Tesla Auto Wipers: Why They Don't Work and Why There Isn't an Easy Fix

https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2045/tesla-auto-wipers-why-they-dont-work-and-why-there-isnt-an-easy-fix

by danso • 2 years ago

87 168 2 years ago

This is a result of Tesla’s strategy to rely upon Tesla Vision to replace all sensors – which they’ve successfully used most recently to replace the ultrasonic parking sensors (USS) on their vehicles. Tesla believes that vision is the solution to achieving all self-driving capabilities, and this includes the elimination of extraneous sensors such as USS and radar.

Why are they so hell-bent on using nothing but video?

dontreact2• 2 years ago

Elon’s belief that humans doing it with vision is proof it can be done with video

TaylorAlexander• 2 years ago

You’re right about Elon but I’ve thought about it and it’s flawed reasoning. Humans don’t do it “with vision” we do it with five senses and the human brain. The computer is severely limited compared to the human brain, so in the context of things like LiDAR, the computer needs all the help it can get. And for rain sensing, the camera doesn’t see the windshield like a person does!

dawnerd• 2 years ago

Vision would make sense... if the cameras were placed back where the driver actually sits.

UniverseHacker3• 2 years ago

That is a reasonable argument that it is likely to be theoretically possible. It’s absolute madness to jump from “theoretically possible” to production without actually inventing and testing the technology. What is going on over there at Tesla? I suspect an emperors new clothes type of situation where employees are too terrified to state basic facts, like “we tested 20 ideas out but none worked, we haven’t figured out how to get this to work yet.” Not the kind of culture I want designing a 2 ton vehicle I’m trusting my families lives to.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Humans do it with variable focus vision. The Tesla cameras are permanently focused at infinity.

tedunangst• 2 years ago

This is true in a sense, but humans incorporate so much more information. Like if I drive past a sprinkler, I know there will be a short burst of water hitting the window. But this requires a fairly complex assessment of the surrounding environment.

snailmailman• 2 years ago

But it can be done better with more sensors. Why handicap the technology? It seems to me like the compromise isn’t worth it here.

My phone can take my face scan in a room that’s pitch black, because it uses infrared sensors and a projection of dots. It’s able to check who I am, regardless of the natural light in the environment. If that technology was limited to “only a camera” it would be way worse.

A camera is cheaper than LiDAR. But it’s also less capable.

As best I can tell. Other cars just use a dedicated infrared sensor to detect the water? Seems like a weird corner to cut. Seems like tesla cut those in favor of just having other cameras attempt to fill in? But seems like that isn’t working.

heavyset_go2• 2 years ago

I think that's more of justification and excuse than a legitimate belief.

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

It's cheap.

ghostcluster• 2 years ago

It feels to me like another one of Elon's stubborn whims. Sometimes these result in great innovations, like Tesla's giant car part 'gigacasting'. Other times, they result in deciding to rename Twitter "X" and forcing a team of engineers to spend over a year combing meticulously through the codebase to remove all references to "twitter.com"

sho_hn• 2 years ago

Regarding the gigacasting: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

dmbche2• 2 years ago

Isn't gigacasting awful for the consumer? Can't replace most parts, have to replace the expensive gigacast?

bigyikes• 2 years ago

not doubting you but how does it take a year to remove twitter references?

surely twitter has some internal code search tool like Sourcegraph which would let them easily search for all variations of “twitter”, right? /twi?t*e?r/gi

ASalazarMX4• 2 years ago

This reminds me of Steve Jobs and his absolute refusal to let flash run on the iPhone. I think we're better now for that, but we had a few rough years for that.

hanief• 2 years ago

I think they falsely believe human only needs one sense to navigate: sight. But we actually use our hearing, smell, and touch too. So, multiple type sensors is actually better than only one.

jimberlage• 2 years ago

Fully agree - also it’s a bit weird on Tesla’s part to think that there could be no possible way to make things better than a human in some regards. If humans had radar, it would probably make us more capable, not less.

