"Plug-In" Electric Car Heat & Defrost

Lookee here-- if you kept the hoses attached and leak-free, all the heater flaps and the spring-loaded thermostat functioning properly the VW heating system was more than adequate for a vehicle the size of a bug especially if you kept the revs up on the engine. It was really in the busses that you froze in and practically needed the gas heater.

Anyways, one of the slickest electric car conversions I’ve ever seen is this guy’s 85 Fiero: http://www.greenplanet3.org/ev/Climate.html

He has page on the climate systems on his page.

Looks like I might have to just keep running the iron I already have and see what shakes out in the next couple of years. By the way, I needed defrosters this a.m. This is way too early. It always is. We don’t have global warming or climate change where I live.

Ah the good old days! I used 3 Army blankets, one on my lap, one on the passenger’s lap and one across both of our laps. The scraper sure came in handy!. The heat pipeswere rusted away years ago.
Anyway, the “gas” heaters of the day worked very well, and that would be my suggestion

Electric cars in the future will have heat pumps to heat/cool the car and defrost the windshield. These have 2-3 times the efficiency of resistance heaters. Airplanes have always been heated/cooled this way.

Good memory, just really short.

I agree with you concerning my 71 Super Beetle heat. I disagree with you on my 64. With everything working right (greased cables, freed-up flappers on heater boxes, new heater hoses, etc.) and driving in a lower gear I still froze in our -25F winters.

However, I don’t remember ever replacing that little brass accordian thermo, oops, maybe that was it, I can’t remember!

P.S. I’ve seen that Fiero. I have two of the gasoline models.

Tough to estimate the power demand unless you’re involved in the design of the system. It’s not typically a 100% duty cycle operation so a lot would depend on the usage profile for various users, climate and season. The efficiency of heat/cooling transfer would need to be known to understand the system output requirements. Also, you’d need to know how the system was designed to understand efficiency from input power to output. Like I said, the larger heat pumps using scroll compressors are exceeding 7x efficiency in input to output “power”. Scaled down, you might only see 5x for example. Too many unknowns to say for sure what the demand would be but I believe (gut feel) that it is a viable solution when you do the quick calculation of BTU output to watt/hour input requirements…

Overall power demands can be reduced quite a bit from the prior incarnations of electric cars. As a couple examples, LEDs (for interior and exterior brake/signal/marker lighting) and fiber optics could replace most of the power hungry lighting and communications cabling used previously.