Greetings all,

I've been googling and watching videos and reading posts in other forums about caring for an electric vehicle in winter. I live in Virginia where the winters are not nearly as harsh as up North however we have had winter nights in the low teens. I have seen a bunch of things about preconditioning the car prior to driving but that leads to my question. Given that I was told that an EV should be charged only when battery percentage falls about 25% to 35% to preserve battery life and not charged to 100% except planning for a long trip. If let's say in the winter, your battery is say at 65% but the temp at night will drop to the teens, wouldn't it be harmful to the battery to charge the car overnight? I've seen tons of videos where Tesla and Leaf owners leave the car plugged in overnight and then in the morning can easily precondition the car while it's plugged in to preserve battery life. And yes, before anyone says it, I don't have a garage to store the car. I'm just trying to understand what folks are doing given this situation as most likely your EV will not be drained down to 25% every night during the winter.

Thanks in advance.
GK

 

My suggestion is to see what the XC40's owners manual says about cold weather driving.

https://www.volvocars.com/us/own/own...owners-manuals (factory link, not a spam site)

 

In addition to what the moderator wrote about the manual (always good advice), the charging systems are actually built into the car and will allow the charge to happen or not allow it depending on the state of the battery. For instance, you can not 'overcharge' it, the system always shuts down the charge when it's time. What you might see as 'full' on the gauge is actually somewhere around 80%. This pertains to all of the EV's currently on the market. The attached image is a charging station I purchased and had an electrician install a little over 3 years ago. It's very satisfactory but today you can find many more that can charge much faster than even my Level II model and also have timers that can tell the system when to turn on and start charging your car. Here is a helpful link for any EV driver. ev charging facts - Bing

MY 2021 XC60 T8 getting a drink

 

Thanks a bunch to both that responded.

 

There was a recent update to the Google Automotive OS for the XC60 Recharge. The version is 1.7. It adds some cold weather indicators to the instrument panel and adds some battery preheating functionality. I don't have the update yet, but it is in the owner's manual. This might also be coming to the XC40 as well.

 

Thanks for the info. I recently had a software update performed so hopefully I have version 1.7. Thanks so much!