binkHN• 2 years ago

I imagine smell and touch are less valuable when driving a vehicle.

llamaimperative• 2 years ago

Our eyes are also attached to an unfathomably efficient supercomputer. The most advanced one in the universe, in fact, by a gigantic margin compared to anything humans have made.

phinnaeus• 2 years ago

Even if all the other senses were gone, the human eyes are hooked up to the human brain. Elon's references to cameras being eyes always glosses over the image processing part.

tw04• 2 years ago

And hearing… like the sound of rain hitting the car.

debatem1• 2 years ago

Guessing, but the cheapest sensor is the one you already have installed.

ajcp• 2 years ago

From the article:

Tesla likes to avoid solutions that only solve a single problem – such as adding a rain sensor. It is an additional manufacturing complication, adds additional cost to vehicles, and segments Tesla’s vehicles between model years.

ra7• 2 years ago

Combination of cost savings and “first principles” thinking.

They tried to save $5 per car by not including a rain sensor. It’s a few million dollars in savings at their scale. At the same time, they spend time and resources engineering a “smart” solution to auto wipers using cameras. And they continue to spend effort on that because it still doesn’t work.

Penny wise, pound foolish.

selcuka2• 2 years ago

Obviously it's not the $5, but the research that matters. We are beta-testing their vision based rain detection algorithm for them, for free (in fact we are paying $5 to test it).

SkyPuncher2• 2 years ago

The rain sensor is the one component that I’m shocked they would just spend the $5.

It works so freaking well.

makeitdouble• 2 years ago

The weirdest part from the outside: reliably detecting it's raining should have obvious positive impact on the driving side as well. For instance to better interpret the tires slipping, or even anticipate worse precision from some of the sensors.

infecto• 2 years ago

I like this take a lot and think its spot on. It feels very much like one of those decisions within a startup where the team decides to build their own tool that does the same thing as an equivalent commercial offering and consider it cheaper without thinking about the time to develop, maintain and improve.

LeoPanthera• 2 years ago

successfully

I don't know anyone who thinks the vision-based parking "radar" actually works well. Indeed, I've heard of several incidents of people bumping into things.

thebruce87m2• 2 years ago

It’s… ok. Much better since the update. Normal parking sensors aren’t infallible either. My colleague scraped his BMW i4 last week and it has proper sensors.

devwastaken• 2 years ago

There's multiple videos demonstrating Tesla's that self drive themselves into obstacles, including trains, because video cannot properly figure out obstacles.

rgmerk• 2 years ago

Because they think they can build a cheaper car that way.

Same reason they haven’t even offered an instrument display in front of the driver as an option, and replaced the indicator stalks with buttons (which from reports works acceptably well in California, not so much in, say, the UK).

Underlying it all is Tesla’s belief that the driver is a legacy feature that is going away Real Soon Now. Frankly, it seems like they’re 90% of the way there (with all that implies about how long it will take to get the rest of the way).

ikiris• 2 years ago

Because if they had something in addition, that might cost another dollar that wouldn't be going to his Twitter debt.

klyrs• 2 years ago

There's totally an easy fix. Buy a squirt gun, and shoot your windshield near the camera whenever you need a wipe.

Edit: ooh, better yet, make a magnetic hood ornament with a squirt gun and a camera pointing at the lower half of the windshield... add GPT4o and Bob's your uncle!

Nition• 2 years ago

You could have a graduated dial to control the squirt gun. Off, then intermittent water squirts, then light, and finally heavy. You could put it on a stalk coming off the wheel area and have complete control of the wipers.

With your GPT-4 solution you could even have 'auto'!

yreg4• 2 years ago

I don't mind most of the common Tesla complaints, but this one I can agree with 100%.

The auto-wipers work ridiculously bad for me and it would be a non-issue if they had just used a dedicated $2 part, like everyone else does.

It is a good example of how the 'use nothing but computer vision for everything' dogma is stupid.

