A Heat Pump Is Worth About Ten Degrees of Winter, and Most Owners Never Knew They Had the Choice

On Peugeot’s own figures for one of its electric SUVs, a car with a heat pump at zero degrees loses the same share of its range as a car without one at plus 10. The same gap holds at every temperature the company lists. One piece of equipment, fitted or left off when the car was built, separates two otherwise identical cars by 15 percentage points of range on a cold morning.

Key takeaways:

• A car maker’s own figures put a heat pump at roughly ten degrees of winter weather.
• The same table has a car without one losing half its range at minus 10.
• It is a factory option that cannot be added later, and it is absent from most used listings.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Several bodies describe what cold weather does to an electric car’s range without ever putting a figure on it. The RAC says only that the full quoted range is unlikely in real-world driving, singling out cold weather among the reasons. The Energy Saving Trust, which publishes specific figures on cruising speed and fuel use, has nothing on winter electric range at all. The clearest numbers available to a British owner come from a car maker and an American laboratory.

The Table a Car Maker Published

Peugeot UK publishes winter range guidance in miles, written for British drivers, with a temperature-by-temperature table for the E-3008 Long Range, a car with a WLTP range of 435 miles. Peugeot labels the table as guidance only, and the figures belong to that one model.

Without a heat pump, the table shows a 20 per cent range loss at plus 10 degrees, 35 per cent at zero and 50 per cent at minus 10. With a heat pump, the losses at the same three temperatures are 10 per cent, 20 per cent and 35 per cent.

The arithmetic is the finding. A car with a heat pump at zero loses 20 per cent, exactly what the car without one loses at plus 10. At minus 10, the car with a heat pump loses 35 per cent, which is what the car without one loses at zero. At every point on Peugeot’s table, the heat pump buys back about ten degrees.

The same page gives its overall range loss two ways, 20 to 40 per cent in one place and 20 to 50 per cent in another, which is a reason to work from the table rather than the summary. The temperatures on it are the relevant ones for a British reader. Plus 10 to zero covers most of a UK winter, so the table is describing ordinary weather here, not extremes.

What the Laboratories Found

The most thorough independent testing comes from the US. The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory results, published in September 2024, found battery electric range fell 41 per cent at minus 7 degrees, against 10 per cent for a petrol car in the same tests. At minus 18 degrees, the average loss was around 50 per cent, from 39 per cent in steady motorway running to 59 per cent in town driving.

These are American laboratory tests on American vehicles and drive cycles, with the cabin set to 22 degrees. They describe the mechanism well, but they are not a British road test.

Two years later, the American motoring organisation AAA published its own testing across three electric cars, with the cabin at the same 22 degrees. It found a 39.0 per cent fall in calculated driving range at minus 7. Two organisations, testing two years apart, landed within two percentage points of each other.

Set against Peugeot, the sources agree more than they appear to. Peugeot’s figures without a heat pump are 35 per cent at zero and 50 per cent at minus 10, and the laboratory’s 41 per cent at minus 7 sits between the two. The apparent disagreement in winter range figures mostly disappears once it is clear whether a heat pump was in the car.

Why the Heater, Not the Battery

The intuitive explanation is a cold battery. It is the smaller half of the story. AAA’s testing found that the climate system, and heating above all, had by far the largest effect on range.

A petrol engine turns most of the energy in its fuel into waste heat, so warming the cabin costs almost nothing extra. An electric motor wastes very little, so the car has to make heat on purpose, from energy that would otherwise have moved it down the road. Kia UK describes conventional heaters in electric cars as high energy electric resistors that significantly reduce range.

That is the cost a heat pump goes after. On a cold morning, warming the cabin and the windows from cold is one of the heaviest jobs the car does, and in a car without a heat pump, all of that energy comes straight out of the battery.

The battery is the second factor. Its chemical reactions slow in the cold, so a chilled pack delivers less power and accepts charge more slowly, and some of its stored energy goes on warming itself. It counts, but it is not where most of the winter range goes.

Why It Is the Component That Decides Everything

A heat pump changes the winter equation more than any other single part of the car. The reasons are mechanical, and so is its limit.

Three to Four Times the Heat From the Same Energy

A heat pump does not generate heat. It moves heat from the outside air into the cabin, even when that air is cold, using a refrigerant circuit similar to the one in an air conditioning system run in reverse.

Moving heat takes far less energy than making it. The Department of Energy puts a heat pump car at doing the same heating on roughly a third to a quarter of the energy a resistance heater needs. In its testing at minus 7 degrees, a heat pump cut the total power drawn by the climate system by 38 per cent.

