TOT indoor solar

But that ultimately is simply recovering energy the fuel engine has put in... Simply avoids wasting all the braking energy as heat.

So today, my Uber to the hospital was a Prius. And the return an Auris (needing a front wheel bearing like most taxis [passim])

LOL !

I am still thinking that when self driving cars finally emerge, they will highlight the lunacy of leaving a car on a drive 90% of the time.

Sure, and is one reason why your MPG is improved.

Have you heard the US expression 'It's only a rental'? Many people will want the use of a car that's clean and undamaged.

What I noticed, in my commuting days, is that everyone wants to use their cars at the same time. And don't suggest staggering hours of work, as that would need to be by a lot more than two or three hours, and the schools, shops etc. would have to match... at least all the civil servants are off the road.

Yes, but that's quite a big advantage for city and motorway driving and for very hilly areas.

Clive Sinclair understood that, and the C5 had regenerative braking.

SWMBO likes to choose vegetables & fruit herself. Others may have the same idea.

When I started work it was the strict 8 to 5 and up in front of the boss if I was a few minutes late clocking in.

When I finished work it was flexi-time with a 3 hour periods in the mornings and afternoons where I could turn up or leave. Time keeping over a month was based on trust. Most people also worked enough hours during the week to take every Friday afternoon off.

The former was nightmare with commuting especially as all surrounding companies kept to exactly the same times.

The latter was much better for commuting although in my area the rush hour expanded over the years to around 4 hours each morning and afternoon/evening. It was also very noticeable when many parents took time off work to coincide with school holidays.

During my working life I had a job in the 1980s with working times between these two extremes with much longer compulsory core times and clocking in/out BUT with the ability to build up enough working hours to get an 24 days a year off (on top of the annual holiday entitlement plus bank holidays).

Have you heard Arthur C. Clarke insight "old people die" ?

Some examples of battery sizes and ranges.

Surprisingly, many of the others cluster around the same distance (67 or so).

Mercedes-Benz GLC 300e: 76 miles 31.2kWh

...

Some of those would make the grocery run in style, but they're not priced for grocery runs :-)

Paul

It's unfortunate that there isn't a table listing the minimum regeneration speed.

At least one car, the motors don't need excitation, to be turned into generators. That particular car, regenerates all the way down to 0 MPH (on a flat surface).

But other cars, they need like 5kW for excitation, and when the regeneration energy becomes 4.9kW, the car computer switches the regen off (removes the excitation) and switches to the friction brake. Such cars don't have the same "mileage efficiency", and you can see this sometimes in reviewer descriptions of the usage of the car, and what is recorded on the dash for consumption.

While the "round trip" has a quoted efficiency, the minimum regen speed also has quite an impact on how useful the regen is. At lower speeds, there isn't a lot of energy being returned to the battery, so if everything below 10MPH was not used, that's not a big deal. But cars that stop regen at 30MPH, that's not so good.

EBikes hardly ever have regen. It simplifies the design.

If you brake via regen suddenly enough, the output power is three times the normal acceleration power. This can be hard on the charge/discharge electronics. In some cases, they can't actually absorb all the returned energy. If you reduce speed a bit slower, the regen is a better match for the charging capability. If you reduce speed too slowly, it may not counterbalance the excitation power required.

On a diesel electric locomotive (North American version), the regen when braking on a hill is fed into a resistive grid, which has a large fan for cooling. But now that a "battery car" is being added to some, the regen when it happens, can be fed to the battery car. The battery car is used for haulage in the final miles into a city, to cut down on diesel pollution within city limits.

Paul

No car regenerates down to 0mph. Simple physics. The motor in regen mode simply does not have the flux reversal rate at low rpm to generate any meaningful power/braking effect so friction brakes are blended in to take over down to zero. Even T brand cars cannot break the laws of physics.

A CVT would help by spinning the motor faster and faster as the speed decreased. And leaving it spinning when the car came to a halt ready to transfer the energy mack into motion.

It would but BEV's tend to have a fixed reduction gearbox typically 8 or

surely Elon rewrites things that don't suit. ;-)

Oh yes. That's about right for motors that do well at 30,000 rpm!

But it is just an engineering compromise.

And don't forget that modern electric cars have loads of power electronics that can make a boost converter so as the car slows it can still generate enough volts to get charge back into the battery, unlike old DC stuff which had to fiddle with series/parallel configuration and varying the field current.

nib

Braking via regen requires POWER to flow from the motor/gen to the battery. Increasing the VOLTAGE does not increase the POWER, it merely reduces the CURRENT and thereby conserves physical laws.