Regenerative braking: how does it work?

An electric motor has a number of very useful advantages. Such as the very high efficiency. Or its high torque that is available immediately from a standstill, with which an electric car guarantees appealing performance. Another advantage of an electric motor is that it acts as a generator when it rotates in the opposite direction.

From powering to charging

The latter is of course ideal in an electric car. And that’s exactly what’s happening. When you lift your foot off the accelerator pedal, the electric motor immediately acts as a generator. It uses the kinetic energy that’s released while the car is moving forward and starts to recharge the battery. This causes the car to slow down more strongly than usual, depending on the selected mode.

With a number of regeneration modes in your MG, you decide whether the car continues to roll as freely as possible, or whether the car slows down even faster to recover more energy. Obviously, the car still have normal brakes, so if you push the brake pedal hard enough, the conventional brakes will kick in to get you stopped.

One pedal driving

In the “most powerful” regeneration mode, the braking effect is even such, that you hardly need a brake pedal anymore. This is also known as “one pedal driving”. You will feel very comfortable with this new way of driving after a short while.

Depending on the selected regenerative braking mode, the braking lights will light up a soon as you lift the accelerator pedal and the regenerative braking kicks in with a certain braking force.

Ideal in city traffic

You don’t want to let the regenerative braking system kick in every time you release the accelerator pedal at high speeds on the motorway, obviously. In situations like this, you can turn off the system. In this case, the vehicle continues to roll as freely as possible. Just like you’re used to and without the traffic behind you being frightened by your brake lights.

But especially in town with many traffic lights, or in heavy traffic during rush hour where you have lift the accelerator pedal very often, the regenerative braking system comes into its own. And thus, you can recover a lot of extra energy to optimize your range. Experience shows that once you get used to “one pedal driving”, you don’t want anything else in city traffic anymore.