The principle is the same as a domestic air source heat pump, which plenty of homeowners have discussed with an installer in recent years. The house version and the car version both work by moving warmth from outside rather than burning or resisting their way to it.

The limit has to be stated plainly. A heat pump loses effectiveness as the air gets colder, and at minus 18 degrees the Department of Energy’s test car fell back on its resistance heater, with the pump contributing only a small share. It is worth having in a British winter. It is not a fix for an Arctic one.

The Option Nobody Knew They Were Choosing

On most electric cars, the heat pump is a factory option or comes with a particular trim level. It is fitted when the car is built, and retrofitting one is not a realistic job.

That means the decision was made when the car was first specified, often by a leasing company or a fleet buyer rather than the person driving it today. A second or third owner inherits the result without ever having seen the choice.

The used market hides it further. A typical listing carries the alloy wheel size, the infotainment screen and the parking sensors, and leaves out the one option that, on Peugeot’s figures for the E-3008, moves winter range by 15 percentage points at zero degrees.

Finding out is simple. A franchised dealer for the brand can check the build specification against the registration or the VIN, the same route owners already use for service information that car makers no longer publish openly.

What an Owner Can Still Change

The heat pump question was settled at the factory. Several things an owner controls still make a difference, and one of them is free.

Heat the Car on the Cable

Every manufacturer that documents preconditioning says the same thing about where the energy comes from. Volkswagen UK says there is no drain on the battery if the car is still connected to the charging point. Tesla UK says preconditioning relies on external power rather than the car’s battery when it is plugged in.

Renault Group goes further, saying the energy to reach a comfortable temperature comes from the grid and the energy in the battery is not touched. Its guidance is to programme the system at least two hours before departure, with it switching off half an hour before the car leaves.

That timing rules out what most owners actually do, which is press a button in the app while pulling a coat on. Preconditioning works when it is scheduled, with the car still plugged in, long enough before the drive for the cabin and the battery to warm.

It is also the one lever that costs nothing in range. The heaviest demand the climate system makes is the first warm-up from cold, and preconditioning moves that part of the job onto mains electricity. For a car without a heat pump, that recovers some of what the missing option costs.

The Smaller Levers, Honestly Sized

Heated seats and a heated steering wheel warm the people rather than the air, and draw a fraction of the power a cabin heater needs. Turning the cabin temperature down helps too. The laboratory figures were recorded with the cabin at 22 degrees, and plenty of owners run warmer than that.

Speed compounds the cold. Aerodynamic drag rises with the square of speed, whatever is driving the wheels, so the motorway is where winter range disappears fastest, in the same way higher motorway speeds cost a petrol car fuel.

Tyre pressures fall with the temperature, and soft tyres cost range in any car. Checking them on a cold morning, when they are at their lowest, is a five-minute job.

None of these is a heat pump. Together they trim the winter loss rather than remove it, and any advice that suggests otherwise is overselling.

What This Means When Buying

For anyone choosing a used electric car, the heat pump question belongs on the checklist alongside the history checks.

The Question to Ask About a Used EV

Ask the seller whether the car has a heat pump, then confirm it from the VIN with a franchised dealer rather than taking the advert’s word for it. Treat the answer as a material fact about the car, in the same way as checking its history for a write-off marker.

The negotiating point follows from the manufacturer’s own numbers. Two otherwise identical cars, one with a heat pump and one without, are not the same car in December. On Peugeot’s table for the E-3008, the gap at zero degrees is 15 percentage points of range.

A winter test drive tells a buyer more than any listing. A range estimate read on a mild September afternoon says very little about how the car behaves in the cold. The dashboard figure on a frosty morning says a great deal.

Reading a Winter Range Figure Correctly

The last job is to avoid misreading normal behaviour as a fault. A car showing around 60 per cent of its summer range at minus 7 degrees is doing what the laboratory testing says it should.

The thing to watch is whether the range comes back in spring. A car still showing winter figures in July has something worth investigating, whether that is the battery or the way it is being charged and driven.

A car that recovers with the weather was never faulty. It was cold.

The biggest factor in an electric car’s winter range was settled before the current owner collected the keys, at the factory, by whoever specified it. The second biggest costs nothing, and most owners use it at the wrong moment. Everything else trims the loss at the edges.

Want more car content? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for the best automotive news and analysis on the internet.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to follow us on Microsoft Start.