The Roseville, Minnesota, fire department has lots of trucks, but its latest had to be electric. That’s the one that carries Ashes, its therapy dog, to and from fires, funerals and any other place where public safety officers need a morale boost.
Assistant Chief Niel Sjostrom says Ashes gets cozy in pretty much any vehicle, but the department’s new Rivian Automotive Inc SUV has programmable climate control, so the pup stays safe when the truck is parked in the heat of summer or cold of winter.
“The ‘Pet Comfort’ (feature) was a huge part of our decision,” Sjostrom says from his station on the outskirts of Minneapolis. “Now, I don’t leave here without bringing her with me.”
Almost all electric vehicles now have some form of climate control that can be programmed to run when the machine is parked and driverless, another feature electric models can offer that internal combustion ones can’t, like a front trunk or fueling at home.
The temperature setting, which carmakers have been marketing for years, is now drawing a wide and specific demographic: the devoted dog owner. Lucid Group Inc. calls its feature “Creature Comfort mode”, which “has without a doubt been a great sales tool,” says spokesman Justin Berkowitz.
Enthusiasm for electric vehicles has been fading somewhat around the world. The pace of EV sales, while still brisk, has slowed down in recent years as governments ratcheted back incentives for electric models, which remain more expensive than gas-powered cars. In this environment, keeping the family pet comfortable is one overlooked selling point that is convincing some people to go electric.
Adding features for dog owners is a sound business strategy. There have never been more dogs in the US, and households with them tend to earn more money than average. While a wide swath of EV brands let drivers keep climate control active for 30 minutes or so while the car is off, companies that exclusively make electric vehicles – Lucid Group, Polestar Automotive Holding, Rivian and Tesla Inc – have explicitly marketed the feature to dog lovers.
Laura Westfall held on to her Tesla Model Y for Phineas, her golden retriever who passed away in 2023, and Huckleberry, the one she got shortly thereafter. In September, she ditched the Tesla for a Rivian SUV and its “pet comfort” mode. Westfall wasn’t dead-set on driving electric, but she couldn’t find a gas-burning car with similar pet-friendly capabilities. Now, when she goes out to eat or run errands, Huckleberry is there, typically waiting patiently and trying to make friends through the closed windows.
“It’s just been a game-changer for us,” she said. “We don’t have kids, so our lives really revolve around the dog in a way.”
Experts have long warned against leaving pets in an unattended car, but the carmakers promise their systems have safeguards built in. In these cars and trucks, a driver sets the climate control to run either before getting out of the car or remotely via an app.
The vehicles will display a message on the navigation screen that climate control is engaged, lest a passerby think the animal is in danger. The setting also typically blocks over-the-air software updates to avoid the car shutting down while an animal is inside. If power is running low or the climate control is struggling to overcome extreme temperatures, the machine will ping a driver’s phone.
That risk is low, though: Most contemporary EVs use relatively efficient heat pumps to control cabin temperature, so the feature drains little battery. It’s possible to leave the air conditioning or heat running in an unattended gas car, but without a vast resource of electric power, doing so requires idling the engine.
Kim Staack Read traded in a gas-burning Mercedes Sprinter motorhome for a Rivian with Raji, a mutt that she rescued from India, in mind. Raji has now comfortably traveled through 47 of the 48 contiguous US states and is headed to Pittsburgh this summer from his home in Bend, Oregon.
It’s hard to quantify the extent to which animals are driving EV adoption. That said, pets are looming large in the car-buying decisions of drivers like Read. Her dog was not the only reason for kicking a gas habit, but Raji was the primary one, she said. And there’s evidence to suggest that’s also the case for others.
While roughly half of US households have a dog, almost two-thirds of Rivian owners fall into that camp. Hyundai Motor Co. says that 4% of drivers of its vehicles – including those that run on gas – schlep around a pet every day. However, in its Ioniq 6 EV, that figure rises to almost 9%.
General Motors Co., meanwhile, says its EV owners in North America set their climate controls remotely 1.8 million times per month. That’s roughly eight times for every one of its electric vehicles on the road, though GM acknowledged that it doesn’t know what share of those requests were made on behalf of a pet. Ford Motor Co., meanwhile, doesn’t have a dedicated pet mode on its electric vehicles, but if its patent filings are any indication, it’s working on one.
The Chuo family in central New Jersey has considered Cuddles, their rescue mutt, in all three of its recent car purchases. Now, the pup cycles between a Hyundai Ioniq 5, Rivian R1T and Tesla Model Y.
“At this point,” says Maxwell Chuo who studies computer science nearby at Rutgers University, “she knows she pretty much doesn’t stay home by herself.” – Bloomberg
