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That's a worse slogan though. Compare "Now with 10% more efficient windshield wipers!" and "Now with 10% dimmer screens!"
Usually when it’s raining there isn’t much need to run the display at full brightness. It’s largely a wash.
I see what you did there.
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Hm, even LED TVs use something like 30W, don’t think you’d get much out of dimming a tablet sized screen. 50W for 5 hours is 250Wh, which is a mile extra range. That’s worth having.
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 wipers: high speed and full load like you're driving through a waterfall. Pulling up a spec sheet for a wiper motor, it looks like normal load is only supposed to draw ~6-10W.
(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.)
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I always think it's a bit incongruous to see them on the cockpit windows of airliners. Sort of like having a vacuum tube power supply for your computer. (Two other solutions exist. One is spinning the window, you'll see it on ships. The other is making the window hot.)
Wipers work well, with minimal complexity. Many airliners already use heated window panes for de-icing. Heated windows don't work all that great in a downpour, and wiping is a simple and faster acting alternative. Blasted air is used minimally for windscreens, but it's a common plane de-icing method for the rest of the vehicle. The complexity and weight of using spinning windows on planes makes that idea a non-starte…
The wipers are costly in terms of excrescence drag, and if there was a better way they'd do it.
OT: have you ever noticed that most scifi movies depict futuristic cars that can hover or fly but which still use traditional windscreen wipers. You'd have thought they'd add a force field that repels rain or a special coating but no, traditional wipers. Even Bladerunner 2048 did this.
I always think it's a bit incongruous to see them on the cockpit windows of airliners. Sort of like having a vacuum tube power supply for your computer. (Two other solutions exist. One is spinning the window, you'll see it on ships. The other is making the window hot.)
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Silicone wipers naturally leave behind a thin silicone film on the glass. Once this film is in place, the water serves as a pretty decent lubricant so long as it's raining.
I’ve found that a windshield at a shallow angle and RainX can negate the need for wipers at high speeds.
(but be careful about driving fast in the rain)
For some reason I've had a feeling for a while that designers are abusing magnets. It seems they are being thrown into everything and for the most frivolous of reasons sometimes. Isn't this a finite resource?
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For 50W, you may as well dim the infotainment display and turn off the music for more power savings.
Hm, even LED TVs use something like 30W, don’t think you’d get much out of dimming a tablet sized screen. 50W for 5 hours is 250Wh, which is a mile extra range. That’s worth having.