I can be very critical of Tesla but if there's one thing they achieved it's making electric vehicles that look cool. I don't think many teenagers saw a Prius as an aspirational vehicle but I'm pretty sure you could find Tesla posters in many a bedroom.
I wonder though if it's the right marketing move and the right deployment of resources.
Car manufacturers found out a long time ago that car sales are not driven by these types of improvements. Cars are purchased emotionally and to a lesser extent functionally. Obviously a Tesla is an emotional purchase since it doesn't really make sense for most buyers to burden themselves with the higher price and inconvenience of an electric car. This seems a great deal like a little icing on the cake of 'we are just a better purchase down to this type of detail'. That's separate from the GP assertion that there is little power savings.
Sure it gets employees thinking of power savings (similar to when Apollo was done everything mattered down to the last detail). But the development and implementation of this is not trivial and it will take meetings and decisions and testing. What else could be done with those resources?
See also the Model 3's AC vents. Whatever their utility & whether its better than traditional ones, they are cool and futuristic and do their part to help the car stand out from the pack. Start adding all these up and you have something.
Car companies outsourced all these types of parts years ago, which severely limit their ability to pursue these types of innovations. That made economic sense when they were competing against organizations with similar cost-cutting strategies, and are a product of the era in which those choices were made and the business climate that encouraged those choices, but it leaves them at a disadvantage when a company takes a very different, tech-driven, vertically integrated approach to product.
The claim that "the electromagnetic moving block induces minimal friction" says very little considering you achieve the exact same effect with a classic wiper arm mounted on a single electric motor. You probably want more than one arm anyway.
I see what you did there.
50W for 5 hours is 250Wh, which is a mile extra range. That’s worth having.
I found this out the hard way a couple of years ago. My 12V was dead, yet I managed to jump start the car and get it running. I thought it would be ok to drive to get a new battery, as long as I kept the engine running high enough. After a couple of km the dashboard lights started to dim, so I tried reving it as high as I could, but the battery wasn't able to buffer the power and supply the ignition system, so the engine stopped. It was rush hour and I was in the middle lane, so it wasn't a particularly fun wait for the tow truck.
Now that tickover and fuel injection is computer controlled or we have EVs, and there's a far heavier electrical load in all cars all the time, you never notice any more. They all take power, and decrease fuel efficiency.
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.
(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.)
That represents about 0.5% of a Tesla's advertised range.
* Only when it rains. (It's worthless the rest of the time)
* Only if all of the motor power is saved. (Presumably the new mechanism uses some power)
* Only if the motor is running at full power the entire time it rains (even on "high" this is not true).
* Only if range is not otherwise impacted by the rain (nope).
If it rains all the time, and the above are all true-- yes, it's worth 0.5%.
When doing motor control work and dyno testing, one of the challenges is measurement of mechanical power (and even electrical) because you need to measure up to -200kW but you care about differences of 10s of Watts.
Heavy cargo & towing can push my power usage up to 50 watt hours per mile. Note that all numbers are based on no pedaling.
(but be careful about driving fast in the rain)
I thought it was the friction of the wipers themselves on the glass that takes the most power...
In any case, some research reveals that typical wiper motors are <50W, which even if that was reduced to 0, would be an insignificant fraction of the total power draw of an EV, the motor powering the car being capable of over 200kW (200000W). I doubt this is going to have much of an effect on the overall range.