EV Winter Range and Heat Pump Tracking, Now on Every Vehicle Page
Every EV page on EVD2 now tells you what winter does to the range, and whether you can live with a regular wall outlet.
Rated range is measured in mild conditions. Nobody drives in mild conditions in February. The gap between the number on the window sticker and the number on a January morning is the single most common complaint I see from Canadian EV owners, and until this week the only thing this site said about it was one line in the FAQ admitting that cold weather "can reduce range". That was true and useless.
What the pages show now
Two figures on every vehicle: estimated range at 0C, and at -7C. A normal January day across most of the country sits at the colder end of that.
For a Tesla Model 3 rated at 440 km, that works out to roughly 365 km at freezing and 330 km at -7C. A Hyundai IONIQ 5 rated at 488 km lands near 381 km and 342 km. An F-150 Lightning rated at 370 km comes in around 289 km and 259 km.
Where the numbers come from
Recurrent runs a winter study built on real telemetry from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models. Not a lab, not a rule of thumb, actual cars being driven in actual cold.
The headline findings: EVs keep about 78% of their maximum range at 0C, and about 70% at -7C. The best model in the study holds 88%. The worst holds 69%.
Why it is a range and not a number
That spread is the interesting part. Nineteen percentage points separate the best and worst cars at the same temperature, and the biggest single reason is whether the car has a heat pump. Recurrent puts that at roughly 10 percentage points on its own.
So publishing one confident figure per vehicle would be inventing precision I do not have. The estimate is shown as a band, and where the heat pump is known the band gets narrower, because that is genuinely the information that narrows it.
I would rather show you an honest range than a tidy number that happens to be wrong.
The Level 1 question
There is a question that comes up constantly in Canadian EV forums and no range figure answers it: I can only charge from a regular outlet in the garage, is an EV going to work for me?
What matters there is not how far the car goes on a full battery. It is whether a night on a 120V outlet covers tomorrow's driving. So every vehicle page now works that out from the car's own battery and efficiency:
- A Tesla Model 3 gains about 127 km overnight in mild weather, or 89 km in the cold
- A Hyundai IONIQ 5 gains about 100 km, or 70 km cold
- An F-150 Lightning gains about 65 km, or 46 km cold
Same outlet, same twelve hours, and the answer differs by nearly a factor of two. Someone with a 40 km round trip commute is fine in any of them. Someone with a 90 km commute and a Lightning has a problem that no amount of optimism fixes.
Heat pumps, and the part that got messy
Since the heat pump matters this much, I went looking for which cars have one. 46 of the 125 vehicles in the catalogue are now marked as having one.
The other 79 say Unknown, and that took more restraint than it sounds like.
The source I used is a published list of models that have heat pumps. That is a subtly different thing from a list of which models do and do not. A car missing from it might not have a heat pump, or might just not have been added yet. The publisher openly asks for corrections.
So the data can support "yes" and it can support "we do not know". It cannot support "no". Writing "no" from an absence would be asserting something nobody actually published, and because the absence of a heat pump is the pessimistic end of a ten point swing, a wrong "no" would show you a worse winter range based on nothing at all. There is now a test in the codebase that fails if anyone ever tries to record a "no" from that source.
Then there is the trim problem
Some cars refuse to give a straight answer.
Kia fits a heat pump to the all-wheel-drive EV6 and EV9, and not to the rear-drive versions. Same model, same year, different answer depending on which one is sitting on the lot.
EVD2 tracks vehicles by model and year, not by trim. So "yes" would mislead anyone shopping a rear-drive EV6, and Unknown would throw away something I actually know and that a buyer would want.
The fix is a footnote. The specification can stay honest about what it does and does not cover, and a Details section underneath spells out the condition. On the EV6 and EV9 pages it now says plainly that the heat pump comes with all-wheel drive, so if you are looking at a rear-drive one, expect the colder end of the estimate.
The same approach is there for anything else that resists a single value. A range figure measured on a different test cycle, a battery quoted gross rather than usable, a price before destination charges. Rather than pick a number that is wrong for some readers, the page can say what is true and explain the catch.
Why bother being this careful
It would be faster to fill every blank with a best guess. Nobody would notice for a while.
But this site exists to be checked. The whole point of publishing range figures, rebate amounts and quota numbers is that someone can act on them, and a number that quietly does not apply to the car they are looking at is worse than no number at all. Unknown is not a gap waiting to be filled in. Sometimes it is the most accurate thing on the page.
If you know something I do not, particularly on trim level heat pump availability for the Canadian market, get in touch. Corrections are welcome and I will name the source.
Colin