Learning to drive “one-peddle driving”

Anyone who has learned to drive a stick-shift car will tell you it takes a little while to train your feet to manage the clutch work, braking, and accelerating when you first start. With an automatic transmission, there is no learning curve like this. With an EV, there is just one speed (gear) so there is no need to shift. In the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, the (software) engineers managed to emulate the behavior of a gasoline engine coupled with an automatic transmission. Namely, when your foot is off the gas and the brake, the car will propel itself at very low speed. This is especially useful when backing into a driveway – just start moving, take your foot off the pedal, and let the car “coast” into position. The BMW i3 changed all that.

When my brand new 2017 BWM i3 first arrived, I took it out for a spin around the block. The first thing I noticed was that taking your foot off the pedal caused the car to come to a stop. This makes sense because regenerative braking is slowing the car, and bringing the car to a stop maximizes the energy generated. It didn’t take me long to adapt to driving forward like this. I quickly learned how far back from a stop sign to remove my foot and let the car come to a stop on its own (except downhill). The trick was trying to back up. All my (driving) life I had learned to back up by providing a pulse of motion, then allowing the car to coast backward until I was ready to stop, when I’d press the brakes. That’s not how it works with one-pedal driving. In order to coast in a car that employs one-pedal driving, you need to train your foot to learn the pedal position of the neutral spot, where neither acceleration nor braking occur. (This is similar to learning the spot in the clutch travel where the transmission engages.) Before I learned where this spot was, I would give the car a nudge to start moving, then remove my foot from the pedal and the car would stop right away. This was confusing and frustrating. (I have a 60-foot driveway and it took about five tries to back up all the way to my garage.) Once I learned the neutral spot in the gas pedal, I was able to nudge the car into motion, adjust my pedal to the neutral position, and allow the car to coast into position. Then I simply remove my foot from the pedal to stop. This technique has now become second nature to me. So, which style of driving do I prefer? With a gasoline engine, I have always preferred a manual transmission with a clutch. You have much more control of the speed when driving through the hills. Between the Mitsubishi and the BMW, I find I much prefer the i3’s one-pedal driving to the i-MiEV’s. You actually have more precise control over when the energy is applied to or removed from the drive wheels, giving more precise control in the hills. And because the car has rear-wheel drive, using the motor this way for braking does not rob traction from the front wheels the way that the brakes do. I am hopeful that all of my cars in the future will also provide an option to use one-pedal driving. On top of the driving dynamics, it reduces brake pad wear dramatically (which also reduces the metal particle emissions during braking).