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

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

notateslaapp.com

87 pointsdanso169 comments

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.

> 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.

> Tesla vehicles lack a rain sensor.

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

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

Yep, and if you sell 10 million of them you have saved 10 million dollars.

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.

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.

You don't need a large sensor area or complex audio analysis. A spot with a few IR diodes on the windshield is going to get wet if it's raining hard enough to need wipers.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

> 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.

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

> 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?

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.

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).

That data would be a lot more valuable to them if it was paired with an actual rain sensor though.

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.

You do not want to start making handling adjustments based on rain on the windshield, when the road could already be slick from prior rainfall or other conditions.

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.

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

It works so freaking well.

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"

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

> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.

Yep, don't count on Tesla for replacing fossil fuel cars. They had a good headstart but hopefully other manufacturers will now take its place to fill growing demand

In all likelihood auto manufacturers won't really be responsible for replacing fossil fuel cars. Designing and building the cars is straightforward enough, they need continued leaps energy storage and infrastructure to make that change possible.

> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.

Oh, come on. Yes, Musk announced that Tesla would announce a self-driving car with no steering wheel in August 2024. Of course, he said that in 2016, in 2018, in 2020...[1]

Reality is that Tesla, while signed up for California DMV's autonomous vehicle test program, didn't report any miles driven last year.

[1] https://www.inverse.com/innovation/tesla-robo-taxi-elon-musk...

That article states that they are retracting to their previous method of gigacasting.

The one that other carmakers are starting to use too, inspired by Tesla.

It actually says that they were attempting to gigacast their new vehicle as a single piece rather than three pieces, but that proved difficult so they are going back to gigacasting three separate pieces.

But your point stands: they are still gigacasting, just for now they are not doing the very ambitious "gigacast in a single bound" plan.

"Elons whim that resulted in great innovation" as ghostcluster put it referred to gigacasting as three pieces, not gigacasting as one.

sho_hn's comment could have been read as gigacasting being a failure. It is not.

Probably related to them dumping the model 2 project.

Article really would have helped if I could have understood how much cheaper/faster it is to make one piece instead of three.

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.

Maybe, or maybe it's like his refusal to allow apps to force everything to be a web app, and Tesla will realize they are better off just having more sensors and more data

I kinda agree with steve jobs on both of those calls. if your "mobile app" is just a wrapper around a web page, I'd rather just have a bookmark shortcut on my homescreen. what's the value add?

I don't think either of those is very similar to the wiper thing. one is using the leverage of owning a major OS to force third parties to do something better for the end user in a context where the stakes are pretty low (ie, no one is going to die). even if it works out in the long run, the wiper only benefits tesla. and in the meantime it is a serious safety risk for the end user.

Tbh I agree because at least with the hindsight we have now, so many apps both desktop and on phones are just wrappers around web browsers anyways.

Back then there was some value add in having access to native APIs but over time we've just added more and more web APIs to bridge that gap.

Both Steve and Elon made stubborn decisions, some of which benefited and some of which hindered their companies' products.

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

It's not like it's cheap to repair frame damage in any car.

Frame damage is actually pretty straightforward on cars that actually have a frame (i.e. aren't unibody).

The problem with repair costs in modern cars is all the sensors, cameras, complex paint jobs, airbags, etc. Those expenses add up quickly, combined with the added costs of body panels and trim for certain brands and costs really get insane - it shouldn't be a surprise that car insurance costs keep growing much faster than inflation.

it's still not easy. - many years growing up fixing up race cars and such. hardest part besides engine repair

Definitely depends on the type of damage. Cracks and rust aren't a big deal at all, a twisted frame due to a corner collision is a royal pain.

In the context of price to repair though, I'd still rather be dealing with a car with a damaged frame rather than a modern car with loads of sensors, body panels, etc that all need replacing.

Refering to this stuff, not sure what you're getting at

https://www.theautopian.com/heres-why-that-rivian-r1t-repair...

