In the power conversion system of electric vehicles, the inverter is shut down when the system fails owing to a drastic load change or other protection reasons. However, when the inverter is shut down in regeneration mode, the DC link capacitor voltage increases dramatically, which will potentially destroy the switching devices. In this paper, the authors propose a halt method to overcome the overvoltage and overcurrent problems if a system failure occurs during the regeneration. In addition, the command voltage vector in Phase 1 is considered from the temporal transition of energy in the drive system in order to suppress the current amplitude. The experimental results demonstrate that the DC link capacitor voltage is 80% lower as compared with that in the conventional method.