Why do electric cars have a heat pump?

In fact, no electric car should necessarily have a heat pump ... However, such equipment has become somewhat of a duty to use or generalized to these cars and this is because of its many advantages.

For the thermal car?

In the thermal car we have two separate devices for generating cold and heat. Heat is supplied by the engine via the cooling circuit that extends into the passenger compartment cooler and the cooler via this air conditioning circuit if the car has one for sure ...

For the electric car

In the electric car, we still have our own air conditioning circuit, but we no longer have any heat motor to heat the water ... so we have two possibilities: electrical resistance or heat pump.

 At TESLA, for example, the first generations were equipped with extremely energy-efficient electrical resistors, which were later replaced by a heat pump.

Why do we use a heat pump?

First, there must be a device that makes it possible to replace the heat generated by "traditional" car heat engines. And if we wanted to avoid counteracting an arm-consuming joule effect, only a few solutions remain before us except for the heat pump.

 The heat pump reduces heating energy consumption by 3 to 4 times compared to traditional resistors. For an electric vehicle that spends its energy saving to maximize autonomy, this is somewhat desirable ... This is a special feature in very cold countries where the energy consumption of resistors can become enormous.

• Another advantage is that the air conditioning circuit and heat pump are integrated here, because the air conditioning is actually a heat pump! We can then get rid of the resistors although there are some additional elements in reality to speed up heating, the heat pump circuit takes longer to operate, especially when the weather is extremely cold. Hence, it appears that the heat pump has certain limits, because from -12 degrees the resulting heat becomes very little ... 

Finally, the complex thermal management of an electric vehicle makes the heat pump suitable particularly for this type of vehicle. It is already necessary to regulate the temperature of the battery, electric motor and passenger compartment.So you have to heat some things and cool others, nothing is better than a device that generates cold on the one hand and heat on the other hand!

 In addition, this temperature management allows more or less autonomy to be improved, which then becomes more than crucial. An extremely cold battery gives less current, for example, and an extremely cold battery does not allow charging quickly and in the best of conditions.