Do electric vehicles really emit less greenhouse Gases compared to gas engines?

Electric vehicles are also able to regenerate some of the power they use by converting the kinetic energy of the vehicle back into electrical power when braking, something that ICE cannot do.

Yes and no.

There are ICE based vehicles that do regenerative braking via hydraulic pumps and high pressure bladders. Rather than convert the kinetic energy to electricity, they convert it to high pressure fluid/gas and on the restart use hydraulic motors as a boost.

If I remember my reading on the topic, the downside is that this system is physically large-ish and noisy. As a result it's not well suited for consumer vehicles but does very well on larger vehicles that do a lot of starts/stops...like trash trucks.

/r/engineering Thread Parent