In the end it's not a big problem for me, I just use manual wipers, the same as I did on my previous, rather old car. But it's dumb.

yareal4• 2 years ago

Autowiper sensors are some of the simplest, well understood technology around. You place an infrared led at a low angle to the windshield, you place an ir collector so the light from the LED hits it. (Remember that at shallow angles, light reflects off glass.)

When water is on the sensor, the angle of refraction and reflection change, and the ir collector suddenly sees much less light.

Two components, plus a microcontroller. Usually two such sensors are on the windshield. Absolutely dead simple and cheap.

Why the fuck would you replace that with a camera trying to parse video?! That's so much more complicated. That's like trying to determine vehicle speed from a camera rather than sensors on the tires or whatever.

marricks2• 2 years ago

That's like trying to determine vehicle speed from a camera rather than sensors on the tires or whatever.

Don’t give him any ideas

marricks2• 2 years ago

That's like trying to determine vehicle speed from a camera rather than sensors on the tires or whatever.

Don’t give him any ideas. Seems like he has the “not built here” complex

kccqzy• 2 years ago

Actually I'm somewhat certain that the vehicle speed is determined by the motor RPM, the known reduction gear ratio, and a known tire size. That's why speed can be inaccurate if you switch to incorrectly sized tires.

eldaisfish• 2 years ago

there is a hugely important implied assumption here - that the size of the water droplets are large enough for refraction to be detected. Any place with frequent drizzles or mists, these rain detectors do not work well or reliably.

GeorgeTirebiter• 2 years ago

They are not this simple; if so, an RLS (Rain / Light Sensor) assembly would cost 50 cents. To do a proper job, you need an array of IR emitters, and an array of detectors; and they need to be properly integrated into your windshield glass.

The RLS is usually a part of the rearview mirror supporting structure.

It also has to also work for hail and snow/sleet. Again, it's not as simple as you suggest.

spookie2• 2 years ago

Anything water based on top of the light emitter will have the same effect. You just need to use a formula describing its refractive index with temperature and density inputs. The temperature is known by the car, the density can use a look up table for various states the water could be in.

yareal4• 2 years ago

Is that not what I described, more or less? None of the components are particularly complex or expensive except the part where they join with the glass in the structure. Trying to do it with video is a much, much harder problem.

what-the-grump• 2 years ago

Because petulant manchild thinks he is best car engineer on the planet. Its why FSD in its current state is such trash, its why a lot of the car is leaps and bounds better than most other cars, and basics that should have been accepted as learned lessons have to be relearned at the expense of the consumer and ridicule by the rest.

Autowipers do not work. Cannot work, will never work. My tesla can't see a full downed tree in my lane, gets spooked by dips in the road and pops collision alerts, how the hell would it see rain.

There are plenty of tasks that become impossible when using the wrong tools. It's like trying to move a lot of sand with a fork.

glimshe• 2 years ago

It reminds me of that old story where NASA spent millions to develop a pen that works in space, while the Soviets simply used a pencil.

trogdor• 2 years ago

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/

Stratoscope• 2 years ago

For anyone curious, Technology Connections has a good video on how traditional automobile rain sensors work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm7Q92xMjQ

frabjoused• 2 years ago

Excellent watch, thanks.

fbdab1032• 2 years ago

I really enjoyed how he was struggling to balance the laser with a lightbulb. That seems like one of the worst household objects available for the task.

OptionOfT• 2 years ago

He mentioned that they aren't perfect.

I had a BMW which had an absolute perfect calibration of the sensor. It just WORKED.

Then I got a new windshield and all fell apart. As it was a BMW, I had to go to the dealer and have the rain-sensor re-calibrated.

And then it worked flawless again.

fewald_net• 2 years ago

I had a similar experience with a BMW. The rain sensor in every car after that has been much worse.

hn_throwaway_992• 2 years ago

TBH, I hate auto wipers and have always believed them to be a tech solution looking for a problem.

