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Have you ever wondered if you can recapture all of the energy you use driving an electric vehicle up a mountain or a hill when you come back down? One of the ways that battery-electric vehicles and hybrids are better at energy usage is brake force energy regeneration. The electric motor or motors in the EV can work as generators when you slow the vehicle or coast downhill. But just how efficient are those motor generators? Do you get back all of the energy possible, or just a bit? The answer is in between those two extremes. Here’s how we proved it.
We drove a 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 Limited to Miller State Park in the beautiful town of Peterboro, New Hampshire. There is a small mountain there called Pack Monadnock. Pack means “little.” It is the smaller sibling of New Hampshire’s most climbed mountain. The really cool thing about this 2,990-foot peak is that it has a cool auto road twisting up it that you can drive for four bucks per person. There is a lookout tower at the top and scenic views in all directions. Folks observe and record the eagles, osprey, and other interesting birds that migrate by as the seasons unfold.
The auto road is 1.3 miles long. We observed our battery state of charge (SOC) at the base and then at the top. It went from 71% to 68% SOC. That was just slow, steady driving, not rally-style. So we used 3% state of charge or so going up. At the top, we hung out for a half hour or so of light walking/hiking, checked out the Boston skyline from about as far at it can be seen with the naked eye, and then headed down.
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The Ioniq 5 Limited is a fantastic BEV. One thing we particularly love is that it has paddle shifters that allow you to vary the regenerative brake force. Left paddle more brake force, to the point that you actually stop the vehicle. Right paddle less brake force until you cannot feel any at all. It was a slow day at Pack Monadnock, so we were able to descend the whole 1.3 miles using only the paddles. No pedals at all. No “gas” and no friction braking at all. At one point, we even stopped completely to take the image at the top of our story.
At the bottom, we observed a state of charge of just 69%. So we regained roughly 1%, or approximately a third of the energy we used going up. Now, any techy folk reading this will quickly realize that with such a short run, and with only integers (whole numbers) for SOC, we don’t have a precise value for the energy. However, on the way out of the parking lot, which is downhill, the SOC clicked up to 70%. So we regained meaningful energy using the regenerative braking. Somewhere between 30% and about 50% is our best estimate. This result aligns with our previous tests using the Chevy Bolt EUV on a significantly longer downhill mountain course.
Brake force regeneration is the single most significant contributor to energy savings in EVs and hybrids. It’s what makes them worth using in the first place. Without brake regen, a Tesla with 300 miles of range would have about 150 to 175 miles of range. When we tested a Ford Maverick Hybrid recently, more than 40% of the miles we covered were driven without any help from the gas engine.
Tell us your experience using brake force energy recapture. Have you ever made a more accurate record of your testing? If so, please tell us in the comments below.
John Goreham is the Vice President of the New England Motor Press Association and an expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. He is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE int). In addition to his eleven years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can connect with John on LinkedIn and follow his work on his personal X channel or on our X channel. Please note that stories carrying John’s by-line are never AI-generated, but he does employ grammar and punctuation software when proofreading and he also uses image generation tools.
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Source: torquenews.com
