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I live in a hilly area, and we have hard rains some times of the year. When this happens there are often deep puddles on the road.

When confronted with such a puddle, the driver (in an ICE vehicle) usually does some mental calculations and sometimes forges ahead. I've never been stuck (yet).

I wonder what happens with an EV? Anybody got real world experience?

2 comments

Oops, just found my own answer via Google.

It seems you can drive safely through deep water, there are actually tests for this.

I'd still be nervous about it!

You can use an EV as a boat!

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/06/tesla-model-s-floats-bo...

But don't.

>While it might seem a little incongruous for an electric car to become a boat, it makes some sense if you think about it. Most conventional ICE cars have an exhaust pipe that's low to the ground and quickly becomes flooded if you drive through deep water. Battery-powered vehicles, on the other hand, don't have an exhaust pipe. (I wonder if fuel-cell vehicles, which do have an exhaust, can be used as a boat.)

>Updated: As mentioned in the comments below, another issue with ICEs is water—which is incompressible—getting into the engine via the air intake.

It's kind of sad and funny that the author had to be told by the commenters that the intake is the issue and not the exhaust.

I guess that author had never been around motorboats? Every stock boat motor exhausts underwater, so mufflers aren't required.

The advice I've heard for driving cars through water includes "Rev the engine fast, do not change gear, do not stop the engine, if you stall do not restart the engine" and explains that advice as stopping water getting into the engine from the exhaust pipe.

Nothing is gonna flow backwards up the exhaust enough to get in the engine. Boats actually dump water right into the exhaust manifolds (at a point that's uphill of the cylinder heads no less). That advice is mostly to prevent the chance of stalling out when you meet some obstacle you couldn't see because of the water. Restarting the engine is definitely worth trying. The starter isn't strong enough to break things if it's hydro-locked and if it hydro-locked when running then it already broke (hopefully just the head gasket). maybe at worst you'd damage a catalyic converter but unless your state has asinine laws that restrict you to buying overpriced parts it'll less than the tow bill you'd get from leaving your car on the side of the road.

There was a video going around a while back where a Model S floated through a puddle without the wheels touching the ground.

With no 4 wheel drive option, this thing is just a car with a pickup bed. I wouldn't use it for any real rural work.

The electric truck I think has most promise is the Bollinger B1 (https://www.bollingermotors.com/). Itching to get my hands on one of those. Analog gauges on an all-electric truck has serious appeal.