Never once have I been in rainy weather and thought "gee, what should I do?". I currently have a car with auto wipers (I'm not sure but I think they use the "standard" infrared sensor to detect rain) and I find them worse than manual, intermittent wipers in every way. I think the biggest problem is that the wipers tend to only go on when water is flowing down the windshield. But we get a lot of "misty" rain where I live, where the small drops will stick in place for some time. So my windshield will become covered with drops and difficult to see through before the wipers turn on, and since the car doesn't let me control the speed for intermittent wipers manually (there is just "high" and "low") I find myself manually hitting the wiper button every ten seconds or so.

I know this may seem like "Old man yells at cloud" (literally), but it's just a huge pet peeve of mine when the lower tech solution works great only to be replaced by something more complicated that does the job worse.

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

the car doesn't let me control the speed for intermittent wipers manually

What's the manufacturer? I'm in the market for a new car, and this would be an instant deal-breaker.

thorncorona• 2 years ago

This just sounds like you bought a crappy car. There are great implementations of auto wipers available in the wild.

shiroiushi4• 2 years ago

Exactly. This is one of those cases of someone using an extremely crappy implementation of a new technology, and then claiming that all implementations must therefore suck.

My last car (a low-end Mazda, now about 10 years old) had excellent auto-wipers; I never had a complaint about them. The controls were simple, the sensitivity could be easily adjusted, they were great. I never wanted to switch back to manual wipers.

lathiat• 2 years ago

By contrast my 2007 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X has automatic wipers that are just magic and other than making them slightly more or less sensitive once-off (which you can do using the dial on the wiper stalk) it responds perfectly, adjusting the speed up and down with changing rain intensity in perfect harmony with what I would do myself. I never find myself wanting. That's nearly 20 years old at this point.

2018 Subaru Outback, same thing.

spookie2• 2 years ago

Great cars! :)

ranger207• 2 years ago

Yeah I don't get the point of autowipers. My car is too old to have them, and whenvever I drive someone else's car I just have to pray that there's a way to bypass the automation because there's about a 50% chance whatever car I'm driving the wipers just won't work. It's an interesting case of UI/UX because adding the autowipers often makes things more complicated than not because instead of manipulating the wipers directly I instead have to manipulate the automation to manipulate the wipers

vel0city4• 2 years ago

In almost every car with auto wipers I've driven it's just been another wiper selection. Off, auto, intermittent, low, high.

vel0city4• 2 years ago

So with auto wipers, sometimes you need to manually turn on the wipers.

With manual wipers, you always need to manually turn on the wipers.

I don't get how the auto wipers are worse. It's not like having auto wipers means you no longer have manual wipers. Other than maybe a Tesla where they took away the stalks, but just about every car I've had with auto wipers still had regular stalks with pretty regular wiper controls. Just one speed is also auto, so you can leave it there instead of off.

And in the end I'll leave it on auto instead of off, and the majority of the time these days I don't even have to think about it. These days, they seem to mostly just work for most of the precipitation I experience. Not always, but most of the time.

The first car I had with auto wipers was kind of like your experience. It had to really be coming down to activate. That was a 2012 model year. My 2017 model year car is a good bit better in that kind of misty environment. My 2021 car, I pretty much never touch the wipers even if it's just a light mist. The tech has seemingly been a lot better over the years.

hn_throwaway_992• 2 years ago

Good point, I think the issue for me is probably more of a lack of the ability to set manual wipers on a continuously variable schedule than just with autowipers specifically. I have no option that's good for the "misty" rain I described beyond hitting the "wipe once" button on the stalk every ten seconds.

brandonagr2• 2 years ago

In a Tesla there is a clearly labelled dedicated button on the steering wheel to active wipers and the ability to change the speed with the thumb scroll wheel, I would argue it's easier to use than twisting the barrel of a stalk that you can't see and can be in different locations hidden behind the wheel

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

I hate everything automatic on my car. Rain sensing wipers activate in dry weather, and then not when it's raining. Climate control does what it wants, I freeze or sweat or have fog on the windshield because it's not directing any air there. Automatic transmission hunts up and down on a hilly road.

