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Cold weather tanks EV range because the battery chemistry slows down and the car has to burn extra energy just heating the cabin and battery itself! You're looking at maybe 20-40% less range depending on how cold it gets, which is pretty brutal if you're already worried about making it somewhere.

Ever wonder why your phone battery drains faster in winter? Same thing happens with EVs. Cold weather makes the chemical reactions inside the battery slower and less efficient, so you lose maybe 20-40% of your range depending on how cold it gets and how you drive. Things get worse if you're also running the heater, since that pulls power straight from the battery rather than recovering waste heat like a gas engine does.

Preconditioning - warming the battery and cabin while the car's still plugged in - is your best bet to recover some of that lost range before you even drive. Everyone's hitting the 20-40% loss number, which is right, but what matters is that the drop happens fastest in the first 15-20 minutes of driving; after that the battery generates its own heat and things stabilize a bit. If you can charge at home or work and let the car warm up on the plug, you'll notice a real difference versus jumping in a cold car and hitting the road.

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