Most fleet managers moving to electric trucks have heard the same advice. Use one-pedal driving. Maximise regen. Let the motor do the braking and put energy back in the battery. It sounds right. However, it could be misleading and, in some situations, wrong.
Regenerative braking and coasting are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were is what quietly costs you range. Here is the physics, without the jargon. When a fully loaded truck is moving, it has a large amount of kinetic energy. What you do with that energy when you lift off the accelerator decides how far the truck goes on a charge.
If you coast, the truck keeps rolling forward on its own momentum. You lose a little to air resistance and rolling resistance, but almost all of that energy stays as useful forward motion.
On the other hand, if you regen, the motors turn into generators. Kinetic energy is converted to electrical energy, stored in the battery, and later converted back to kinetic energy when you accelerate. This could be huge, as you have a ton of load in the back. Every one of those conversions loses something. As a rough guide, you get back somewhere around 60-70% of what you captured. The rest leaves as heat.
So the order of efficiency is simple. Coasting can beat regen. However, Regen beats the friction brake. Coasting never converts the energy, so it never pays the conversion tax. Regen recovers a good share of the energy you would otherwise lose. The friction brake throws all of it away as heat on the disc.
This is where the popular advice breaks down. Maximum regen on every lift-off feels efficient because you can see energy flowing back into the battery. But if the truck did not need to slow down, you just took the momentum you already had, ran it through two lossy conversions, and handed back a fraction of it. Coasting would have kept nearly all of it for free.
The point is not coast versus regen. The point is anticipation.
A skilled EV truck driver reads the road ahead. When the truck does not need to lose speed, they coast and preserves momentum. When the truck needs to slow down for a light, a corner, a vehicle ahead, or a long descent, it can use regen to recover as much energy as possible rather than dissipate it through the brakes. The real enemy is the friction brake and the unnecessary conversion.
For a fleet, this consists of 3 things.
First, driver training. If you train every driver to rely on heavy regen and one-pedal driving everywhere, you are teaching a habit that reduces range on open roads, increases energy bills, risks service, and deteriorates productivity by adding more hours at the plug. Teach anticipation!
Second, your telematics and scorecards. Reward drivers who execute the right strategy when needed, such as coasting or regen. Measure energy used per kilometre on the route, not regen for its own sake.
Third, route and terrain planning is key! Flat and rolling corridors reward momentum management. Long descents and dense stop-start work reward regen. Match the expectation to the route rather than applying one rule everywhere.
Regen is good. It recovers energy that diesel trucks turn into brake heat and brake dust. But the cheapest energy is the energy you never convert in the first place. That is coasting, and most fleets may be leaving it on the table because of this new flashy regen thing. Electrifying a fleet is the 1st step. Running it well is the 2nd. The gap between the two is full of small operational choices like this one, the kind that compound across thousands of kilometres into real money and time worth getting right.
Want to get this right from the start? Contact our team at BeyondEV. We can help you model your routes with our physics and machine learning tools to boost efficiency and make your electric trucks more productive.