As long as you have a heat pump harvesting the waste heat to keep the battery up to temp.
But might be significant on short drives, 10kW for the first 3 km is massive.
This is a big difference because there are all kinds of other factors besides energy capacity that can affect the efficiency of the whole system, and therefore affect range.
Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
As someone else mentioned, climate control also consumes a lot more power when it has to maintain a larger temperature difference between inside and outside.
But TBF same factors affect ICE cars
I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l2cq6b/comment/...
But if they add buttons back as planned, I might be willing to try a new id.4 in 5-10 years.
AFAIK most EVs already use heat pumps today, so the future happens whenever sodium batteries become mainstream.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...
https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/fuel-economy-cold-weather
At -40F (-40C), it's generally good practice to just stay inside and not drive at all...
Is that actually true once the engine has reached operating temperature?
> Fuel economy tests show that, in city driving, a conventional gasoline car's gas mileage is roughly 15% lower at 20°F than it would be at 77°F. It can drop as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips.
Not sure the engine ever reached "operating temperature" on that drive.
1) winter blend fuels have less energy per volume, that doesn't make your engine any less efficient by energy but it does by volume of gas
2) lots of temporary cold effects: fuel vaporization, thick lubricants, etc. these things become less of a problem as the engine warms up but some energy is still lost on long drives
3) air resistance: all aerodynamic forces are linearly proportional with air density. At a constant pressure there's about a 15% difference in air density between the hottest and coldest places you can drive (and thus 15% less drag on a hot summer day than a cold winter day). aerodynamic forces are proportional to the square of your velocity and they become the largest resistive force around 50mph -- so at highway speeds you're losing efficiency because you have to push more air out of the way
4) energy used to maintain temperature: this is hard to calculate but some engine power is lost because the energy is used heating up the engine block and lost to the environment
5) the Thermodynamics 101 engine efficiency goes UP with increased temperature, but it's got a lot of real world effects to compete with, no spherical cows and all
'22 Ford Escape hybrid
The remaining miles thing shows less than that on a full tank, but I've been pretty consistently getting upper-600s between fill-ups.
I suppose it would probably be less if I went on the interstate more.
Assuming a 1000km range is a very strange thing to do, as it's a fringe feature that almost no one needs or wants! Recall that "almost no one" means that there's still some, an existence of a handful of people on HN is quite consistent with "almost none."
Which I would expect to typically find something that's, um, fairly typical on characteristics I wasn't selecting on.
It has an 18.8 gallon fuel capacity (https://www.volvocars.com/lb/support/car/xc60/article/dfc6f0...)
That’s a max range of 470 miles. You would need much greater fuel efficiency above 34 mpg to get to 650 miles on an 18.8 gallon tank.
Also you are quoting a value for the B5, which is not what I have, mine is a T8(and before you ask - no, I didn't have any opportunity to charge it anywhere on the way).
Since the Lithium battery prices dropped, there are many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering. Not a good sign when smart people jump ship.
The Na cells also have lower energy-density, and currently fewer viable charge cycles. One can still buy evaluation samples, but it takes time to figure out if the technology will make economic sense.
Best regards =3
I assume it's just that its internal resistance rises when it's cold, but I might be wrong.
Yes. It's mostly wasted as heat inside the battery. I think there's also a temperature relationship to open-circuit voltage? But the predominate effect is from elevated internal resistance.
The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle.
It delivers 175 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, which is lower than nickel-rich chemistries but roughly on par with LFPI've seen that repeated a lot but I still can't buy sodium batteries cheaper than lifepo...
Granted, you have a minor bootstrapping issue wherein you need the battery to be warm before you use battery power, but at very low % of the battery's power capacity I suspect it's less of an issue.
OTOH, there are seemingly more lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery ev options now - rivian now uses LFP, Ford mustang mach-e has had a LFP variant since fall 2023 (and should have other models using LFP in 2027), I think the 2026 chevy bolt uses LFP, etc.
I'll be the first to say we need less range anxiety, and Norway is awesome. But we need to be careful comparing the US to Norway here.
The US administration has basically told them to do so.
So don't expect any innovation on this front from the middle of the North American continent. It's being actively sabotaged.
Any US automaker relying on Trump staying in office is playing with fire. Yes, you may see reduced or zero press releases and budgets for EV research being "reallocated" on paper so the toddler in chief doesn't get a public tantrum - but assuming there will be free and fair elections this year, it is highly, highly likely that Congress will be solid blue and reinstate a lot of what Trump has cut down, only this time as an actual law that is far harder to cancel than executive orders.
And everyone not hedging for this possibility will wreck their company's future.
Don't expect any movement on EV legislation unless and until Democrats take back the White House in 2028
interested in hot desert weather performance which often gets lost in the averages.
Sodium would need to be more efficient to be lighter, which it isn't
The capacity of storing energy does not depend at all on area, but only on the mass of sodium contained in the battery and on the efficiency of using it (i.e. between full discharge and full charge not 100% of the sodium or lithium is cycled between the 2 oxidation states, but a fraction, e.g. 90%).
