Chevy wants you to prepare for “one pedal driving”
One of the great advantages of electric vehicles are their mechanical simplicity. Electric cars completely eliminate the need for gears, meaning no gear shifting either manually or automatically. Now Chevy is eliminating another staple of the driving experience: the brake pedal.
Being fair, it isn’t really eliminating them so much as it's making them less necessary. According to this Forbes piece, the soon-to-be-released Chevrolet Bolt will have “one pedal” driving modes that use regenerative braking to bring the vehicle to a stop even without using the brake pedal.
The car will have four modes with progressively stronger levels of regenerative braking. The lowest level, called “Drive” will still require the brake pedal to come to a complete stop. On “Low” additional braking is applied, and so on and so forth. If you want a boost in both power regeneration and deceleration, there will be a “Regen on Demand” paddle for that. Chevy is quick to point out that even in “one pedal” modes it’s important to be ready to hit the brakes in an emergency situation.
Their warning touches on the obvious safety concern one would have when hearing that a set of drivers are being encouraged to stop using what might be the most important safety feature a vehicle has. It’s likely that most people will instinctively use their brakes when driving the Bolt especially in emergency or tight spots, but the danger is that the less time people spend doing something the easier it will be for their reaction time to slip.
Despite the surface concerns for the feature, Chevy says the feature was born out of feedback from EV drivers and that they expect people to enjoy the feature when the car debuts next year.