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Technology / Re: Does regenerative braking have a hazardous complication?
« Last post by vhfpmr on Today at 11:49:41 »That indeed is a possible unintended consequence- whether it has been researched, I do not know.
I think I do.
As they have been mandatory for about 100 years it would be difficult to disentangle this hypothesis from the statistics of increased traffic density, increased speeds, mandatory speed limits, improved tyre treads, and brakes that actually work.
That's why I asked.
I recently spoke to a guy on Twitter who designed side-impact protection for cars, so I asked him if there was any evidence that SIP had saved any lives. He didn't have an answer, and the more I pressed him the more he squirmed.
People just assume that if something's intended to save lives, then it does save lives. Drugs would probably be an exception, generally they don't get a a licence without some evidence that they work first.
My car (fully EV, Polestar 2) can be set to one pedal or two pedal driving; the former makes maximum use of regenerative breaking and I barely need to use the brakes. It definitely puts the brake lights on in this mode.
I've never driven an electric car, but I don't like the idea of having braking shared between two pedals rather than separate pedals for brake and accelerator. I can foresee dangerous dithering: if an emergency starts to develop I can imagine being undecided whether staying on one pedal will provide enough brake force or whether I need to move to the other. That's not going to be conducive to fast reaction time, and if you continue jumping for the brake automatically like in an ICE car it risks creating a pile up with unnecessarily sharp braking. Far better to put your foot on the brake, and then just modulate the pressure according to how the situation develops.
I think I'd want a switch for a "simulate ICE" mode, in which the regenerative braking simulates engine overrun unless I swap to the brake pedal.
Another note: How efficient is regenerative braking. How much energy is lost regenerating and then re-accelerating? How can an EV get decent range if it cannot just coast and allow a minor variation in speed?
I suppose the answer would have to be that you can still coast by adjusting your foot position accurately/carefully enough, but I doubt people will, and the idea doesn't appeal to me much.