[RichardInCA]

I discovered a new screen recently - when you go to the live vehicle mode and clock on trip data, I can see how much regen my motors have returned to the battery for each trip. It’s pretty impressive to me - here’s a screen shot of the data from my commute home.

It’s a Bay Area highway slog with lots of stop/go traffic and a net uphill. The stats are:


Approx elevation gain ~1,000ft
Distance 27.4mi
Energy used 8.6 kWh
Efficiency 3.2 mi/kWh

From the screen below, I was able to return 3.5kWh through coasting/downhill in B mode, so effectively 3.5 x 3.2 = 11.2miles of that journey was “free”.

It also struck me that 3.5kWh of regen is pretty impressive - equivalent to the power require to run a hair dryer or a space heater for 3.5hrs.

If I conservatively assume that 15% of the time I was harvesting regen - that would mean that the regen power was 3.5 kWh / 0.1725h (15% of the journey time) = 20.3kW - which is 2x higher than an L2 charger. Neat. I’d be interested if anyone knows what the max regenerative power actually is from the motors on an i5 - my guess is that the peak is much higher than that number.

Given that my morning commute is a net elevation loss, the numbers look even better then.