Hi we live on Vancouver Island and ski at Mount Washington. At certain times chains are required to drive up the Mountain. Does anyone known if it’s ok to put chains on an EV? Worried that the instant torque with an EV engine might cause problems? Or if there are any other issues that might occur? We own a Hyundai Kona 2020.
Your Kona manual has a section titled Winter Driving in the Driving your Vehicle chapter, which covers what you need to know. Otherwise, no different to driving an ICE.
I can't answer for snow chains on the Kona, but Tesla actually recommends a brand, sells them, and provides use instructions. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-94F63B13-EA2C-45D9-83AB-5DCA6295D587.html Now, interestingly, I just RTFM for the Kona, and apparently Hyundai wants us to inflate snow tire pressures to 4 psi over the door jamb spec. (Page 7-37) Didn't catch that before even though I'm a geek and read it cover to cover when I bought the car.... Currently I have them at 36 psi.
Snow tires are softer, so I always run them a little higher psi, on all my cars (about 40psi on the Kona). If I don't, I get premature wear of the edges of the snow tires. With the Kona, I decided to just keep it that high year round as well, to help with efficiency. I think as long as you're not wearing out the center of your tires faster than the edges, you're doing fine.
We've used snow chains on our Kia Niro a few times driving up skifield access roads in New Zealand. These are gravel (metalled) roads, so take a bit more to ice up than normal tarseal. We've had no problems at all.
