Cold weather another downside to electric cars

Nissan Leaf at the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show (LHD).Image via Wikipedia
Charles Lane:

Count me among the many thousands of Washington area residents who spent Wednesday night stuck in traffic as a snowstorm sowed chaos all around us. Being car-bound in sub-freezing weather for six hours can make a guy think. I counted my blessings. The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address.

It is a basic fact of physical science that batteries run down more quickly in cold weather than they do in warm weather, and the batteries employed by vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf or the Chevy Volt are no exception.

...
There is more. He gets down into the batteries to explain the problem, but just the amount of time it took people to get home would probably run down the batteries.
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