Regenerative braking dots …

One of the big advantages of an electric car is that the vehicle can recuperate kinetic energy to the battery when braking. With a regular petrol or diesel car this is not possible, and the kinetic energy that the vehicle has is dissipated as heat to the environment via the brakes, and with that the energy is lost for once and for all.

With your Tesla Model 3 you can see the regeneration of kinetic energy on your screen. A thin line can be seen at the top left of the screen under P R N D. A thicker line varies during driving below this line. If the thick line is black, energy from the battery is used to either maintain speed or to accelerate: the longer the line extends from the center to the right, the more energy is drawn from the battery. When braking, the line turns green and goes from the center to the left. Also here applies: the longer the green line, the more energy is delivered back to the battery by the e-motor / e-motors. The amount of energy that can be supplied can be seen on the thin line under P R N D. There where the thin line changes to a dotted line, circled in red on the photo, is the area where the battery is unable to recuperate the amount of energy the e-motor(s) can deliver. This limitation can have 2 reasons:

• the battery is too full: the futher the battery is charged (and with this I mean the closer to 100% State of Charge) the less the battery has capacity left over to absorb extra energy. Normally you should charge up to 90% to secure longevity of the battery, so this limitation normally does not occur.
• most common is that the battery is too cold. Even at normal summer temperatures of 25 degrees Celsius, the battery is still too cold to be in its optimal temperature range, leading to these regeneration dots.

At cold temperatures these dots will also appear on the right side of the thin line. This means that there is a limitation of the maximum power that the battery can deliver to accelerate very quickly.

While driving or during (fast) charging, the battery heats up and the length of the dotted lines decreases and eventually disappear.