I think most of the time if you are in a serious enough accident to damage the gigacast in a way that it needs replacing, that would've totalled most other cars as well.

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

Code for a public facing website used by hundreds of millions of people is always more complicated than you think it is on the surface.

I would like you to do this for one of your larger projects at work - just change its name with a simple regex like this - and see how many unit tests fail.

"But I'll just fix those!", you might say, and you might. Except your project is likely not as big as twitter, and fixing every problem is likely to become a much bigger problem.

Plus, you now have to catch all the stuff not caught by unit tests, which also includes design elements that a person has to look at.

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

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!

Alternatively: it’s a cost cutting measure and the “humans can do it with vision” is essentially a marketing spin.

Considerably more than five senses, actually. We rely on a huge variety of inputs beyond the basic ones when we drive.

Vision and hearing are the main senses we use to driving, and touch a distant third. Using taste, smell or proprioception means something is probably wrong with your vehicle.

Personally, proprioception ranks ahead of hearing for me.

Vision is first, but proprioception is how assess nearly everything else. Braking speed, acceleration, throttle input, cornering, traction, hydroplaning, tire pressure (even in specific tires), alignment issues (down to the specific wheel), balance issues, toe rod issues, transmission issues, engines issues, wind, payload, towing, etc, etc, etc.

I could probably tell you within 100lbs how much and roughly where payload is in the vehicle simply by feeling how the car is driving.

I literally cannot do racing game because I can’t sense the vehicle. Flip side, I used to think professional racers were crazy for being able to call in subtle issues to their crew chief. Turns out when you drive a specific car enough, you learn how it out to feel.

I thought about smell but actually vehicles do malfunction, and smell can be an important indicator. “Something is wrong with your vehicle” is a real scenario that actually happens pretty often.

I feel we must be using smell all the time to be able to detect when a burning odour begins to arise. It’s just that we’re not aware of it when nothing unusual happens.

If you’re not running AC you can certainly smell rain also

Driving without proprioception is probably almost impossible. That's how you know where your hands are, how the steering wheel is turned, where your feet are, how to move your hand to the indicator lever, etc.

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.

> 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

Or maybe the emperor is a "idea #16 is good enough for me" type of person?

Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, probably his thinking is more along the lines of:

"I'd like to solve this with vision. Sure, we can ship a $5 part to do it the tried-and-true way, but if we do that then we're probably never gonna solve it with vision, because there will no longer be a pressing need to do so. So I'm gonna force us to not ship our cars with a proper rain sensor in the hope that it will continually push my teams to get this shit done and do the improbable".

There’s no doubt to give him the benefit of… even in your version they still decided to ship a basic feature that doesn’t work in a production automobile. Other car manufacturers push teams hard to develop new tech also, but they also test the heck out of them so they’re 100% functional before they would put it into production.

Piech was famous for outlandish demands on engineers at VW, but his demands took the form of the desired test results: the Phaeton had to be capable of being driven all day at 186 mph with an exterior temperature of 122 °F whilst maintaining the interior temperature at 72 °F. And they did it…

I'm not defending the mindset, just pointing out that this is what I would assume is going on in his head.

And like him or not, his companies have delivered a lot of innovation in the past.

Fair point- that does seem like a likely explanation, I am just horrified that it would lead to putting broken systems on a mass produced production automobile.

That sounds so cool when a billionaire vision-guy says it. Too bad reality is that "pressing need" isn't magic, and sometimes just isn't enough. Like this time.

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

And if you could rapidly move the cameras in multiple dimensions.

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.

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.

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

I know a few people who work/worked there. I don’t agree with it but it is a genuinely held belief

That's terrifying

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

For seeing rain it's mostly that they are offset back from the windshield more. People over 50 barely have variable focus vision and it isn't really important in driving.

