Light and Dark Mode impact on battery?

[OlyPen]

Anyone done an analysis to see the impact of using the light mode on the displays vs dark mode? On my mobile devices, I can eek out an extra hour a day using dark mode and adaptive brightness. (Yes, I know I'm not going to suddenly get 100 more miles.... But efficiency helps overall, especially in long road trips...)

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[JamieGeek]

I think the power to move the car greatly outstrips the power necessary for the displays that it is likely not noticable.

Think about your phone's battery and how small it is compared to the Mach-E's. Getting an extra hour a day means a few hundred mWh (milli-watt-hours). So you might get an extra mile...maybe.

 

[ARK]

I know brightness affects energy use, but does color (i.e. the LEDs emitting black versus white light)?

In any case, I don't think you would get a meaningful difference at all. The motors use up exponentially more energy.

For example, Google tells me my new 2021 iPad Pro 11 has a 28.65 watt battery. By comparison, the extended range battery Mach-Es have an 88,000 usable watt battery (88 kWh), while the standard range Mach-Es have a 68,000 usable watt battery (68 kWh).

 

[OlyPen]

I know brightness affects energy use, but does color (i.e. the LEDs emitting black versus white light)?

In any case, I don't think you would get a meaningful difference at all. The motors use up exponentially more energy.

For example, Google tells me my new 2021 iPad Pro 11 has a 28.65 watt battery. By comparison, the extended range battery Mach-Es have an 88,000 usable watt battery (88 kWh), while the standard range Mach-Es have a 68,000 usable watt battery (68 kWh).

The displays run off the 12v, which is charged by draining the main battery. And again, I know it's negligible, but every gained point in efficiency is a gain.

I didn't dig too deep into the displays to see if they're OLED, in which case black uses no power (the individual pixel is off completely) vs white using the most power per pixel. On a 15.5” screen, that's a considerable amount of power difference, especially at it's brightest setting.

It can amount to 10-15% greater power draw and a 20% reduction in overall screen life (using light mode vs dark mode). These are well documented on OLED screens particularly and the reason phone manufacturers are pushing dark mode on their phones now to increase screen life and battery life, as well as speeding up processing times (more energy can be diverted to the processor vs the screen).

The screens in the MME look fairly advanced vs previous screens and probably amount to a larger power draw on the 12v than past vehicles.

 

[HuntingPudel]

I am not running the numbers but my head tells me that over the course of 3 hours of driving to deplete the main battery, you might get maybe 60 feet worth of distance if the screen was an OLED When comparing dark vs. light. If the screen is traditional LCD with LED lighting, it would actually use more power in dark mode (closer to opaque requires more power), zoned backlighting would nullify this.

 

[ARK]

The displays run off the 12v, which is charged by draining the main battery. And again, I know it's negligible, but every gained point in efficiency is a gain.

I didn't dig too deep into the displays to see if they're OLED, in which case black uses no power (the individual pixel is off completely) vs white using the most power per pixel. On a 15.5” screen, that's a considerable amount of power difference, especially at it's brightest setting.

It can amount to 10-15% greater power draw and a 20% reduction in overall screen life (using light mode vs dark mode). These are well documented on OLED screens particularly and the reason phone manufacturers are pushing dark mode on their phones now to increase screen life and battery life, as well as speeding up processing times (more energy can be diverted to the processor vs the screen).

The screens in the MME look fairly advanced vs previous screens and probably amount to a larger power draw on the 12v than past vehicles.

Sure, but it's a very tiny amount at issue, so an efficiency gain on that tiny amount won't make a meaningful difference. Look at it this way, suppose you have a 100% charge on the ER battery and drive at 60 mph for six hours until the battery is completely depleted. In 6 hours time at 60 mph, you would have traveled, let's estimate, 360 miles. Now, in 6 hours there are 360 minutes. In 360 minutes, there are 21,600 seconds.

For the ER battery's 88,000 watts, to drive 60 mph for 6 hours would mean you are using a little over 4 watts every second (because 88,000 divided by 21,600 is just a bit over 4). That means in about 7 seconds of driving, you have used as much energy as contained in a modern iPad's battery (4 watts * 7 seconds = 28 watts).

My math is ball park, but unless I made some big conversion error, the screens in this situation are just using a miniscule amount of energy compared to the motors.

 

[physib]

The dark mode doesn't actually use black, so the oled part doesn't make a practical difference.

 

[JohnnyForensic]

The dark mode doesn't actually use black, so the oled part doesn't make a practical difference.

It’s definitely not OLED—neither panel is. There was a thread here where someone showed their hazard lights on from the inside and the backlighting on the whole smaller display lights up to show the hazard lights. Given that they’re not OLED, there’s not going to be any kind of appreciable difference in power draw. Brightness levels of the panel settings will have a lot more impact on that than day/night mode, but in the grand scheme of things on a BEV that consume energy, the screen panels are pretty low.

 

[OlyPen]

It’s definitely not OLED—neither panel is. There was a thread here where someone showed their hazard lights on from the inside and the backlighting on the whole smaller display lights up to show the hazard lights. Given that they’re not OLED, there’s not going to be any kind of appreciable difference in power draw. Brightness levels of the panel settings will have a lot more impact on that than day/night mode, but in the grand scheme of things on a BEV that consume energy, the screen panels are pretty low.

Thanks for checking the specs on that.

 

[RedStallion]

Anyone done an analysis to see the impact of using the light mode on the displays vs dark mode? On my mobile devices, I can eek out an extra hour a day using dark mode and adaptive brightness. (Yes, I know I'm not going to suddenly get 100 more miles.... But efficiency helps overall, especially in long road trips...)

How about we do some simple math. The most impact from energy conservation you may expect driving in the city, where the battery drain is the lowest.
Let's take some round numbers -- a slow 36mph city driving with an efficiency 4mi/kWh. Dividing them 36/4 = 8kW -- that's your average power. How much do you think a screen can contribute (black or white)? Perhaps in the area of 10W, i.e. 0.12% -- you can save a few hundred feet of the range while driving in the city.

 

[dml105]

Mach-e extended range: 88 kWh.
iPhone: 5.45 Wh.

ifthe display completely drained 5.45 Wh, it would be 1/16000 of the battery use of a Mach-e. But it doesn’t even do that. You really don’t need to worry about light mode versus dark mode. Worry about whether your tires are properly inflated.

 

[OlyPen]

Ok, everybody. Got. It. ?

But feel free to post more battery calculation formulas here for others to check out your math skills.

 

[TruWrecks]

Dark mode vs Light mode has no power benefit. The LED panels in the car are not OLED and they do not turn off the background pixels because they are blue. For it to make a difference the pixel backlight needs to be turned off for blacks and on for everything else. Since Dark mode doesn't use black for the background all the pixels will remain backlit.

 

[sockmeister]

It’s definitely not OLED—neither panel is. There was a thread here where someone showed their hazard lights on from the inside and the backlighting on the whole smaller display lights up to show the hazard lights. Given that they’re not OLED, there’s not going to be any kind of appreciable difference in power draw. Brightness levels of the panel settings will have a lot more impact on that than day/night mode, but in the grand scheme of things on a BEV that consume energy, the screen panels are pretty low.

This is correct. It's definitely a traditional backlit LCD panel. And the reason for that I would venture is twofold: 1) cost, and 2) much better durability in the extreme temperature environments of a car interior.

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