FAQ: What is regenerative braking?

Battery-powered motorbikes are even harder to build than electric cars.

Weight is an inevitable consequence of shoving battery packs into a chassis – and weight is a motorcycle engineer’s worst nightmare.

Add extra cells to extend the range and the weight climbs too high. Don’t pack enough cells into the stack and the restricted range makes your electric motorbike nimble but more of a novelty than a daily ride.

Tapping into the energy wasted during deceleration is a simple way to help balance the equation.

Simply put, the electric motor reverses itself when the bike is being slowed. At this point it acts like a generator by converting mechanical energy – the change in the bike’s momentum – into electrical energy which is stored in the battery.

Hit the accelerator and the motor operates in its primary role, sucking those electrons back out of the battery and converting it into mechanical energy to turn the rear wheel.

Urban riding – where you tend to stop and start a lot – is the most efficient way to ride an electric bike because it is constantly recovering “free” energy every time you roll off the throttle.

Freeway cruises at a constant speed don’t allow for much regenerative braking, so there’s no much scope for extending range.

It’s worth noting that regenerative braking is used in combination with traditional disc or drum brakes, rather than replacing them.

Emergency stops are still the domain of friction-based brakes and, on most motorbikes, are needed to bring the machine to a complete stop.