Efficiency studies on the Toyota Prius claim that it delivers 32% of energy from the gasoline it consumes to the road compared to only 16% for a conventional gasoline engine.
The efficiency of the charging cycle for a battery connected to a wall charger may be 85%. That is your best case. After you subtract the losses in the drive train and efficiency of the generator, those losses are added on top of the 15% inefficiency of the battery charging process. You're still throwing away more than half the kinetic energy of the moving vehicle to bring it to a stop.
--Efficiency studies on the Toyota Prius claim that it delivers 32% of energy from the gasoline it consumes to the road compared to only 16% for a conventional gasoline engine. --
We are not talking about the gasoline engine. We are discussing regenerative braking.
--The efficiency of the charging cycle for a battery connected to a wall charger may be 85%. That is your best case. After you subtract the losses in the drive train and efficiency of the generator, those losses are added on top of the 15% inefficiency of the battery charging process. You're still throwing away more than half the kinetic energy of the moving vehicle to bring it to a stop.--
You reference nothing to get to your losses. I would expect that we are recovering more than half. Still, even recovering half is much, much better than recovering ZERO.