This has been covered about a million times on this forum, and it is very simple.

The brake lights are controlled by the rate of deceleration. It doesn't matter how you are slowing down.

 

Except if you're in adaptive cruise control, then any regen commanded by the car shows the brake lights, regardless of if you're actually decelerating. Probably makes us look like maniacs with the brake lights flashing all the time.

 

Yes.

 

Some cars don't have regen which is strong enough to slow them down quickly enough that braking is a consideration.
In an ICE car you lift off the fumes pedal and the brake lights do nothing.

Gaz

 

I once drove around for half an hour testing the braking in all sorts of cases and did a detailed write up on it:

Brake Lights Work Just As Well With Regen

This has been discussed before but I thought previous discussions did confirm brake light comes on with regen but were not completely conclusive about whether there was any difference in brake light response for a given speed reduction when we compare foot brake vs regen brake. So I thought a...

www.ioniqforum.com

This is for Ioniq, but Kona might be similar.

Anyway after my detailed testing my write up was a a very long winded way of saying what was already said in the first post to the thread: "The brake lights are controlled by the rate of deceleration. It doesn't matter how you are slowing down."

 

Not quite a million times, but yes, plenty.
This is still the best vid to watch on the issue - fully experiment on the 3 levels of regen.

 

Thanks all ! Just 1 other daft question you seem to know when your brake lights are on ! How? am I missing something?

 

Can you see the reflection of the high brake light in the rear windscreen? You can in the Ioniq.

 

I'll have a look next time I am out in the dark..

 

Some info about Kona's braking system here on P2.