I want a car with manual transmission, manual wipers, manual climate control settings, and manual radio. Unfortunately they are not sold unless you buy one that's 30 years old.

ec109685• 2 years ago

Accidentally left auto wipers on at the car wash.

Never enabled them again.

photonbeam• 2 years ago

Is there an aftermarket addon from anyone to route around this problem?

brysonreece• 2 years ago

Just manually enable the wipers instead of having it set to auto?

AnotherGoodName• 2 years ago

The newest teslas don’t have wiper or indicator stalks. They don’t have functioning auto wipers or auto indicators either. Manually enabling wipers is buried in the center mount touchscreen. The indicators are tiny crappy buttons on the wheel that turns when you turn making them a pain on roundabouts.

resolutebat• 2 years ago

Until recently this was a pain in the ass, because you could only adjust wiper speed via the touchscreen. This was literally my #1 problem with Tesla's UI.

However, they recently rolled out a software update that lets you adjust the wiper speed easily with the left scrollwheel.

jbotdev• 2 years ago

I get it, he’s trying to do everything in software (with the existing cameras), since software is “cheap” and can do anything in theory.

Unfortunately they keep showing how they’re in over their head with some of these features (like FSD). But it’s fine because their customers agree to keep beta testing while they figure things out on production cars.

shiroiushi4• 2 years ago

But it’s fine because their customers agree to keep beta testing while they figure things out on production cars.

This is the bottom line right here. It's the same with many other products too. It's not really wrong to run a business this way, because SO many customers apparently like it and continue to support these companies. Other examples are Microsoft and the ads it's baking into Windows, and Netflix and its price increases combined with feature degradation (like cracking down on password sharing in families).

ohmyiv2• 2 years ago

This is the bottom line right here. It's the same with many other products too.

This is how I feel about some released "MVPs". "I gotta show something even if it's crap. If it doesn't work, we'll fix it along the way."

Anytime someone mentions they're releasing an MVP, I make note of it to revisit later when they're done with alpha/beta testing. Incomplete release products kind of bug me and it seems to be more common, but I guess that may be a "me" thing. I'm glad my clients are tiny to small businesses and want things to work properly before they take over.

jeffreportmill1• 2 years ago

One thing that would improve them immensely is to make the algorithm much more aggressive if I manually hit the wiper button. When I hit that button it should be a strong hint that conditions are rainy.

eurleif2• 2 years ago

I strongly suspect this is already the case, based on repeated experiences of pressing the wiper button and then having the auto wipers come on.

tempestn5• 2 years ago

There are other issues with Tesla's auto wipers.

The main one is that, in other cars, you can have the wipers on auto, while still manually increasing or decreasing their speed. So if the wipers aren't going fast enough for you, you can bias the speed upward while maintaining the auto function, and vice-versa. On Teslas you don't have that option; you need to choose between auto and a fixed speed. (My guess is that the ability to increase or decrease the speed of auto wipers is patented, and Tesla doesn't want to license that patent, but that's just a guess. Maybe it's just laziness.)

And that's bad enough, but it was made far worse by the fact that for most of Tesla's existence until just recently, the only way to change that fixed speed was via the touch screen. This was, thankfully, finally fixed just recently! (But only properly so for older vehicles.)

The turn signal stalk on Teslas that still had turn signal stalks has a button on the end that activates the windshield wipers. It will cause them to wipe once, and will bring up a control on the touchscreen to choose between speeds or turn the wipers off. Until a few months ago, that was your only option to change speed: use the touchscreen while driving. (As a result, Tesla drivers like myself would often just control the wipers manually, pushing the button for each wipe, as that was more convenient than fiddling with the screen!)

