OK.. I know about the blue meaning you're in a more eco mode and the red meaning performance.. but does anyone know what the shades of each color mean? My car will go from a DARK blue to a lighter one, then black of course, then back to a blue (all within the same trip). I drive in normal mode. Now obviously one would think that the lighter mode would signify less fuel performance but I dont see that. My gas mileage doesnt seem to increase or decrease and the different shades of blue appear to have no meaning as I've been topping 80mph and still had a dark blue dash color.

Any ideas? Aesthetics maybe?

 

Hi,

The different shades of blue will change with your driving conditions, when your driving eco it will be a bark blue and gradually fade away as you drive more aggressively.
You can still drive eco at 80 mph if you keep your foot steady on the gas peddle.
Its more of the way you are driving, accelerating, than your actual speed.

 

Yep. Red does not change. I almost started a thread about this same thing a couple weeks ago when I noticed that the blue changed while driving.

 

Interesting and thanks for the response. Do you guys notice a significant different in gas mileage when running on the Red (Sport, Sport+) mode over the blue? I dont seem to notice any significant diff between dark, light blue and black.

 

You can still drive economically even in sports + mode.
I have the hybrid version and I can still drive with just the batteries in sports + mode.
I think the difference between all the modes is just how quickly the car responds, and drives especially in sports + mode with rear wheel steer.
I don’t think there would be any difference in fuel consumption if you floor it in eco or sports+ mode.

 

The blue lighting intensity is inversely related to the amount of throttle application. It's a rather primitive meter as it doesn't account for engine load increases, such as when you need to apply additional throttle to maintain your velocity up an incline.

The "Eco" meter which can be displayed in the center display of the instrument panel works based on the throttle position as well. The blue meter represents a maximum-limited graph (e.g. minimum 0% to maximum 10%) showing the throttle percentage. Once you exceed a certain percentage, the meter maxes out and the indicator blinks.

I find both indicators to be nearly useless since they both will dim-out or max-out in typical steady-state driving in this region. I think there is plenty of data being recorded by the OBD II system which could make these more "intelligent".

 

well doesn't matter much to me. I run in Sport mode most of the time.

 

there is nothing unintelligent about them, they show you when you spend more fuel basically, which is obviously tied into your throttle application... so if you tried to stay in eco mode, you would spend less fuel.

 

As he said, the different shades of blue to black tell you how much you're hitting the gas. When its black its basically telling that you you're burning more gas.

I agree that I don't find much use for the the ECO meter. I'd rather use the meter showing me how many mpg I'm getting at the current time.

And I seem to agree that I don't find that much different when I put the car into sport mode. Just today I just felt the need to punch it in Sport mode and it didn't really bring down the mpg.

 

My dash color dosent change to Red when in Sport anyone know why?

 

I think you may have played with the settings. Set it back to default and you should be good to go.

 

Lexus could have used the money used to develop and install the fading light gadget for much more useful things like power trunk pull down or folding mirrors which would be more desirable, at least to me.

 

Folding mirrors would have been GREAT!!

 

Agreed. The colors are just unecessary "fluff". I can read the Average Miles Per Gallon or the MPG since fill up. It won't change my driving habits anyway.

 

That's why I turned off the blue light. I kept the red because it look cool.