So I have to take a road trip in an EV, and it’s winter. So I’m going to have to use the AC. I know in my old ICE car I could have the AC off and the fan would blow hot air just from the engine. With my EV it seems to be the same, even with the AC button off the vents are blowing hot air. Is that hot air just heat vented from the battery? Or is it still using battery power for the compressor to heat the air.
Many now have a heat pump, similar to the AC but it can reverse the refrigerant flow and either cool the air coming in the car, expelling hot air by the radiator or heat the air coming into the car and blow cold air outside.
Older EV mostly had electric heaters, cheap and simply just like a plug in heater at home. But the can take 3-5 times more power.
Our Ioniq 5 mainly uses the heat pump, except for when running defrost then it uses both. Once the car has warmed up it can take just 0.8 - 1 kw to maintain the temperature. So with a 100% charge and 74kwh of battery capacity you can assume it would run over 70 hours.
Can you heat up the car with the phone app? That is a feature I really like with Tesla and was curious if Hyundai does it.
If your ioniq is anything like my old Niro, you actually have 2 condensers, and it can pull both heat and a from the heat pump at the same time.
That also means if you have a leak in one, you lose both. That’s how I found out about the setup.
I haven’t looked to see how the ev6 or ioniq 5 are configured though, but I’d expect it was the same as the niro