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It’s been a long time since I charged my Tesla Model 3 SR+ above 90%, but I’m taking my girls on a little road trip and just charged up to 95%. It didn’t take me long to notice something had changed.
The car was braking for me as I was approaching stopped traffic at a red light. I know, I know — regen braking. Except, it wasn’t that, and this is the whole point. It used to be that the regen braking fades away, or goes away completely, when your battery is close to fully charged — there’s not much more space in there to pour electricity in through regen braking. It was actually a little dangerous, in my opinion, because being accustomed to regen braking, it’s surprising when your car isn’t automatically braking as you expect it to. That can lead to having to slam on the brakes when you get closer than you expect to something (if not worse).
So, again, I just left a Supercharger with 95% battery (forgetting, to be honest, that I’d need to be using the brakes), and as the car was getting close to the stopped traffic, it seemed to apply the brakes itself. That’s right, it wasn’t like normal regen braking, it was more like the car pushed the brake pedal down. It wasn’t the smoothest application of the brakes, but it wasn’t bad. It took me a minute to process it. I was thinking, “Wait, what, it’s doing regen braking at this high of a charge level?” But I knew it was different, it had surprised me in how strongly the brakes were applied — and basically right at the same time that I’d probably normally be surprised that regen braking wasn’t slowing down the car. When it did this again, I was more prepared for it and more attentive to what seemed to be happening — it really seemed to depress the brake pedal on its own.
Naturally, I think this is a great little update. I always considered it to be quite dangerous that the car would behave much differently at a high state of charge, and that there wasn’t enough warning or widespread awareness of that. This — if I actually understood and experienced it correctly — is a big step up. It’s a little bit rough in that it was braking harder or sooner than I expected, but maybe that was really just because I was slow to brake (expecting regen to softly kick in) and then it decided it was time to act in order to avoid a much bigger issue. I’ll just add that I don’t think this was normal automatic emergency braking — it didn’t feel like that and it happened much sooner than I think automatic emergency braking would.
Let us know down in the comments if you’ve noticed this as well, or if you think I’m off my rocker with this one and was imagining the car behaving differently from how it’s always behaved!
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- Source: https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/23/tesla-has-improved-braking-with-a-full-battery/
