Man with electric car at 1% battery at top of mountain sees how far down he can get before it runs out of charge

Putting his 10-year-old electric car through another grueling test, this man embarked on a journey down a mountain with one percent battery, in the hope that regenerative braking could help guide him home.

Nowadays, it’s been proven that you should really keep your battery charged between 20 and 80 percent.

With infrastructure still quite sparse, though, sometimes it’s necessary to drop below that threshold.

So, what happens when you set off on your journey with one percent battery? Can you reach your destination with a few savvy hacks? Well, maybe if it’s all downhill…

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YouTuber puts regenerative braking to the test in a 10-year-old electric car

With electricity costs at an all-time high, plugging into the grid can be an expensive habit, even if it does save money compared to gas and public Superchargers.

So, EV drivers are taking every opportunity to squeeze in a few extra volts to their batteries and gain a few miles for free.

One of those methods is by using regenerative braking, and certain routes offer more chances to put that into action than others.

Specifically, YouTuber Efficient Alex has found a nine-mile and 600-meter descent from the Brecon Beacons in Wales, UK, to Cardiff, the capital of Wales.

And then decided he wanted to see if his 10-year-old Nissan EV could gain more battery than it used.

This was all in aid of seeing whether you could set off on one percent and survive the drive, but he really started the journey with around 14.6 percent.

Some people have found a lot of success using this method, but would it still work on a decade-old EV?

How far could he get?

Well, ultimately, if he set off on one percent, he’d have got stuck in under a mile.

Straight off the bat, he found that he needed to accelerate the electric car in certain parts of the route.

Documented on YouTube, he actually ended up using nearly 10 percent of charge, although braking did regenerate 1.9 percent, meaning, all in, he lost eight percent in the downhill journey.

“Regen does work in brief spells, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t do enough to recharge the battery when you go down a mountain,” he said.

“I am genuinely surprised about how that did not charge the battery at all.”

Nowadays, Tesla cars can get a few miles on one percent alone, meaning this would be a bit different in a modern EV.

But the YouTuber loves putting his old electric car to the test, and it makes for some interesting results.

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