nimbuzz
Member
More cute than dumb, years ago my 9 year-old son heard me say that using the brakes in our hybrid recharged the battery. He asked why I didn't drive with the brakes on all the time to keep the battery fully charged. I considered explaining about entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, perpetual motion machines, and the like, but ended up just saying that it was an interesting idea ;-).
This is not a dumb question but rather a dumb answer--perhaps pop doesn't know the answer to this good and appropriate tech question?? The answer is that regenerative braking only recovers a fraction of what the motor uses up so the car would come to a stop before charging the battery enough to keep going.
The question is good and penetrates into the relevant tech. I don't know exactly what % a Tesla can recover but I doubt it is a whole lot different than a Prius that only recovers 8%