Manual control of treadmill motor

I have a treadmill motor and pwm controller. I want to control it manually and disable the auto speed maintainer. The system works fine but using to power a small vehicle and under auto it draws too much current. Have tried to reduce current like gulf carts but such a waste of limited energy.

If you reduce the current (a manually-controlled PWM driver will reduce the average current) you will, of course, have less power available. Power = Voltage x Current.