Electric vehicles lose noticeable range in cold conditions. The dominant cause is not permanent capacity loss but energy diverted to heating, plus chemistry that temporarily resists delivering power.
Cabin heating has no free source
A combustion engine wastes most of its fuel energy as heat, so warming the cabin costs almost nothing extra. That waste heat is simply redirected.
An electric drivetrain is efficient enough that it produces little surplus heat, so cabin warmth must be generated from the battery. On a cold journey this can rival the energy used for propulsion.
Short trips are affected worst, because warming a cold cabin is a large initial expense that is spread over very few miles.
The battery itself must be kept warm
Lithium cells deliver and accept power poorly when cold, because the chemical processes involved slow down at low temperature and internal resistance rises.
Vehicles therefore heat the pack to bring it into an efficient range, which consumes energy before any of it reaches the wheels.
This is also why fast charging in winter is slow until the pack warms, and why preconditioning on the way to a charger makes a substantial difference to the session.
Heat pumps change the arithmetic
A resistive heater converts electricity to heat at a one-to-one ratio. A heat pump moves existing heat instead, delivering several units of warmth per unit of electricity consumed.
Their advantage narrows as outside temperature falls, since there is less ambient heat available to move, and at extreme cold they often fall back to resistive heating.
Even so, the difference across a typical winter is large enough that heat pump equipment is one of the clearer explanations for range differences between similar vehicles.
Road conditions add their own losses
Cold air is denser, which increases aerodynamic drag slightly. Winter tyres, snow and wet roads increase rolling resistance more substantially.
Regenerative braking is also limited when the pack is cold, because a cold cell cannot safely accept high charging current, so energy that would normally be recovered is lost to friction braking.
The loss is temporary, not degradation
Capacity returns when the pack warms, so a vehicle showing reduced range in winter has not lost anything permanently.
Heating the cabin while still connected to power avoids drawing that energy from the pack, which is why preconditioning before departure recovers much of the apparent loss.
Understanding the split matters because the fixes differ: preconditioning addresses the heating cost, while nothing addresses cold chemistry except waiting for temperature to rise.