That literally makes no sense. There’s a point on the accelerator pedal curve where you are coasting (between it applying power or applying regen), you get used to staying around that position pretty quickly because you stop short of where you are aiming to stop otherwise. You basically only back off past that point and into regen when you would be braking in an ICE car, so there is really no difference.
You don't stay at the zero point. It's an impossibly small target. This is not news to anyone who drives an EV and keeps an eye on the readout showing current power usage/regen.
I don't think it's impossibly small. Maybe it depends on your software - you don't need to have a completely linear response across the full range of the pedal.
Braking from regen or braking from a brake pad has the same net impact on tire wear. EVs can coast too and don’t apply full regen the moment you apply brakes. Some even have brake coach alerts to get you to gradually apply the brakes to maximize energy return.
EVs could coast if a manufacturer chose to make one that allowed that without shifting into neutral. In practice, when letting off the accelerator, existing EVs will instead regen brake.
The default setting just moves the coast point to a slightly depressed accelerator. This is because EVs typically have lower drag, so this behavior mimics a higher drag vehicle. If you use the accelerator to achieve the desired speed, you will coast when possible. You can also monitor the display to see the coast point. My 2013 plug in hybrid only supports this style of operation.
Modern EVs have easy adjustment for this. The Hyundai/Kia EVs for example have shift style paddles for adjusting this on the fly which includes a mode for regen only when depressing the break pedal.
The Hyundai/Kia EVs do not have a mode that only regens when pressing the brake. The best you can do is limit the car to 2kW of regen braking when not touching the accelerator. You can't disable it entirely.
It's true though that using this mode will extend the life of your tires.
It hovers depending on how my foot modulates the speed. I don't want or need "exactly zero power readout", I only need to reach my target speed at my target spot on the highway, without having to action the physical brakes at any time.
Whether that is more or less efficient than a zero-power coast followed by some kind of braking exactly at the end... I assume the difference is so tiny that it makes no difference.
The difference is tiny from an energy efficiency perspective. But we're discussing tire wear, and the periodic regen followed by power that a human foot gives because it can't perfectly match the car's PID loop, wears the tires a bit each time. Which adds up over ten thousand miles.
Indeed it adds up, over ten thousand kilometers, to a lot less wear than the equivalent coast-then-hit-the-brakes in an ICE. If I follow your reasoning correctly.
What? No. We definitely didn't follow one another. I'm confused where we misunderstood one another now.
For the purposes of tire wear, applying regen braking in a car is the same as applying brake pads. Generating 5kW of electricity of 10 seconds vs generating 5kW of heat for 10 seconds, same same.
Let's say you're on the highway driving in an EV. You have cruise control on. You go down a hill. The EV's cruise control applies regen braking down the hill, using the tires to slow you to your desired speed.
Let's say you do the same in an ICE vehicle. You will coast down the hill, gathering speed. Cruise control in an ICE vehicle generally will not brake for you. So more of your energy from the hill gets removed as air resistance. When you slow due to air resistance it does not wear the tires.
The same logic applies each time you push the gas pedal slightly harder than you needed to and then back off.
"applying regen braking in a car is the same as applying brake pads"
That's an assumption I disagree with. Brake pads will always be less smooth than engine braking. For the same braking action, I assume more brake dust and slightly higher tire wear due to brakes not able to provide fine speed adjustment.
The down-the-hill scenario is interesting, it brings new comparisons: is there more tire wear from maintaining a chosen speed, vs letting the car overspeed and then braking? How does air resistance contribute in each case?
I maintain my earlier opinion that the differences between all these scenarios are minimal and can be ignored. But if you have some physical model that helps calculate these scenarios, it could be fun to play around with.
The tires and their dust don't care whether you're braking by regen or friction. The reason there's more dust is from the increased weight of the EV not because of regen braking. You can coast in EV as well, that is not exclusive to ICE.
> The tires and their dust don't care whether you're braking by regen or friction.
I'm aware. The point I'm making is that EVs apply more braking than ICE vehicles do, due to the specifics of the implementation of regen braking that all manufacturers have chosen.
> You can coast in EV as well
Not without literally putting it in neutral. If you just take your foot off the accelerator, any modern EV will apply some amount of regenerative braking. It's not really possible to hold the accelerator pedal at the exact position where you are not applying motor power but also have 0kW of regen braking, certainly for any extended period of time.
