In Germany it is only legal to operate a touch screen while driving for essential functions with only a brief glance. For example, a judgement was handed down against a Tesla driver who tried to switch up the interval of the windscreen wiper via touchscreen and ran off the road in the process.
Source: https://www.burhoff.de/asp_weitere_beschluesse/inhalte/5723.... (in German)
We should be very careful not to include the kitchen sink in with "essential" items.
Turning the wipers off and on, is critical, adjusting delay timings is not
You've never driven in rain, have you?
My ex (one of my best friends), born and raised in Seattle, used to give me serious grief anytime I mention rain in Boston or NYC. She had no belief in what I would describe.
Work finally ships her out to (NYC). She calls me up to say she just ran ~2meters from the hotel to the taxi and is soaking wet.
She has never commented on Seattle "rain" since.
REAL rain.
Many years ago we had a guy working for us who was sent over from our company's parent company in Southern Cali. He was not keen on going out in the rain at all, and was absolutely terrified that we still drove at 60mph when it was raining. "But what if you skid? It's raining!" he'd wail.
He'd never driven in rain. He just did not take well to a Scottish January, especially the bit where you get 140mph winds for a couple of weeks.
I guess we also have laws about keeping cars in good condition with decent tyres and stuff.
We get that rain too periodically.
Sesttelites complain about rain because we regularly experience 100+ days of rain.
Seattle rain is not not a storm, it's a marathon.
There's a map here that shows that most of the eastern US gets more rain than Seattle, but Seattle is very high on the number of days of measurable precipitation.
setting it to a high speed will fuck up the wipers when there is little rain, a /low/ speed will be useless when there is appreciable rain, and when driving you often move from one to another.
You know, like on my appallingly primitive 1998 Range Rover, or pretty much anything from the same era?
Besides, what if you are on the road with no shoulders.
Construction, cliff roads, country roads, etc.
Tesla are unsafe death traps by design.
This is completely untrue by third party metrics (both governmental and not).
Drivers are licensed operators of heavy machinery that travels at high speed. Let's not encourage systems that turn us into more dangerous operators.
But also, you can now adjust wiper speed / interval on the steering wheel in a Tesla without using the touchscreen.
Feature was actually added a just a few weeks ago in a software update.
Yes, in theory it would be best to have the perfect speed without intervention but there isn't one perfect speed for the conditions.
The speed the driver wants changes from driver to driver and might depend not just on how much rain is coming down but on the amount of traffic on the road, proximity to pedestrians, eye sight and time of day and any number of other factors.
It's always going to be better to have an automatic system that can be tweaked by the driver because everyone is different. The more easily the driver can do that without thinking the better.