As government regulation on the fuel efficiency of vehicles becomes increasingly strict, automotive designers have had to make reduction in energy consumption a top priority. As hybrid-electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius have shown, recovering the kinetic energy usually wasted when braking can be one way to save trips to the petrol station. In electric vehicles, braking energy is recovered and reused by using the electric drive motor as a generator to slow the car. This generates electrical energy that is typically stored in a battery or ultra-capacitor and reused when the driver wants to accelerate again.
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