Air conditioners on electric cars save 5 times more energy than petrol cars?

April 21, 2022 09:20 GMT+7

Recently, technology expert Bach Thanh Trung – admin of vOz forum conducted a practical test to calculate specifically the energy consumption of the air conditioning system on the VinFast VF e34 electric car and a model. petrol cars of the same size.

Automatic air conditioning system on electric car VF e34.

For the VinFast VF e34, expert Bach Thanh Trung turned on the air conditioner in automatic mode and parked the car within 24 hours. Accordingly, the car stopped at the spot, under the sun without a roof from 9 a.m. the previous day to 9 a.m. the next morning, the outdoor temperature sometimes peaked to more than 41 degrees Celsius. The temperature from the air conditioning system inside The cabin was set at 22 degrees Celsius. At the beginning of the test, the battery pack had about 88% of its capacity left. After 24 hours of continuously opening the air conditioner, the battery capacity remained at 25%, equivalent to a decrease of 63%.

According to Trung’s record, in 8 consecutive hours of sunshine, the battery decreased by about 30%, from 88% to 58%. The remaining 16 hours are cool and at night, so the car only turns on the automatic lights and air conditioner, the battery level drops by 33% from 58% to 25%. The actual temperature in the car measured by an independent thermometer has a moment of only 18 degrees Celsius, which is quite understandable because the car is closed for almost 24 hours, no people are inside.

With this experiment, it can be seen that when the car is parked in a place under the hot sun, the air conditioning system consumes less than 4% of the battery capacity for an hour of use. Thus, users can open the air conditioner continuously for more than 25 hours under hot weather before the car runs out of battery. Meanwhile, when it’s cool, the battery capacity drops by less than 2% in an hour. With the same energy consumption as the test, each hour VinFast VF e34 consumes a maximum of about 1.68 kWh for the air conditioner, equivalent to more than 2,000 VND of electricity.

The air conditioning system on the VF e34 electric car costs about 2,000 VND per hour.

Meanwhile, testing with a gasoline car using a 2.0L engine, the same setting with an outdoor temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, the cabin temperature at about 18 degrees Celsius, let the car stop in one place and turn on the air conditioner. , the fuel consumption in an hour is about 0.352 liters, equivalent to an amount of about 10,300 VND when using A95 gasoline. This number is more than 5 times higher than the cost of electric cars.

Of course, this test is only for the moment when the vehicle stops in place, but it can be easily seen even in actual operating conditions, when the vehicle is affected by factors of traffic conditions, driving behavior of the driver, the energy consumption of electric vehicles will also be much more optimal than gasoline cars.

Before expert Bach Thanh Trung, many famous magazines and independent testing units in the world also had tests showing that the power optimization of electric vehicles is much better than that of gasoline cars. Not only bringing economic efficiency to users, reducing energy consumption also helps the car to operate on longer distances.

According to expert Bach Thanh Trung, basically, the structure of the air conditioning system of electric cars and cars with internal combustion engines is not much different. This system still includes components such as compressor, outdoor unit, indoor unit, fan, filter, throttle valve… However, the biggest difference between these two systems is the way power is supplied to the compressor.

In electric cars, the compressor is directly connected to the vehicle’s battery pack, so the air conditioning system works almost independently of the engine. While with traditional cars, the compressor works by connecting to the engine through a belt, so the car has to start the engine to use the air conditioner if you don’t want the car to run out of battery. This is the reason why the air conditioning system on gasoline cars consumes more energy than electric cars.

Thus, with this test result, electric car users can be completely assured of using the air conditioner even when facing traffic jams for many hours. There will be no more scenes of turning off the air conditioner, opening the glass door to save gas like when using a traditional internal combustion engine car!

Minh An