A man deep froze his Tesla Model 3 before immediately plugging it into a supercharger and he couldn’t believe what happened.
Documenting it for YouTube, the man put his electric vehicle to the test in order to find out what would happen.
And the conditions the car faced were pretty brutal, having been parked for two days in a parking lot in temperatures as cold as -14 degrees fahrenheit.
Advert
The video was uploaded to the Out of Spec Reviews channel where the description read: “Kyle and Alyssa deep freeze their Model 3 to see what happens when you try and Supercharge a frozen battery pack. Hope you find this interesting!”
However, when Kyle attempted to plug the charger into his frozen car, he came up against some issues.
In the clip, he said: “I think it’s frozen, I don't think it's gonna latch, yeah that is a non-latching situation right there.”
Driving to a different charger, the YouTuber tried again.
He said: “Another completely Frozen cable, went in nicely this time. Wow, I feel like I'm gonna get frostbite just touching that thing, come on latch. Wow, these things are not latching at all, it's just so cold.
“Will it start charging? I don't know, let's see what the car says on the inside, let's take a look, it's definitely in, it says supercharging.”
But for the first 45 minutes, the car appeared to do nothing at all.
And Kyle found that the hold-up was down to the Tesla using battery power to heat up the car’s battery before it could charge properly.
People took to the YouTube comment section to share their reactions to the experiment.
One user wrote: “It would kill me to wait more than 1 hour in cold to be able to use my car. Call me old fashioned but I like to fill up in 3 min with gas and drive. I probably get an electric car when they charge in 5 min sometimes in the future.”
A second said: “I find it difficult to understand why EV owners just accept the craziness of this scenario. Hour and ten minutes it took you to charge, I could have driven in my ICE car to my nearest town, had breakfast at the local cafe and come home.”
A third explained how to cut down the charge time by adding: “When connected to a Supercharger you can turn on the cabin heater to heat the battery quicker. It'll pull juice from the charger to run the heatpump (or PTC heater depending on model) and then reuse that heat for the battery coolant loop as well.”
And a fourth person joked: “One way to warm up the batteries is....park next to a EV that is on fire, works every time.”