R1S Range Drop in Cold Weather

[usulio]

My son and I just started helping him with his 2nd-gen R1S, and we’re loving it overall — but after driving 36 miles in Michigan (it’s freezing here), the car lost about 70 miles of range. Is that normal? Does the cold really make the 380‑mile battery feel more like 200 miles in the winter? I’d love to hear from others — I’m worried there might be a battery issue.

When you start a new trip in the cold, a bunch of energy is used to warm up the battery and cabin. After 30-60 minutes, everything is warm and efficiency improves a lot, though still not as good as summer. This can be avoided by preconditioning before the trip - turn on climate control early.

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[Golfer04]

When I pre-condition my Tri I've noticed the battery temp is only 55-60 degrees when finished. In my gen 1 quads it was 65-70 degrees. Suttle change, but curious. Many think the loss doesn't matter, but it depends on where you live and how far you drive. I think we lose a very similar percentage of range in our gas vehicle, but there is a gas station every 5 miles and it takes 5 minutes to fill up.

 

[1stPlace]

When I pre-condition my Tri I've noticed the battery temp is only 55-60 degrees when finished. In my gen 1 quads it was 65-70 degrees. Suttle change, but curious. Many think the loss doesn't matter, but it depends on where you live and how far you drive. I think we lose a very similar percentage of range in our gas vehicle, but there is a gas station every 5 miles and it takes 5 minutes to fill up.

I have a Gen 1 quad and the battery temp has always gone to 55-60 degF with scheduled conditioning for me.


From my experience with 70k+ miles mostly in Michigan, the expected range for Winter (0-40 degF) with highway driving is ~200 miles on my Gen 1 Large pack. If you are trying to plan your charging for the range that you need, here's what I do:

1) Take the number of miles you expect to travel
2) Multiply that by 1.5 for worst possible case efficiency (meaning ~33% less from most ideal temp, from what I and @Budman have witnessed)
3) Charge to that amount of miles.

 

[Golfer04]

I have a Gen 1 quad and the battery temp has always gone to 55-60 degF with scheduled conditioning for me.


From my experience with 70k+ miles mostly in Michigan, the expected range for Winter (0-40 degF) with highway driving is ~200 miles on my Gen 1 Large pack. If you are trying to plan your charging for the range that you need, here's what I do:

1) Take the number of miles you expect to travel
2) Multiply that by 1.5 for worst possible case efficiency (meaning ~33% less from most ideal temp, from what I and @Budman have witnessed)
3) Charge to that amount of miles.

I'm 45 miles from Normal. Put 90,000 miles on two gen 1 quad Ts and now my second Tri gen 2 (total of 40,000 miles on them). My gen 2 trucks get better efficiency than my gen 1s by about 15 percent. I know if you don't precondition the efficiency really nosedives.

 

[CharonPDX]

Happens to ICE vehicles too, but people tend not to notice because ICE cars aren’t sold by range, and until recently tended to not have visible range estimates. Same with towing range reduction.

If you’re somewhere it gets really cold, you’re probably familiar with block heaters, to help mitigate this. Same with EVs, leave it plugged in and configure it to precondition. That tells it to warm everything up using grid power by departure time to minimize cold-soak losses.

 

[sherold]

Lots of good info on cold weather driving and range impact in this thread: Best practices for driving in extreme cold

We still do not have explicit control over the battery pre-conditioning so, the cabin conditioning can only prep for best efficiency so much. Once the battery pack cold soaks to 14°F, the preconditioning function will activate battery heating along with cabin heating.

 

[usulio]

Just from physics, raising the temperature of the battery and the cabin from 20 degrees to 55 is going to take at a bare minimum 5 kWh (10-15 miles of range), probably close to 10 kWh (20-30 miles of range) in real life.

If you can precondition and pull that from the wall (takes 30-60 minutes), then it's not a range hit. Otherwise, the first hour of travel will use up an extra 20-30 miles of range, which I'm guessing is what happened to OP. After that your efficiency will also be worse due to cold and denser air, but usually not more than 10-20% worse unless extreme cold or wind.

So my rule of thumb for winter miles needed is multiply summer miles by 1.25, and then add 30 if not preconditioning.

 

[R1Skol]

Once the battery pack cold soaks to 14°F, the preconditioning function will activate

Thanks for sharing, will be first winter with my R1S and getting cold here (40's) and starting to see my efficiency start off in the 1.3-1.5 range after preheating cabin to 70. Was wondering when the battery warming would kick in. Even with efficiency drop wouldn't go back to ICE. Just have to plan accordingly.

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