Then, they added the ability to long-press a steering wheel scroll wheel, and then turn it to control wiper speed (although backwards, with an up turn on the wheel making the wipers go slower). This was a hassle, but better than the screen. For several months that was the situation, until just finally a week or so ago the logical link was made so that pressing the dedicated wiper button on the stalk allowed speed to be adjusted using the wheel. Not as good as a proper, adjustable auto function, but at least usable - finally.

why_at• 2 years ago

FYI I have owned a model 3 for about a year now and I have always been able to manually set the speed by pushing the button and then using the horizontal part of the scroll wheel to cycle through the settings.

tempestn5• 2 years ago

Ha, maybe that's been an option for longer and I just never thought to try that particular incantation. I even googled this issue and didn't discover that. Will have to try on mine now.

I do find it amusing that you now have the option of long pressing the scroll wheel or pressing the stalk button to thrn turn the wheel to change speeds... But the direction of the change in those two cases is reversed; in one case up on the wheel is faster, and in the other it's slower.

CGamesPlay• 2 years ago

Completely ignoring the terrible UX of all of this, I can't imagine why someone would ever want to drive a car where path to access critical functionality changes so frequently.

tempestn5• 2 years ago

Agreed. But I wanted an electric SUV with room for kids and dog and such, and the Model Y absolutely blew away competitors in 2021 in terms of space for people and cargo, in a reasonably sized vehicle. Still does to some extent; no one else has the small third row option, which is fantastic for driving kids' friends and such. Also the charging network was/is far superior to alternatives. So I was willing to put up with some Tesla nonsense for those advantages. Probably wouldn't make the same choice in 2024 though, as alternatives have improved, and Tesla's gotten weirder.

lm411• 2 years ago

Using a touch screen to control wiper speed seems insane. In fact, most of what you wrote sounds incredibly unintuitive and frankly stupid.

Things like wiper speed need to be brain-dead simple muscle memory controls - and similar in behaviour to other vehicles. I own three (cheap and old) vehicles, and I can easily switch between them and control the wipers even if I haven't driven one for 6+ months.

Vehicle control interfaces and design peaked long ago. True of many things in the modern world in my opinion.

I do under these modern designs are cheaper and that is generally the push for them.

nsguy2• 2 years ago

When I picked up my new Model 3, about 5 years ago, I headed home and it started raining. I had no idea how to turn the windshield wipers on and was barely able to find a place to stop on the side of the road as I tried to figure it out. I do love the car overall but this certainly wasn't thought through and the auto mode is pretty bad. It's one of those quirks you get used to...

csa2• 2 years ago

Using a touch screen to control wiper speed seems insane.

Honestly, I think that this is overblown.

Tap the end of the left stick and then use left scroll wheel to adjust.

Or use the voice command (e.g., “turn on wipers” or “increase wiper speed by 1”).

The “bad” part of the wipers is that some folks new to the car don’t know how to operate them if they have not read the manual.

Shitty drivers are going to do stupid things when it’s raining. No amount of UI is going to fix that. All the designers can do is minimize the degrees of freedom of stupidity. Tesla controls are somewhere between fine and quite optimized by this metric.

4b11b4• 2 years ago

They'll probably learn something by trying to do it with vision though

creativeembassy• 2 years ago

This is my #1 complaint with our new Model Y. The "Auto" setting is completely worthless. It almost never turns on when it's raining. When it does turn on, it's either too fast or too slow. It'll turn on randomly when there's no rain.

But it's not just the sensor, which would be inconvenient. The lack of control makes it *dangerous*. You have to push the button in _slightly_ on the left stalk, which makes the wipers go once. And then you have to push the left scrollwheel left or right (but not up or down!) to turn the setting up or down, while staring at the bottom left part of the screen to figure out what setting you're on. All of this takes your eyes much further away from the road, while driving in more dangerous conditions with reduced visibility.

