> Do you ever hit the brake pedal outside emergency situations?
Yes. BTW, you mostly use B-mode on the highway. You don't get any advantage in stop and go traffic.
> What is the rate of braking when you take take your foot off the pedal?
It is greater than aerodynamic friction. What I like is that in emergency situations where you do brake, it brakes faster since in the interval between your foot on the accelerator and your foot hitting the brake, it's already braking.
> Does it take into account the car in front of you?
There may be cars that do this (Tesla?) but not the Leaf and probably not the Bolt.
I get a lot of advantage out of one-pedal driving in a Model S in stop and go, both urban and highway.
One thing that makes me sad about Tesla's adaptive cruise control is that it's not as good as I am at never touching the real brakes -- it doesn't anticipate very well, and waits until it gets within 2-3 car-lengths (settable) before it even thinks about braking.
Yeah, I was on 880 and I saw a Tesla doing that. I knew it wasn't a human decision. It was too precise and at the same time unnecessarily disconcerting. A human would have been less precise but would have dipped in speed well before 2-3 car lengths and probably would have taken the opportunity to zip around the car in front.
Self-reply: It is adjustable in most electric cars at, variously, up to 0.2g or 24 kW of regenerative braking power. This is actually significantly higher than typical engine braking in a gas powered manual transmission vehicle. Engine braking can keep up with low-power, light braking to adjust following distance on highways, and can limit acceleration on a downhill if you downshift to force the motor to run at 3/4k RPMs on a steep hill, and can eventually bring a vehicle to a stop. Regenerative braking can be equivalent to typical braking forces for day-to-day driving, depending on battery capacity and charge level allowing the required power dissipation to be in the range of safe charging rates.
(Note: By "Engine braking" I'm referring to throttle retardation in a typical non-diesel engine, not jake brakes on big diesels. I have no idea how powerful those are.)
Yes. BTW, you mostly use B-mode on the highway. You don't get any advantage in stop and go traffic.
> What is the rate of braking when you take take your foot off the pedal?
It is greater than aerodynamic friction. What I like is that in emergency situations where you do brake, it brakes faster since in the interval between your foot on the accelerator and your foot hitting the brake, it's already braking.
> Does it take into account the car in front of you?
There may be cars that do this (Tesla?) but not the Leaf and probably not the Bolt.