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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

I live in Oslo, Norway, we've got -12C and snow now. If I preheat the car using charger I get at least 250km range mixed driving, with AC at a quite comfortable 22C. If my SO isn't in the car I reduce the AC a bit and it gets closer to 280-290km.

We had -25C earlier this winter, it dropped a bit closer to 200km, again with a comfortable AC level.

So yeah, it drops a lot. We found we need at least 150km range for our car to be useful (we have an old Leaf with less for some time), and if things scale linearly we should still have about 175km effective winter range with 70% SOH.

Sure it's not winning any range contests, we knew that when we bought it.

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Interesting, does Oslo have a lot of chargers? For my area, this is an option only for those who have the ability to charge at home to pre-heat the car / battery pack. I live in a dense city and street parking is the norm, so for us this is not an option.

When I'm driving on my own with my wife's car, I turn heating or AC off, and it makes a little difference, but not all that much.

> Sure it's not winning any range contests, we knew that when we bought it.

I mean, it is also far more affordable that a lot of the alternatives. I find that range is only useful up to a point. If you have enough range to meet your requirements, why spend so much more money just to get a bigger number?

We're fortunate to be able to charge at home thanks to our condo parking getting chargers. There's been tax incentives for this.

And the municipality is installing street chargers. While not enough currently due to the high % of EVs, they're going to install a lot more they say.

> If you have enough range to meet your requirements, why spend so much more money just to get a bigger number?

This was exactly our approach. We wanted 400km which we felt was sufficient for us. So we just eliminated cars with less and looked at other aspects to decide which one to pick.

I too have settled on 400km, which I think is a reasonable range for most European countries. After 400km, it's quite reasonable to take a 40min break or something anyway :)

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