Regen Addiction

I have an addiction.  It's not a physical addiction, it's a mental desire to recoup the energy wasted from braking.  I am addicted to regenerative braking in electric vehicles.

Over the years I've had a few vehicles.  From a tiny Subaru GL, to a Volvo 240, to a Scion XB.  I then changed from the small car to the monster truck and traded the xB for a Chevy Tahoe and began my truck phase.  But unlike all those internal combustion engine vehicles, none of them changed my thoughts about the power source, because electric cars were just the hobby of eccentric people.

It might be reasonable to think that electric vehicle owners are on the fringe and that driving under the power of electricity doesn't actually change a person.  For an efficiency-conscious person, like myself, merely driving electric isn't the only beneficial feature.  It's the regenerative braking that I want.

I still own an internal combustion engined vehicle, and every now and again I need to drive it.  That vehicle is a Chevy Avalanche and when I bought it, I loved it for its utility.  I still love the utility of it, but now the lack of regenerative braking causes me a twinge of mental anguish.  For now there are no consumer pickup trucks that are pure electric vehicles, but there are some hybrids.

A company called Via Motors takes Chevy trucks and converts them to series-hybrid vehicles.  They buy the trucks with a V6 engine, which they bolt directly to an electric generator.  They add batteries and another motor to drive the wheels. All these additions does add about 1500 lbs of weight to the truck, but despite that, the new drive train improves the efficiency by a factor of 5. Typically these trucks get 15 MPG, with the change it improves to roughly 100 MPG.

I would gladly purchase a Via Motors VTrux in a heartbeat if I had a spare $75k.  As of this posting, the public cannot access these vehicles, but Via Motors has announced that some time in 2014 they will be making them available to non-commercial customers.

The only other alternative to my dilemma is to consider either the Chevy Volt or BMW i3.  The i3 offers an optional electric generator that will produce an additional 100 miles of range when the battery has run out of juice.  Whereas the Volt has a permanent engine that acts as a generator 95% of the time, and only on rare occasion will power the wheels in parallel with the electric motor.

The idea of regenerative braking, super energy-efficiency, and alternative power sources, isn't actually all that new, but thank goodness we're moving toward it finally.  I look forward to the day when regenerative braking is the norm.