In December 2023, news spread on the Internet that electric vehicle batteries that died in severe frost caused congestion on German roads. We decided to check if anything like this actually happened.
A photo allegedly showing a German highway blocked due to dead electric vehicles. published some Media, informational And entertaining resources. Social media users also shared the photo (X, "VKontakte"), blog platforms ("Zen", LiveJournal) And forums. The image also became popular on Telegram: it was posted by the channels “Freshness"(275,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Evil proof"(177,000), "Mislivets Egor"(73,000), "Club service" (72,000), "Open Ukraine | Open Ukraine"(57,000), etc.
On December 2, 2023, the south of Germany was hit by a strong snowfall, which caused a transport collapse. Air traffic was suspended in the region, trains to and from Munich were delayed and cancelled, and public transport in the Bavarian capital was also limited. Neighboring countries also suffered from bad weather: the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland. In particular, on the key Czech motorway D1 between Prague and Brno, the accident caused a 20-kilometer traffic jam of trucks. There were also congestion on the D5 highway connecting Prague with Germany. Temperature in the region on the night of December 3 it reached –17 °C. However, “Verified” was unable to find information in reputable German or other European media that the cause of any of the congestion was the batteries of electric vehicles discharged in the cold. It was not possible to find in media reports a widely circulated (or similar) photo showing the consequences of bad weather in Bavaria.
The image of a snow-covered highway with stranded cars that accompanies most news posts was taken long before the snowfall that covered southern Germany. Based on Google image searches, it has long been used in media coverage of winter weather (e.g., “Ural week" published it in a 2014 article about cold weather in the USA, Life in the same year, he illustrated for them the news about upcoming precipitation in Moscow in 2021 “Murmansk Herald"called on residents of the region to be careful during snowfalls, accompanying the message with the same photo). The photo was taken on February 2, 2011 by an agency photographer Associated Press during a snowstorm in Chicago (USA), when hundreds of cars were stranded overnight on the city's main street. However, in this case, “Verified” was unable to find information that the cause of the congestion was discharged electric vehicles. It is noteworthy that this is not the first time that the photo has been used to illustrate posts (often biased) about the unreliability of batteries in electric vehicles. AFP fact checkers in July 2022 have already refuted similar messages (the news was then caused by a snow storm in the US state of Virginia).
“Verified” was unable to find out who and where was the first to post a photo of a snow-covered highway and link it with bad weather in Germany. It is possible that this initially happened abroad, however, in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, the earliest similar post that could be found was published in the Telegram channel “Freshness» December 3, 2023 at 14:13 Moscow time. This channel has previously been seen publishing false information. For example, “Verified” refuted the messages posted there that the Ukrainian porn actress Nancy Hey announced her candidacy for the post of President of the country or that Western media are calling for chipping children.
Electric cars are indeed less practical in extreme cold than cars with an internal combustion engine (ICE), since physical and chemical reactions in the battery occur more slowly at low temperatures. Another reason is that an electric car is forced to spend additional energy heating the interior, whereas in cars with an internal combustion engine, part of the heat generated by the engine can be used to maintain a comfortable temperature inside. In addition, a car with a dead battery in the middle of the highway cannot be charged in the absence of specialized infrastructure nearby - this is precisely why the authors of posts who published common photos from Chicago under the guise of Germany explain the traffic jams.
Nevertheless, repeated experiments indicate that the risk of a battery dying in a traffic jam in the cold within a couple of hours is not that great. In January 2022, enthusiasts from the YouTube project Dirty Tesla conducted a test on two models of electric vehicles produced by this company. One of them was installed heat pump, which helps redistribute heat in the car. The batteries were charged to 90%, the interior heating in electric cars was set to 21 °C and they were left in the cold of about -10 °C. After 12 hours of the experiment, in the car, which was equipped with a heat pump, the battery was discharged only to 58%, and in the other - to 47%. Of course, the experimental conditions did not exactly correspond to the weather in Munich in early December 2023, but it is reasonable to assume that even at -17 °C, electric cars would not have started to massively discharge to zero in a few hours.
Experts from the General German Automobile Club conducted a similar experiment. Volkswagen and Renault electric cars were left overnight with the side lights on, heated seats and interior heating to 22°C. Temperatures that night ranged from -9 to -14 °C (which is closer to Munich's -17 °C). As a result, in 12 hours, Volkswagen used up about 80% of the battery charge, and Renault - about 70%. That is, even at such low temperatures, until the battery is completely discharged, the driver will be able to stand in a traffic jam in very comfortable conditions for 15 to 17 hours, depending on the car model.
It is significant that, according to statistics for 2022, which is cited by the World Natural Resources Institute with reference to the International Energy Agency, Norway became the leader in the share of sales of electric vehicles, where the average temperature in winter it is about –7 °C, but can drop much lower, to –40 °C. It is unlikely that Norwegians would be so actively purchasing electric cars if in winter they regularly quickly discharged and froze on the highways. The second and third places in the ranking of countries in terms of the share of purchased electric vehicles are Iceland and Sweden, which also cannot boast of warm winters.
Thus, the photograph of snow-covered cars on the road was taken in Chicago, America, more than a decade before the snow storm that hit Germany in early December 2023. There is no evidence that the jam was caused by discharged electric vehicles, even if there were any in it at all. Judging by repeated experiments, there is no reason to believe that low temperatures comparable to those observed in Germany can cause mass discharge of electric vehicles stuck in traffic jams and, as a result, the formation of traffic congestion.
Cover photo: screenshot SK News (original photo source - Associated Press)
Read on the topic:
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