Photonix

pkulak,

I am fairly certain the i3 (which I have driven for 5 years) does not engage the friction brakes unless you press on the brake pedal. Most times, I can make my 40 mile round trip commute without ever using the brake pedal just by giving myself a tad more following and stopping distance. Of course there are situations when the brake is required (driving down a steep hill, to avoid an accident, etc.) . Best part of all of this is I have never had to clean brake dust off my alloy wheels, something I hated doing with my ICE cars.

grssypond,

Thanks for your description. It suggests that it should be possible for Audi to develop a setting that is more aggressive than the 2 click amount. Unlikely this will happen, but one can always hope.

madcanadian

In manual mode it has fine grained regen increments using the gas petal. When letting off the gas slowly, you can control how much regen is applied, with much finer detail than the two settings the petals control, just like the vehicle does in automatic mode.

We humans have awareness of surroundings and traffic far better than the eTron does. We can anticipate when to decelerate better than the car can. This makes a difference if you are willing to do the find grained regen control on the gas petal. It has the added benefit of lower latency to apply regeneration than to move your foot from the gas to the brake.

In my BMW i3, I can bring the vehicle to a full stop on regen only. The way I have confirmed this, is on the hills of San Francisco, the i3 rolls backwards at stops on a steep hill, which it shouldn't if the brakes were applied. In fact, the eTron also does this, rolling backwards at a stop sign on an uphill road, before it can apply the auto brake function if you aren't pressing the brake petal.

Audi could implement this like the i3 on the eTron as it's a full drive-by-wire system. I agree it's more than an ECU firmware update, as there is likely a certification and possibly type-approval re-assessment to make such a firmware change which impacts the system controlling the braking system which is safety critical.