Automakers have put a lot of effort into making the electric vehicle driving experience as similar to a combustion vehicle as possible. Going from combustion to electric these days doesn’t require drivers to change what they do behind the wheel, with one important exception: what happens when you lift off the accelerator pedal.
In a combustion car, what happens when you lift off depends on whether the vehicle is in gear (and which gear it’s in). If it’s in gear, this will cause engine braking and slow the car down, while if it’s in neutral, it will just coast.
You will experience much of the same in an EV, with the exception that when you lift off, the car will immediately start slowing down and the rate of deceleration will be considerably higher than in an ICE vehicle. The deceleration that electric motors are capable of is so strong that lifting off fully in an EV with its brake regeneration set to high makes the brake lights come on to alert drivers behind you that you are slowing down.
An EV’s much stronger deceleration allows you to essentially drive the vehicle with just the accelerator pedal. In some EVs, lifting off will bring the car to a complete stop, while in others you will have to apply the friction brakes once the vehicle has slowed down to creep pace to scrub off the last few miles per hour.
How strong the brake regeneration is in an EV depends on the type of motor it uses and whether it can physically decouple its motors from the wheels. You can usually adjust the level of regen toggling through different strength levels, which gives you a lot of flexibility to use the system in the way you’re most comfortable with.
While earlier EVs only allowed you to toggle between fixed regen strength settings, newer models also have an automatic mode, like the i-Pedal 3.0 system that we tried out in the Kia EV3. This saves drivers from having to constantly adjust regen for any given traffic situation, and the car does it for them, taking into account what type of road it’s on or what’s in front of the vehicle.
For instance, in a more recent EV with automatic regen, the car will prefer to coast when you lift off and there isn’t another car in front or if no corners are approaching. This automated approach is certainly a sign of how regen will be handled in the future, but these systems aren’t perfect yet, and they lack the kind of consistency that instills confidence.
One of the best uses of automatic regen was in the refreshed Tesla Model 3, which seemed to anticipate what you wanted from it better than in most other cars we tried. Driving it in town, it always seemed to stop exactly where you expected and wanted it to without you having to correct that with additional acceleration or braking.
The biggest regen-related change that drivers who are new to EVs need to adapt to is to still keep the go pedal pressed about halfway to get the vehicle to coast. Once you start lifting off after a certain point (not necessarily close to the end of the pedal travel), you will feel the deceleration.
Keeping the pedal partly pressed will take some getting used to, and it may even make your ankle sore since your right foot may not be used to staying in that position. This is what happened to me driving my first few EVs, when I found myself constantly toggling through the regen levels (usually done via paddles on the steering wheel) instead of having to retrain years of muscle memory.
The more you drive in one-pedal mode, though, the more you may start to like it, and it will make hopping back into a combustion car feel a bit strange at first.
You can turn brake regeneration to a very low level or almost off, in which case when you lift off, you will experience similar deceleration to a combustion car. However, you probably don’t want to do that since using high levels of regen puts electricity into the EV’s battery pack, essentially adding miles of free range.
This may not seem that important since in normal driving you will rarely see the predicted range going up while using regen, drive an EV down a mountain road, and you will see it add mile after mile of extra range as it descends. It also makes the physical brakes last a lot longer, to the point where automakers are envisioning future EVs with in-drive brakes that won’t require servicing for the lifetime of the vehicle.
One-pedal driving to me makes the most sense in stop-and-go traffic where you’re just sitting in a queue of cars slowly inching forward. It feels natural to use it in this instance and it’s also great practice to get a feel for which part of the brake pedal travel does what.
It’s not for everyone, though, and manufacturers of sporty cars don’t seem too keen on integrating one-pedal driving with strong regen into the driving experience. They want to retain as much of the combustion engine sports car experience in an EV that they are willing to forego some free electrons flowing back into the battery in favor of a more traditional-feeling driving experience.
Let us know in the comments how you got on the first time you experienced one-pedal driving and what your take on it is. Do you keep full regen on all the time and keep the go pedal partly pressed to coast? Do you just keep it off or do you adjust its strength manually while you drive?
