Canada’s most populous provinces are falling behind many U.S. states when it comes to building fast charging stations for electric vehicles, a CBC News analysis shows, raising questions about whether this country’s infrastructure is ready for a transition to cleaner energy.
The other issue is where they are. Two thousand chargers in Montreal do you no good if you’re on the Transcananda out near Longlac, Ont., in that area where there’s no cell phone coverage.
I don’t really know the area or charger quality, but there’s a 50kW Ivy station in Geraldton, a total of 38km away from Longlac, Ont.
I picked Longlac because there’s a long stretch of pretty-much-nothing to the east of it until Calstock (Geraldton’s to the west). Even if you’re driving an ICE vehicle, you want to keep an eye on your gas if you’re up that way. You’d need to be even more careful if you were driving an electric on a -36C January morning. Maybe one of the handful of campgrounds or tourist resorts along that stretch has a charger (if they don’t, they should get some put in, 'cause they’d probably make a killing).
There’s a few chargers in Hearst, ~250km to the east of Geraldton (210km east of Longlac). Most EVs can easily do 250km in -36° weather. That’s one of the longest stretches of major highway in Ont without a charger, but it’s certainly short enough for the average EV to do just fine even in harsh conditions.
Fair enough. The last time I looked into range figures was a few years ago when I was last in the market for a car, and I couldn’t get a lot of data on cold weather ranges (lower, yes, but by how much? No one wanted to say.)
The standard safe estimate is ~⅓ reduction when temps are around -25° to -30°, but it varies by car as to how much each degree affects that particular battery design.
You can use abetterrouteplanner.com and put in actual drives for different car models and in the settings you can set temperature, headwind, etc…