A touch of frost

First properly cold morning, this morning. The perfect morning for dowsing the windscreen with a bit of hot water.

Except if you have an EV.

One of the best (and most often over-looked) features of the Nissan LEAF is that you can remotely control the heating and cooling system, using an app on your phone. The benefit of this on a cold morning is that it not only clears frost from the windscreen, it pre-heats the whole cabin so that it's nice and toasty when you start your journey (I have mine set to 23 degrees). No need to wait for an engine to warm up. In the summer time, this function can be used to pre-cool the car as well.

This, of course, comes at a price. To carry this function out, the car will use some battery power, and so will take some range away. In my experience, pre-conditioning the car for about 15 minutes (which is plenty) uses about 3%, and so takes about 3km off the range. I don't have any hard science to back it up, but my guess is that running an engine on a regular car to do the same job would also take about that amount of range from the tank. 

To overcome such losses, there is an easy fix. If you have the car plugged into a charger at the time you carry out the pre-conditioning, the energy used comes from the mains and not from the battery. That means if you have the car plugged in overnight, you can get into a pre-heated car and still have 100% battery when setting off. That's just not possible in a regular car (unless you have your own petrol/diesel pump at home).

And yes, I get the irony of having to go outside on a cold day to take these pictures which are supposed to show "remote" pre-heating. :)