A few days ago, Ford published a list of tips that owners should consider to optimize their winter range. This is mostly standard fare in the EV community, but it's worth sharing here:

I have a few bones to pick with these.
4. As you could imagine, it takes a lot less energy to heat your steering wheel and seat than it does the entire cabin. Lots of people make a habit of using the seat heaters to stay comfortable with a few degrees less of cabin heat. You can only expect cabin heat to make up about 10% of your power usage when traveling in colder weather, so the difference isn't going to be huge, but it's there.

5. They suggest turning off your heater when charging. This would help the truck charge just a little bit faster, as the energy that wasn't going into your cabin heater could go into your battery. But if you're DC fast-charging, there's a good chance you're staying in the truck and will be heading off along your trip from there. In which case, you'll be freezing in the cabin only to have to burn a bunch of energy to heat the cabin back up when you get back on the road. I don't think I've ever chosen to be cold and uncomfortable for the sake of a few more miles. It makes a difference, but it's not huge.

7. Speed is EVERYTHING when it comes to efficiency in an EV(ICE, too, but it matters a lot less), and this is more pronounced in the winter time. It's a common belief that batteries have less energy in the cold, but that's not actually the case. The reduced range is a combination of the added consumption of your cabin heater as well as the increased density of the colder air, which ads to aerodynamic drag. On a trip last weekend, I was getting 3.2 mi/kWh at 60 MPH for the 60 miles I spent on back roads. Once I hit the highway, I booted it up to 76 MPH and my efficiency dropped to 2.5 mi/kWh. This is a 48-mile difference in range that was caused by a 15 MPH higher speed on my EV6. You can expect similar or greater reduction in the Lightning because of its greater frontal area and coefficient of drag.

You can adjust your range by controlling your speed, so if it looks like you might not make your next charging stop because of an unexpected headwind or colder weather, just slow down a bit. You'll be surprised at the difference it makes.

 

4. My wife likes her seat heater on even in the summer of GA. There is NO WAY I would be able to run around in the winter without at least the passenger side zone heater on. When we traveled back to ID from GA in late May of this year, I-80 was closed west of Cheyenne WY due to a blizzard. As we found a country road that was not closed, the temperature dropped to 17° and it was nearly whiteout conditions. This was in May and we took our Escape instead of the Subaru like we normally do during months where we would run into weather. No cabin heater on during this time in order to make sure we arrive alive at our destination which was now 200 miles out of the way... Deal breaker for sure for my application and family.

5. Same gripe as number 4... Deal breaker...

7 (Tom 10). Cold can and will affect a battery system, but so will heat and often times heat is more detrimental to the lifespan of a battery. Even when we are on our 6,000 mile trips cross country we stick to the speed limit and do our best to maintain a comfortable speed while maintaining safety for the road conditions and or traffic. As we travel across NM at 5,000' or up in SD across the black hills, the heater is likely on for my wife on the split climate control setting. Even our 2008 Subaru has split climate control and I would expect a brand new vehicle to be able to sustain this method of travel.

There are times in the middle of nowhere MT, NM, TX, ND, etc where we slow down a bit in order to increase the MPG's of our ICE vehicle.

I look forward to the day that a mid-sized SUV EV is able to satisfy the requirements of a family who travels cross country at a comfortable or speedy pace with in cab climate controls roaring and an abundance of charging stations available in states west of the Mississippi other than CA, WA and OR. It doesn't appear that 2023 is going to be the year for us though.

Lastly, I read this same article a couple days ago and chuckled a bit at some of the "tips" for traveling during the colder periods.

 

I'm entering my third Minnesota winter with an EV, and I've never turned down the heat to get where I'm going. Even in my standard-range Model 3 in January road trips, I've never done it. These are mere suggestions by Ford, and I think some of them are ridiculous. I also think it's a silly idea to turn off the heat while charging because speed is commonly throttled by the vehicle rather than the charger. So if I'm limited to 130 kW because of thermal constraints in the battery pack, leaving the heat on and drawing another 5 kW isn't going to slow me down at all when connected to a 150+ kW fast charger.

That's true, but not really applicable to any EV that's not called a Nissan Leaf. Everything else I've ever looked at has a modern liquid cooling system that puts the battery where it should be. I think they all use a combination of air-to-water cooling from the radiator as well as active refrigeration from the A/C compressor. The battery should never get too warm unless something is broken. And to my understanding, these batteries don't suffer any kind of reduced lifespan unless they get well below 0º. The system will work 24/7 to keep the battery temps above the threshold where they'll sustain damage. At frigid temps above this point, the system will throttle power delivery as necessary to protect itself. Modern battery management systems are pretty sophisticated, which is the biggest reason why batteries tend to last longer than most of us originally thought they would.

Unless you have a 1st-gen Leaf. Stay away from those.

 

Understood.

Today we drove an hour to Anderson SC which is the nearest little city. It was 55° and sunny on the interstate with windows up and my wife had the heater on low and set heater on high.

That is the way she rolls.

I would bet it is safe to say most consumers considering a modern EV knows that they are liquid cooled. I didn't feel that a 10 paragraph explanation like I sometimes post was warranted, maybe I was wrong. My statement was more towards batteries in general. Especially FLA batteries.