>>No touchscreens, no fancy door handles, no cameras, etc.
We own a Volkswagen e-Up, it's exactly like this. We love it too, it's just such a great little car, you can easily get 150 miles out of its 32kWh battery and it fits everything, has no touchscreen, good old buttons for the climate controls and even proper analogue gauges for speed and battery level. I will own it until it falls apart.
>>I also think it would make a lot more sense to have an auxiliary diesel heating system.
I honestly doubt that anyone would like the "convenience" of having to fill up the tank for it with diesel every now and then.
>>and likely generate less carbon emissions
CO2 - yes. But these heaters(and devices like Webasto etc) are hugely polluting because unlike the exhaust from your engine their exhaust isn't filtered or treated in any way, all the bad stuff goes directly outside.
>>A gallon of diesel would last for months if it was just used for heating the cabin
No, it wouldn't - I own two cars with a webasto and they both use about 0.4L of fuel for hour of operation, it's not much but it's not insignificant.
Besides, this is a fixed problem - just use a heatpump instead of a resistive heater. A 500W heatpump will produce as much heat as a 2000W resistive heater.
The reason we went with 4y old leaf and not brand new e-up was that it looked like a coffin made out of matchbox. Compared to leaf which is still simple and conventional but has much more space to absorb impact and full of safety features.
Well....if you don't like the look you don't like the look. But it used to have full 5 stars on NCAP testing until the forward collision avoidance system was made mandatory and it's was never fitted with one by VW. For us the Leaf was a lot more expensive than the e-Up with less range so I wasn't interested.
I don't understand why your Webasto is using so much fuel. I use one to heat my sunroom in the winter and 2.4 gallons lasts me several days. A small, insulated cabin should require much less.
Because it also heats the engine as well maybe? Also I guess a car loses heat much faster than your stationary cabin because the flow of air around it as you drive is very good at taking the heat away. Also there is no insulation anywhere.
Anyway, from its spec sheet it says it can actually use up to 0.6L/h at full load:
Full load is way too much unless you're arctic trucking. The lowest setting is plenty for my sun room until it gets below 20f or it's especially windy. This uses about a gallon in 6 hours.
But you're right, without any insulation, the moving vehicle will lose heat much faster. The room has terrible insulation but at least it has bare brick for the bottom 3 feet which probably retains a lot of the heat. I suspect with proper insulation your fuel usage would be drastically reduced.
OP's rate of usage equates to using 2.4 gallons in about 23 hours. Assuming you are only using yours during the few hours a day the sunroom is occupied, several days sounds about right.
Yes i run it 6-8 hours a day when I'm using the room. It really surprises me how effective and cheap it is vs a space heater. A solar powered heat pump would be even cheaper, I suppose but this solution was only about $200 to build. I doubt a heat pump would last long enough to pay for itself unless i could figure out away to cheaply acquire and install it.
It is. Modern high-efficiency single stage air-source heat pumps will only have a COP of between 2-2.2 in -20°c/-4°F, so your 500W heat pump would output 1000W-1200W of heat.
However at 0°C/32°F this bumps to 3.5-3.8, so you'd be getting much closer to the quoted 2000W.
If you're operating in -20°C or below for much of the year a heat pump might not be the best option, but even in Yellowknife that's only three months of the year and it's still twice the heat per kW.
We own a Volkswagen e-Up, it's exactly like this. We love it too, it's just such a great little car, you can easily get 150 miles out of its 32kWh battery and it fits everything, has no touchscreen, good old buttons for the climate controls and even proper analogue gauges for speed and battery level. I will own it until it falls apart.
>>I also think it would make a lot more sense to have an auxiliary diesel heating system.
I honestly doubt that anyone would like the "convenience" of having to fill up the tank for it with diesel every now and then.
>>and likely generate less carbon emissions
CO2 - yes. But these heaters(and devices like Webasto etc) are hugely polluting because unlike the exhaust from your engine their exhaust isn't filtered or treated in any way, all the bad stuff goes directly outside.
>>A gallon of diesel would last for months if it was just used for heating the cabin
No, it wouldn't - I own two cars with a webasto and they both use about 0.4L of fuel for hour of operation, it's not much but it's not insignificant.
Besides, this is a fixed problem - just use a heatpump instead of a resistive heater. A 500W heatpump will produce as much heat as a 2000W resistive heater.