2 ms·

Tesla's speaker system is 200/560W. So it's possible to get to 50W just from screen and speaker savings. And that's assuming constant worse case use of the wipe

• jerf 7y ago
  This sort of thing is why I refer to "the noise floor" in these sorts of discussions. It's not that it's untrue that it may save a mile of range, it's just so dominated by other factors that it doesn't matter. Your human cognitive spotlight is focusing on this one fact, and it may be "true", but that doesn't make it important. It's not worth engineering effort to save amounts of power that will be casually wiped away by any number of little things. (Sometimes you can bind together several little things into one big one worth doing, but human intuition is still often broken by the factors of magnitude involved. 6 %.0002 things still don't add up to anything significant, for insurance, even if it may feel like six things ought to matter.)
• close04 7y ago
  On the other hand even a 1 mile (probably less) saving over a 5 hour (~200-250mi) trip through the rain might as well be a rounding error regardless of the fuel used. Many other methods for achieving the same saving are not as flashy though. I imagine the most important way is to ensure optimal tire pressure at all times. Many people tend to ignore this even when having pressure sensors at hand which leads to a whole lot of wasted fuel. The reason wipers only received minor optimizations over the decades is because they work well, are cheap and enviably reliable. So any new wiper system design has a high bar to pass, beyond using new tech.