But ICE cars don't regen when you are going downhill. I thought that with a Tesla if you have no net change in elevation then temporary changes in altitude should not cause very significant increases in energy consumption. At least that is my experience in five years of driving my Model S.
No kidding ICE cars don't regenerate! The reference to ICE fuel economy was as an indication of the energy requirement difference between eastbound and westbound trips. ICE fuel consumption is indeed another form of energy use. It is of course far more damped than we see in a BEV because of the inefficiency of the ICE. I also extrapolated a fuel economy difference over the Deep River to Mattawa stretch because that was the original question to which I was responding. When I drive westbound fuel consumption is more or less constant until I get to Deep River and then increases quite significantly peaking at Mattawa and thereafter starts to drop. Hence the reason I extrapolated a higher difference between westbound and eastbound over the Deep River to Mattawa segment.
Regenerating the amount of "extra" energy spent going up a hill on the downward side is a first order approximation only. Complete equalization would represent a perpetual motion machine which anyone with any engineering or physics acumen knows is an impossibility. But certainly for low hills with roughly equal slopes on each side we do tend to see something approaching 95% recovery so the "hill cycle" losses are barely, if at all, noticeable. If I recall correctly Deep River to Bisset Creek has a peak rise of 130 meters, Bisset Creek to Deux Riviere has a peak rise of 152 meters (that one I know for sure) and Deux Riviere to Mattawa has a peak rise of 140 meters (measured by GPS). And there are many local maxima and minima along each segment. There are several warning signs of steep descents at 8 and 11 percent for the east side (eastbound down and westbound uphill) but none on the west side of the hills. The only steep hill on the west side of the peaks is immediately east of Mattawa.
Actual numbers from the car's "Trip B odometer" will tell if my concerns are accurate or overblown. Until then I can only go on my experience of some 100 trips driving ICE cars over this route and "transposing" that to the Tesla. I have done the same on another frequent trip of mine and see a reasonable correlation that my Tesla indeed requires more energy in the same stretches that the ICE car fuel consumption increases and similar rate differences between the "uphill and downhill" directions. We'll see when I get to drive the Tesla to Sudbury.