Any battery has both an energy density and a power density, which are weakly correlated and the correlation may have opposite signs, i.e. for some batteries it may be possible to increase the power density if the energy density is lowered and vice-versa.
For a given stored energy in kWh, the required mass of sodium is several times greater than the corresponding mass of lithium, by a factor that is the product of the atomic mass ratio with the ratio between the battery voltages. The voltages are similar, with a slight advantage for sodium, so the required mass of sodium is about 3 times the corresponding mass of lithium.
If the complete batteries have about the same mass, that means that other components of the sodium-ion battery are smaller and/or lighter.
Na will be big in grid storage, it's a perfect fit.
This means that if you do not use the car for some time, you may need to recharge it before you can use it again. This may be a problem if the car is left far from a charger.
Otherwise I agree with what you said.
The reason this is so exciting for me personally is for stationary energy. Because the raw materials are so abundant and have good cold weather performance, both grid and home level energy storage costs should come down significantly as this is commercialized further.
Crustal abundance up to 1000x that of lithium - pretty much every nation has effectively unlimited supply, it's no longer a barrier or a geographically limited resource like lithium.
No significant damage going down to 0V, can even be stored at 0V - much safer than lithium which gets excitable once out of its prefered voltage range.
Cold weather performance down to -30C - northern latitude users don't have as much range anxiety in the winter.
Basically, the only problem I see is that companies that have made significant long-term investments in lithium could take a big hit. Countries that banked on their lithium reserves as a key future resource for will have to adjust their strategy.
Lithium batteries will likely still have a place in the high performance realm but but for the majority of run-of-the-mill applications - everything from customer electronics to EVs to offgrid storage - it's hard to see how sodium-ion wouldn't quickly replace it.
I don't doubt that sodium ion has a place... but whether it takes over as the dominant battery type for portable applications strikes me as very dependent on the future of lithium extraction. It seems like a place that has a lot of room to grow more efficient and thus more competitive on cost.
https://battery-news.de/en/2026/01/26/catl-presents-sodium-i...
So lithium-ion batteries will never be replaced in smartphones or laptops by sodium-ion batteries.
But there are plenty of applications where the energy density of sodium-ion batteries is sufficient. Eventually sodium-ion batteries will be much cheaper and this is why they will replace lithium-ion batteries in all cheap cars and for most stationary energy storage (except when lower auto-discharge is desired).
The EV described in the article has a standardized range of 250 miles. This isn't a range monster in any condition. There is some gesturing that Sodium batteries don't require as much active heating in cold conditions. But nothing is quantified.
As usual with sci-tech broadly and batteries specifically: it's exciting that sodium batteries are coming to market; we can be optimistic that maybe in the future they will provide lots of range, or be less expensive, or maybe less flammable than today's lithium batteries. But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.
If we put aside the politics, what are the actual statistics behind lithium battery fires today? And don't LFP's have negligible fire risk?
I feel like my gasser F250 had a higher risk of spontaneously combusting.
No one burned to death inside a Tesla while driving normally. It's always following a crash.
And I've been following Polish firefighters reports about EV fires and they are very interesting - basically saying that in all recent cases of EV fires they were contained so quickly even the interior was largely undamaged - something that practically never happens with regular cars. Some of these have been in underground garages too, with difficulty of access - but nowadays they just know how to approach an EV fire and containment isn't a problem.
That is exactly the substance of the headline.
"The Long-Range Version sets a new record for light commercial vehicles with a single-pack capacity of 253 kWh, achieving a maximum range of 800km."
That would be some 720 km at -40 C if the numbers are correct. I'm not well versed in this area and not sure if these batteries are comparable to those in personal vehicles, but the ones I've heard owners talk about have a reach at about half that if it's cold at all.
The marketing hype is the true range monster
Most of the winter it tells me I can only do between 100 and 120 miles. It is definitely half the EPA range with climate controls disabled at 0F. (Ask me how I know).
I love driving it in the winter. I don't have a pressing need to go long distances, so that is not a current concern. Not having to stand outside in the bitter cold to fuel up in absolutely awesome.
There are EVs on the market that do much, much better than mine in cool weather and I now know what to look for.
To really penetrate the midwest it will take a car that can realistically do a road trip to Florida from say Duluth, MN or Michigan's UP in the winter.
Because not only do folks in the midwest drive long distances without a second thought, they sometimes do it in the cold of winter so they can get a break from the snow.
So yes still getting 90% of the range at -40C does sound attractive.
Since it's also cheaper, it's likely that Na-ion will be adopted by cheaper city runabout type EVs, while premium long range EVs will continue using Li-ion.
Given the difficulty of radiating heat away I would have expected the opposite.
Especially considering the incentive to send up as little battery as possible, and the very predictable day/night cycle leading to the ability to precisely predict how small a battery you can get away with...