Have you ever pulled into a fast charging station on a freezing morning without notifying your EV first, and found that it charges more slowly? Turns out that if you set that same charger as a destination in the car's navigation, many EVs will use the time it takes to drive there to prepare the battery. It's something Tesla's manual tells owners to do 30 to 45 minutes before arriving, while Porsche goes so far as to warn that, without doing so, a vehicle's charging power might be lower.

This warm-up routine is part of an EV battery's thermal management system in most modern cars. Alongside it is usually a cooling loop, which uses liquid coolant pumped via tubes or metal plates pressed against the battery, collecting heat and carrying it to a radiator or into the car's air conditioning system.

Fleet management company Geotab tracked more than 22,700 EVs for a study and found that, on average, batteries lost 2.3 percent of their health each year. Cars in hot climates lost about 0.4 percentage points more a year than those in mild ones, while cars that frequently used fast chargers above 100 kW lost 3 percent a year against 1.5 percent for those that rarely did.

At the average rate, a battery would still be at roughly 77 percent after a decade, in line with research suggesting that EV batteries can last much longer than experts first predicted . When fast charging, where 300 amps or more can be pushed through the battery pack, a lot of waste heat is generated and needs to be removed.

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