Originally Posted by Serge
...because, electric cars are getting cheaper. 200 mile range cars are coming out left and right. Its enough for most i think. Thought?
Maybe, if the electric is used only in town, but that was always the case, dating back to 1904, and the age-old arguments against electrics still apply.
Minnesota's climate isn't that much different than Manitoba's. Climb into the car when it's 20 below F, turn on the heat, the defroster fan, the rear-window defrost heating wires, the heated seats, the heated steering wheel, the heated outside mirrors, the headlights, the radio and the wipers, and you'd be lucky if the battery has enough oomph left to rotate the square tires once.
Distances to anywhere else are vast in each of our locations, though anywhere else in Canada is sparser. The next fair-sized population centre west of Winnipeg is 50 miles away, then 120 miles away. Oops. can't get back from the second one without a decent charge, especially if you managed it in winter. A driver could watch his kid grow and graduate with a doctorate while filling up.
South-east of Winnipeg there's a small city about 30 miles away, but the next population centre east, in that particular lake-district, summer-vacation country, is about 150 miles away. Beyond that it's here-be-dragons territory for electrics. And that's in summer.
I cannot find, and never could, a decent electric-car cold-weather test on the internet. Those I do find are so-called winter tests in southern Ontario where they call out the army if it snows, or in Norway where cold means 20°F. I stopped looking months ago, but I doubt anything's changed. A real cold-weather video would cut their own throats.
Running an electric car in the northern U.S., excluding, perhaps, on the West Coast, and in Canada, in a stretch, southern Ontario and British Columbia, is the same as motorcycle season, with the added inconvenience of growing old after plugging the thing in to get home.