I appreciated Eugene Nalence’s excellent discussion of the physics of electric cars in the September 2022 issue of The Physics Teacher.1 It attributes the higher stop-and-go driving efficiency of electric vehicles to the lack of a transmission, but it does not discuss regenerative braking compared with traditional friction braking. Was this an oversight, or was it perhaps omitted since the saving is trivial? I have been given the impression that regenerative braking is quite important, and since the physics could be interesting to high school students, I am attempting to develop demonstration and lab experiments to illustrate this principle. I look forward to a future article on this topic.
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