I have a Model 3 in Canada, so winter is something I think about a lot. Most of my EV experience is in a pretty cushy setup (heated garage), and I've realized that setup hides a whole category of problems from me. So I want to ask about the opposite case.
Here is the scenario. Southern Ontario, so 120V. Winters are cold and snowy, sometimes colder than -20 C, though that's rare. The roads get salted. The house has a driveway but NO garage, so the car lives outdoors. The only power is a pair of 120V outdoor plugs on the side of the house with a spring-loaded cover, the kind you use for Christmas lights and an electric lawnmower. The driving is light: about once per week, and the farthest regular trip is around 30 km. No road trips. For anything big, you rent a van.
My own experience says the cold part is the easy part. I've taken the car out on fresh snow and ice this season and it handles BRILLIANTLY. Drivetrain and cabin heating are a non-issue. I also took it through a car wash and let it freeze overnight at -7 C, specifically to see what happens in the city without any real risk. It was mostly fine but I did notice some issues, and those are all about stuff freezing in place, not about range or power. Obviously I did that test with a heated garage as my fallback, which is exactly my point. Someone with no garage doesn't have the fallback.
So these are the questions I'd like real answers on:
\- Is Level 1 on a driveway actually viable? At roughly 1 to 1.5 kWh per hour, a week of 30 km trips should be recovered in a night or two. But I have no experience doing this outdoors in the cold, so tell me where I'm wrong.
\- What about the outdoor outlet itself? Those spring-loaded covers are not designed for a continuous multi-hour load in freezing rain. Should it be GFCI, should an electrician look at it, and is it a bad idea to leave a cord and plug sitting in snow and ice for months?
\- Charge port and connector icing. I know the charge port can freeze shut in the wrong conditions. Does anyone with no garage have a routine for that, or does it just not happen very often?
\- The "sitting" problem. The person in this scenario has a gas car now, and after a 3-week trip it needed a jumpstart (they waited a week to do it), and then the power steering was wonky for the first hour of driving. I assume that was the 12V battery being low, and I assume an EV would handle that differently since it's topped up from the main pack. But what actually happens when an EV sits plugged in outdoors for a month or more? Any gotchas that are specific to EVs, or shared with ICE cars?
As far as I can tell, the answer for a low-mileage driver in this kind of climate is "yes, it's totally fine", but I'd rather hear from people who actually live it than trust my garage-spoiled brain.
If you have a no-garage Level 1 setup in a cold climate, please share what's worked and what hasn't.
