Tesla Model Y Heat Pump - Engineering to break the Laws of Physics?

The heat pump in the Tesla Model Y is able to generate more heat power than what it takes from the car's battery (in most situations). Where is this additional heating power coming from? How does it work?

Goal: heat up the car’s cabin when it’s cold.
COP (coefficient of performance) = Q (heat put into cabin)/W (work required to generate this heat).
COP ~ 1 for more electric heaters. Ex: the 100W of electric power that goes into your space heater from out the wall creates almost 100W of heat.
Tesla’s heat pump has a COP of 3, so for the Tesla to generate 100W of heat inside the cabin, it’s only using 33W of power.
Are we breaking the laws of physics? Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Where do the other 67W of heat come from? The outside of the car, by entering the evaporator.
A heat pump is a refrigerator running in reverse.
1. A compressor turns a low pressure (P), low temperature (T) gas into a high temp, high P gas
2. This high energy gas enters a condenser where thermal energy of the gas is given to the cabin to raise cabin temp. As the gas loses energy it condenses into a liquid.
3. The liquid moves through an expansion valve that causes the P to decrease (and T). There’s more volume available to the liquid.
4. The low volume makes the liquid vaporize as there are fewer intermolecular collisions. As the liquid molecules turn into gas, they pull thermal energy from their surroundings (the outside of the car). In the evaporator we now have a low pressure, low temperature gas that repeats in this cycle.
Caveat to heat pumps: heat pump’s COP decreases as the temperature around the evaporator decreases (in colder places, the COP isn’t as great) as the liquid molecules that want to be a gas don’t have as much thermal energy available to them.
At -20 degrees C, the COP of the heat pump ~1 (which is the same as normal electric heaters).
The fluid that turns from liquid and gas and back again is called refrigerant, and one common example in cars is called R134a.

Special thanks to Engineering Explained for introducing this concept to the broader public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7wxGl7m2sw

Видео Tesla Model Y Heat Pump - Engineering to break the Laws of Physics? канала Vincent Stevenson