Re: Cold weather and cold batteries
AC: "Opening air ducts does not constitute 'infinite cooling'."
What is this? ...'Failure of Imagination' Week?
The car designer, assuming that he/she has obtained a brain and had it installed, could EASILY arrange for the battery pack to be both highly insulated (so that it would require only a few watts of power to keep it toasty warm on a dark and stormy night), and equipped with selectable air ducts (with uC controlled doors) that could provide effectively ten times more air cooling than would ever be required (effectively "infinite", same as if the battery pack were not insulated at all). The concept of a controllable air system in no way impedes the required cooling. Not even close. 30+dB margin.
The fact that a cold battery pack in the frosty morning is a apparently a real world problem when the electric car is ***still connected to the National Electric Grid*** is crystal clear evidence of just how f-in stupid these car designers really are. Perhaps they all live in Southern California and don't get out much... Daft.
Cold batteries in electric cars is a stupid design flaw that is trivial to fix for 90% of the cases.
Battery temperature should *only* be a limitation in the remaining extreme case where the car is parked away from commercial power for extended durations and there's no sunshine. For example, parked at in the distant cheap parking lot at an Alaskan airport in the dark dead of winter for six weeks. There's nothing much that could be done in such extreme cases, except perhaps to deploy a little windmill, or include a radioisotope thermal generator.