 240VAC generator could do this. Same as routine charging.
Just not so fast.