Stranded Overnight On A Snow-Clogged Interstate? Tech Should Have Saved You

This week we watched in shock as hundreds of cars were stranded on a section of I-95 near Washington, DC because of a rare snowstorm and major pile-up. People spent the night in their cars in freezing conditions, some were stuck for over 24 hours. Our more modern transportation technologies might have improved this situation, but some ponder if a switch to electric cars would have made it worse as the cars ran out of power.

To those who grew up in snowy places, the calamity that occurs with moderate snow in places that aren’t used to it is somewhat amusing. In Buffalo a foot of snow would cause some disruption but be shrugged off. In Texas and Virginia, a few inches could be national news. These regions need to spend more on their infrastructure to handle snow and increasingly frequent weather extremes, but aren’t willing to pay the cost.

Electric Vehicles

A report in the Washington Post speculated that it could have been a disaster if it had been a highway of electric cars. It’s true that EVs lose battery performance in very cold weather, up to about 20%. Most now heat their batteries to deal with this, but if somebody got into a jam like this with a very low battery, they could face trouble. Some gasoline drivers also ran out of gas idling their engines, though it was easier to deal with them if small vehicles could bring a gas can. There are mobile EV rechargers out there, but there aren’t too many because in reality, running out of charge in an EV is much more rare than running out of gas, because people are more aware and their car computers nag them to avoid it. Roadside service providers found that less than 5% of calls to service an EV on the road involved running out of juice.

On the plus side, and EV can keep you warm quite well. Most EVs have electric seat heaters, which will keep one side of you toasty and keep you alive, even if the other side gets cold. They only draw about 60 watts (per seat) but a 20% degraded EV battery can provide that from full for almost a month! (That’s not true in a Tesla
TSLA
, which won’t turn on the seat heater without running he computer, and the computer draws 240 watts and would only last a week.) A gasoline car, on the other hand, uses around 0.16 gallons/hour to idle, and thus can not idle for nearly that long, though that keeps the whole car warm. Idling an engine to keep you warm is vastly less efficient than doing it directly with wires in your seat.

Of course, drivers would prefer to heat the whole interior — but a full battery should be able to do that for around 3 days. Nobody has a full battery, but it’s still likely to beat the gasoline car. Particularly because with an EV, you can set the heat low and use less energy, which is not the case with the idling gas car.

Navigation Systems

We don’t see news reports, but clearly a large number of drivers that day were told to avoid that backup by their navigation system, and never got on that road. Such systems are usually aware of full stoppages within minutes, though a few people probably took the road anyway, because nobody expects a jam to last 24 hours. At least they were not in China where the worst jam (not in snow) lasted almost 10 days!

Weather like they had in Virginia no longer happens by surprise. This storm was known about well in advance, and while the pile-up was not directly predictable, our systems should get better at knowing when the risk is high for jams, particularly in places that don’t have the ability to handle the foot of snow everybody knew was coming a day in advance. Our navigation systems might well predict and warn us that there is a certain risk to using a highway like this, and we should be on the alert to look for these warnings.

Or rather, we should not need to be on the alert at all. Today’s traffic aware navigation systems are great, but their flaw is you have to use them. You need to (in most cases) enter a destination, and then it will plan a route and divert you around traffic. That’s too much user interface. Most of us don’t want to bother the effort of turning on navigation just to drive home, or take a Sunday drive on a route we know well.

The best systems never need to be actively used. Rather they give you warnings when you need to know something, and the lack of warnings is a signal that everything is normal. Your nav system should know you and your likely routes, or at least the likely routes in your area. When roads are clear, it need say nothing if not asked, other than perhaps display a green light on the screen. However, since it knows the problem areas, if you give clues that you are heading for one, then it should alert you and ask you to enter your destination.

For example, even not knowing you, it could say, “You appear to be heading for the interstate on-ramp. If you’re going north, you should know that’s slow and a better route is available.” If it does know you — for example, that you normally drive to work each morning, or home each afternoon — it can do much better. In those situations, its silence means the regular route is good. It will only pipe up if you need to divert.

Some systems are doing a touch of this, for example the Tesla will pre-load a route to the address of a meeting you have put in your shared calendar, and then it will avoid traffic for you. Even a system that knew nothing about you would have been able to notice you getting near the on-ramp for I-95 that day and warned you to stay away.

If this happened, people would have been avoiding that road before the police could get there to close it off. Which would have reduced the size of the jam, and even have allowed police to direct the cars at the back of the line to turn around and go the wrong way to get off the highway. That would have saved everybody a lot of grief.