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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

A few reasons why I much prefer the Audi Q4 E-tron to a Model Y;

* It has wireless Carplay - so I don't need to rely on Audi (or Tesla) engineers to provide Spotify or podcast integrations

* It has a physical lever to control the windshield wipers like every other car made in the past 50 years. You don't need to dig through menus to use a critical safety feature.

* It has physical buttons for the HVAC controls - so again, I don't need to look at an obnoxious screen for a feature that shouldn't be software-based to begin with.

I have no doubt that Tesla's "pace of development" is faster and that they're going to ship more updates to improve things but sometimes you don't need in-house software to solve all of your problems.

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Do you really have to go into a menu to turn on the wipers in Tesla cars?

You can make them swipe once by pressing a button and then there's a little pop up on which you can turn them on. Not great, but you don't have to go into a menu.

For the fog lights you have to go into a menu or flash your high beams to get the lights pop up, which really sucks.

No, you tap the button on the end if the indicator stalk. This gives you a wipe, and a wiper speed menu will appear on the screen if you want to override the auto wiper speed.

Saying that, the auto wipers can be dreadful. They mostly work OK, but occasionally will randomly turn on when it's dry, or not come on when it's pissing down. It's down to the fact that rather than use a simple infra-red based rain sensor (that the rest of the industry has used for decades) Tesla think they can do just as good a job using the front-facing AutoPilot camera and save a dollar or two on a dedicated sensor.

No, at least on my '22 MY, you can use one of the stalks to turn on wipers or spray washer fluid. There's also an auto mode that turns them on when rain is detected that works about 80% of the time for me. You can also use voice controls.

That’s okay, but still bad UI for a critical safety component. It used to be much harder too. In practice it is okay, but the only driver for this is design aesthetics, even after knowing it is highly disliked the way it is. Wiper controls were one of those little issues that really turned my partner off of her Model 3 over time.

Yeah -- technically you can make the stalk active the wiper a single time -- but to adjust the speed of the wipers you need to look at the touchscreen and (at least at the time I used it), select a fairly small target during a downpour. It drove me crazy in my 20 minute test drive since the auto wipers were failing miserably.

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