Every year, fleet operators who managed their EV routes confidently through spring and summer discover in November that their planning assumptions no longer hold. The routes are the same. The vehicles are the same. The results are not.
This is not a malfunction, it is physics.
Lithium-ion batteries are electrochemical systems. The reactions that release energy slow as temperature drops. A battery pack delivering 100% of its rated capacity at 20 degrees delivers roughly 80% at 0 degrees and 60 to 65% at minus 10 degrees. The capacity has not permanently changed — warm the battery back up and it recovers. But on a January morning at a Dutch distribution depot, that option is not available.
That is only the first effect. The second is cabin heating.
Heating an EV's interior draws from the traction battery. Unlike a combustion vehicle, which uses waste heat from the engine, an electric drivetrain produces almost none. The heat pump or resistive heating element keeping the driver warm on a cold morning pulls kilowatts directly from the range budget. On a long motorway run in January, cabin heating can account for 15 to 25% of total energy draw. Range shrinks from two sides simultaneously.
The practical numbers for a van rated at 200 km WLTP: on a 3-degree January morning, loaded, running the heater, real-world range is somewhere between 120 and 145 km. A routing system using the 200 km figure will generate routes that look correct on screen and fail in the field.
There is a third factor that makes cold weather worse in commercial fleet operations specifically: charging slows down in the cold. Most DC fast chargers limit their output when the battery is cold to protect the cells. A stop planned for 18 minutes at a fast charger in August might take 28 minutes in January. A routing system that does not account for this produces arrival time estimates that are consistently optimistic in winter.
The fix requires a routing engine that treats temperature as a genuine input — one that adjusts each vehicle's consumption model based on the day's forecast, not a blanket seasonal adjustment applied uniformly to all EVs. Different vehicles respond to cold differently depending on their battery chemistry and thermal management architecture. A blanket 20% reduction is a guess. Per-model cold-weather curves are routing.
Chargetrip's vehicle consumption models incorporate cold-weather performance curves specific to each vehicle model, including the adjusted charging behaviour at low temperatures. Routes calculated on a January morning reflect January conditions, not a temperate annual average.
One of the biggest fleet companies, Arval, uses Chargetrip across their European fleet clients for exactly this reason the accuracy holds year-round, not just in favourable conditions.
See how Chargetrip handles cold weather routing for fleets.
