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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

Omg this! I drove a friends Tesla recently and it started raining on the freeway. Neither of us could figure out how to turn the windshield wipers on. My friend eventually dug through the touch screen menu enough to find them. Turned out they were set on 'auto', which apparently doesn't mean that they turn on automatically in the rain.

That was by far the scariest car situation I have been in for a while. If I had been alone in the car I never would have found the menu item while driving and could have easily crashed before pulling over.

Even after we found two ways to adjust the wipers it was still the worst interface I have ever seen for a safety critical car system.

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The Model3 has a dedicated button for the windscreen wiper on the steering wheel, and then you can adjust with the scroll buttons. It certainly has a learning curve, and it would be better if you could rely on muscle memory for these things.

I usually spend a couple of minutes when I drive someone else's car to get familiar with the controls, as the rear window windscreen wiper, light controls (especially fog light) can be tricky on old cars as well.

What do you mean a dedicated button? What year did they introduce this?

The turn signal stalk has a button on the end. Small press activates the wiper. Large press cleans the window with washer fluid. Either press brings up the wiper menu on the screen to adjust frequency.

I love my model 3 but the wipers are by far the worst feature. The auto sensing is awful in light mist, there are not enough different intermittent settings, and changing the speed is a nightmare.

Yeah even once you know the controls driving through intermittent storms where you need to adjust the speed regularly is an abysmal experience.

I've driven I don't know how many dozens of cars in my lifetime and literally never had a problem finding safety critical controls outside of driving a Tesla. They took an issue that had been completely solved decades ago and created a problem for some combo of cost cutting and UX fad chasing.

I think the offset touch screen controls are categorically worse than traditional cars in many ways, but hiding the freaking windshield wipers is the worst of them.

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