If your point is that someone could make an EV to which regen braking contributes no more to tire wear than an ICE vehicle, you're correct. Unfortunately, no such EVs are currently manufactured. Even the ones that allow you to "turn off" regen braking will generally apply 1-2kW of regen if your foot is off the accelerator.
> I'm aware. The point I'm making is that EVs apply more braking than ICE vehicles do, due to the specifics of the implementation of regen braking that all manufacturers have chosen
Hyundai and Kia EVs have a 5 level setting for what happens when you lift up on the accelerator, either partially or fully.
At level 0 the regeneration is so low that I don't notice a difference between that and being in neutral. It slows down way less than an ICE does when not in neutral.
> If you just take your foot off the accelerator, any modern EV will apply some amount of regenerative braking. It's not really possible to hold the accelerator pedal at the exact position where you are not applying motor power but also have 0kW of regen braking, certainly for any extended period of time.
Tire wear is not a linear function of acceleration. Is there any reason to believe that variations from not being able to hold your foot perfectly steady, assuming you aren't have spasms, will be big enough and/or last long enough to make a non-trivial difference?
The responses tend to be either "actually regen braking wears tires just as much as using brake rotors" by people who didn't actually read, or "surely manufacturers wouldn't do that, it doesn't match the mental model in my head" by people who've never paid close attention to the power readouts while driving an EV.
Your own response was "actually one manufacturer does have a setting that will avoid the effect if someone sets it, therefore the whole concept must be wrong".
The amount of braking force needed to take a car of X weight from Y miles per hour to zero in a given amount of time is the same whether by friction brakes or regen brakes.
You can reduce the total braking force needed by extending the time, in which case aerodynamic forces and rolling resistance will contribute some more to the reduction in speed.
In an EV with one-pedal driving you can still stop quickly or slowly. In an ICE car you can stop slowly with more coasting or quickly with more braking force.
I don't see how the drivetrain is going to make a difference to the amount of braking needed to stop and thus force exerted on the tire. The added weight of most EVs would be the larger factor.
But ICE vehicles can be in engine breaking mode. You pretty much never "coast" (e.g. put the vehicle in neutral or hold the clutch in). I get what you're saying but it feels like it's way in the margin if an effect at all. Do you have some reference? People keep talking about tire wear but my model 3 tires (which are relatively high performance soft tires) aren't wearing any faster than the wear I used to get on my Subaru before. I just don't drive aggressively. Flooring the accelerator must be the big difference. I don't think the weight difference is that large, certainly compared to trucks.
The amount of engine braking applied by an automatic transmission ICE vehicle when you take your foot off the gas is an order of magnitude less than the regen braking applied when you take your foot off the accelerator on your Model 3.
First off, my Renault Megane e-Tech has paddles that allow me to change the regen strength on the fly. I use it actively when driving.
But anyway, I find I drive differently with an EV. I don't let off the throttle unless I want to slow down. If I want to coast, I just reduce my throttle input to where its coasting.
I'll have to double-check, but as I recall it the lowest setting in Sports mode was off. But maybe just very, very low.
In any case, what's the problem with having it very, very low vs off? Like, what do you really need coasting for? Not something I've felt I've been missing.
I see that you later backed down from "no such EVs are currently manufactured", but for the record I've only driven 2 electric vehicles for a significant amount of time and they both have modes where you can absolutely coast with no regen. Polestar 2 and Mustang Mach-E. Perhaps you haven't driven enough vehicles yet to make such claims.
Adaptive cruise control lets you set a speed, usually the speed limit, and then you just have to steer.
In a gas car that means the car is using the brakes and gas engine (obviously) but it’s a jarring experience compared to a BEV or hybrid. The regenerative braking and smooth acceleration are much more pleasant.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but if we're talking about a 1-2 kW of "standby" regen, surely the rolling resistance of any kind of vehicle is in the same ballpark anyway (source: it takes multiple people to push a broken down car).
The bearings and whatnot that cause rolling resistance on an ordinary car also exist in EVs; this is 1-2kW on top of that, when the car is in Drive. Furthermore, it's common to use one pedal driving- it's generally much more than 1-2kW.
Which unfortunately also increases tire wear from regen braking during periods when an ICE vehicle would be coasting without braking.
EVs are much (much much) better for CO2, much better for brake dust, and much worse for tire dust.