If any hardware manufacturers are listening, I'd gladly pay $200 for an aftermarket part that lets me control my goddamn wipers.

kayodelycaon2• 2 years ago

Tesla vehicles lack a rain sensor.

Here’s how a proper rain sensor works https://youtu.be/TLm7Q92xMjQ?si=Yb-_TBYbPIuPXk_p

pseudosavant2• 2 years ago

Good thing Tesla saves $1 on a few IR LEDs and photoresistors. That $50000 Model 3 is now $49999.

pseudosavant2• 2 years ago

It would seem like you could sense rain hitting the roof through its acoustic signature using a contact piezo mic. That'd probably have a much larger effective sensing area than the IR sensor.

sundvor• 2 years ago

Great video. Tesla cars would just be so much better with these, it's kind of infuriating.

(Also the rear cross alert pings from my old (MT Sedan) Mazda 3 Astina '14 is something I miss greatly.)

Having said that, the wipers in my LR3'22 work pretty well and I am not really giving it that much thought.

I keep the area clean and wipe the blades down regularly. I do like how easy it is to engage the wiper service mode to be able to lift the blades; no manual required.

There was a time when perhaps I didn't keep the area that clean and found I couldn't really use cruise control on a highway drive without the wipers going nuts in the dry, fortunately it's been a while since I've experienced that - upgraded behaviour, perhaps.

dmitrygr• 2 years ago

I'd gladly pay $200 for an aftermarket part that lets me control my goddamn wipers.

A surprisingly low price for what will eventually cause your fatal accident due to inattention.

ojbyrne• 2 years ago

“eventually” seems to be doing a lot of work here.

cco• 2 years ago

There are aftermarket Tesla buttons that you can buy and program to change things like wipers. Maybe look into those.

jerlam• 2 years ago

These are over $300 but these are aftermarket Tesla buttons that can control the wipers and other functions:

https://enhauto.com/product/four-s3xy-buttons-gen2

(not an owner, just have a good memory)

ouryummydino• 2 years ago

Just keep 4 spare CR2032 batteries handy in case it starts raining and your wiper button batteries are dead.

m4632• 2 years ago

oh wow. amazing.

keep going! now a knob for volume control with push on/off, and a separate one for temperature with push on/off.

m4632• 2 years ago

The lack of control makes it dangerous.

I totally agree with you.

But I suspect some company cultures are fundamentally broken. Apple started with a one-button mouse, and will probably never make a good mouse. I think tesla has adopted their broken mindset and I think the tesla culture will never make any of us happy.

Personally if the old tesla cars with the wiper control on the turn-signal stalk could just change the two useless auto settings to slow and fast intermittent... that would be SO wonderful.

noSyncCloud• 2 years ago

Meanwhile 7? years ago I drove a company Volkswagen Touareg on a ca. 5 hour drive with constantly varying rain conditions the entire time and did not touch the wiper controls beyond initially setting them to Automatic. This is a solved problem.

fortyseven• 2 years ago

"Early Access: The Vehicle" -- I swear for every positive Tesla thing I've ever heard, there's two or three absurd things. Shit we'd never let any other company get away with.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Wipers are a critical safety item. There should be a way to activate them manually, in fact I thought this was a legal requirement in the USA but perhaps I'm mistaken.

nsguy2• 2 years ago

There is, by pressing a button on the left stalk. But that only wipes once and is also not intuitive when you first drive a Tesla.

eurleif2• 2 years ago

When you press that button, a wiper control pops up on the screen, and allows you to keep the wipers on by pressing one of the four speed buttons. You can also use move the left thumb wheel on the steering wheel left and right to switch between those options while the pop-up is visible on the screen.

murgurglll• 2 years ago

If they can't solve this it means the FSD system has no idea if it's raining either. Which implies FSD drives the same in dry and rainy conditions.

Woshiwuja• 2 years ago

Just use rain sensors. Why would you make it like this for any reason.

Tesla Auto Wipers: Why They Don't Work and Why There Isn't an Easy Fix

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