Quote:
Originally Posted by David Beale
While cool, doing this actually wastes energy and drops your mileage. The reason is you loose a lot of energy discharging and charging the battery. 50% efficiency has been put out there. Add to that the efficiency of the gas engine when it eventually has to recharge the battery - around 25%, and you can see it's a pretty big issue.
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I'm not sure this is entirely all that bad for FE.
1. If you did this and your battery is low at the end of the day, in the morning when you start the car, the engine will start up anyways, and you use it to move the car, but you get to recover the motion with regen. If your battery was already full in the morning, you cant recover as much for the time your ICE is on anyways. A net gain.
2. If you're house is on top of a hill, this is generally good because you can regen going down without ICE. Not so much if you had gone up without ICE, but if you did, you could go down and get a net gain.
3. Much [well maybe, some] of the time the battery is full due to recharge during cruising with ICE, that there's no room for regen capture (or less recharge efficiency). If you try running on EV a lot, you'll keep the battery low for capacity to regen. A net gain, vs. stopN'go without capacity to recharge.
I know, I know...if you're just staying in EV for the sake of using only electrical energy, then your FE will suffer...as David indicates...but there are some circumstances where it helps...
BTW, I do this every chance I can...it's a fun thing to do, esp when you have to run boring errans...