In reply to Climbing Pieman:
I once followed an early Tesla Modle-S that had brake lights coming on all the time under what I presume was very gentle regeneration - less aggressive than me coasting down in my high compression diesel. It was borderline dangerous (in terms of training the follower to ignore its break lights and by being very distracting.)
I don’t think our Leaf puts its brake lights on under no-throttle regeneration.
I’ve been musing on this lately - I think the brake lights should indicate the rate of deceleration crossing a threshold and not what a pedal or regeneration is doing. So many different vehicle behaviours out there now, and deceleration is what people actually care about.
> Could explain why a hybrid car I followed recently appeared only to accelerate or brake with no steady speed maintained.
It took me about 100 miles or so of driving our Leaf to get the hang of holding a speed to within 1 mph in a 30 or 40 zone without a dangerous level of staring at the dashboard. The lack of engine revs/vibration/sound, the instant responsiveness of the throttle and the fact the throttle pedal is mapped to your full 0-max speed range (as a single gear vehicle) all conspire to make speed holding difficult. Ironically I use cruise control on my 3-series (more to avoid accidentally going over speed and to free my attention from dial watching for the road) but I don’t in the Leaf because the controls for it are not very ergonomic. Actually they’re outright crap compared to the BMW paddle.
What I think is really needed is a non-linear response to change in throttle position so that small movements during cruise have a smaller effect. Or a “sticky” throttle with haptic feedback creating soft stops every 10 mph when required.
Mind you I did adjust but I made a conscious effort to train myself for the new car. As EVs become widespread I’m not sure everyone who learnt on ICE cars will.
I had a test drive of an i8 and that had a nice approach to the EV speed awareness problem - a little colour heads up display showing your speed.
Post edited at 13:52