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Heating and Cooling in Electric Vehicles
First, being a Tesla owner, I really love how fast the car warms up in the winter and cools in the summer. It’s super-fast (just like the car) and usually warm by the time I drive about ½ mile. Most of us know already how combustion engine cars heat and cool.
Combustion type engines use water to keep the engine cool and to also bring heat into the vehicle safely through something called a heater core, which is like a radiator. Tesla uses something to heat the car called resistive heating. Resistive heating is like the home portable heaters you may have or a toaster, that turn a thin element into a red-hot element, emitting heat, and this is called PTC (positive temperature coefficient) heat.
The Tesla works the same way which can explain why the Tesla can heat up so much faster than a combustion engine. The newer model Tesla’s use something called Octovalve. It is much harder to explain in text, so we have attached a video that is about 15 minutes long, so you can see how complicated this may be.