Normal human eyes also have more dynamic range than the cheap cameras used in Teslas. This matters in some difficult lighting conditions.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Touch is really important: it's how you can tell if your vehicle is sliding. You can feel the various forces of the vehicle's motion through touch.

Also more basic things like whether your feet are touching the pedals, that you're gripping the steering wheel at all, and how much force those things are taking.

Touch is extremely important when driving a vehicle. You won't know which controls you're using and how much force you're exerting upon your pedals otherwise.

Smell lets me know when it’s time to roll down the window.

also, depending on the area or the AQHI, when to Roll it back up

Unless that smell is oil. Or gasoline. Or burning rubber. Or petrichor. Or just plain old smoke.

Or the touch is the feeling of road surface changing, or the steering wheel getting harder to turn / having no effect at all, or the rush of air if a door flies open...

Touch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see, hopefully at low speed... but taste, yuck!

>Touch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see

I think you're underestimating the importance of touch, especially when it comes to steering and pedal control.

That's a limitation of us. We need touch and indicators to gauge how effective we are, but a machine can precisely throttle 23% or keep the steering wheel at 19 degrees without need to gauge how hard it is pushing the actuators. Touch is nice, but hardly crucial for driving.

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.

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.

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

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).

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

It's cheap.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Excellent watch, thanks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> no one else has the small third row option

Rivian R1S, Kia Ev9, Mercedes EQS SUV?

Small third row. The nice thing about the Y is that you have 7 seats when you need them, but don't need the footprint of a massive SUV when you don't, which in our case is most of the time. It's a foot or more shorter than any of those vehicles.

As I said though, if I were to choose today, I'd probably pick a different option. None of those existed when we chose the Y in 2021.

no one else has the small third row option

Kia EV9?

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

Yes, now you can tap the button and then use the scroll wheel to adjust, but as I said, that option has literally only been available for a week or two, at least on my car. For the first three years of ownership you were stuck with the touchscreen. (And even with that ability you need to change it constantly because the auto level is rarely right, for reasons in the OP, and you can't bias it up or down.)

Ha, or yes, voice controls. Don't get me started on how many times I tried "set wiper speed to 1" or similar and instead got max speed, before I eventually gave up and used the screen or "manual" control.

> For the first three years of ownership you were stuck with the touchscreen.

Tap end of left stick and hit setting on bottom left of screen (in US) with peripheral vision or a tiny fraction of a second of a glance.

I mean, none of this required navigating menus or staring at a complex/busy screen unless someone was trying to be obtuse. If this tiny fraction of a second is actually an issue for anyone, then I think that either: 1) they have other issues (e.g., irrational levels of control expected), or 2) they’re just a really bad driver, or 3) they didn’t rtfm on their car with a unique design.

As a simple example, one will trivially look at the controls of a rental car or a friend’s or family member’s waaaaaay more than the wiper controls on a Tesla, yet no one that I am aware of is writing about those on HN or other mainstream social media.

The Tesla system is new and different, and so people just seem to like to bitch about new stuff, especially when it involves Tesla.

> Don't get me started on how many times I tried "set wiper speed to 1" or similar and instead got max speed

Regarding your voice controls, I hope you see why your input was unclear (“to/two one”).

From the manual:

BEGIN QUOTE

Windshield Wipers

Update the windshield wiper speed and frequency based on changing road and weather conditions:

"Speed up the wipers"

"Increase/decrease windshield wiper speed by..."

"Turn on/off the wipers"

END QUOTE

Have you tried these exact commands?

They have worked very consistently for me.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

No. The vehicle speed is determined by a single sensor, the Vehicle Speed Sensor. It measures the rpm of the driveshaft (or one of them), the shaft that is the output from the transmission. You don't need the gear ratio.

But yes, it does assume that the tires are a certain size, so if you put the wrong size tires on, it will be wrong. Also, it's not super-accurate: tires sizes differ slightly by brand/model, plus they change their outer diameter as they wear down. That error accumulates.

I wonder what you mean by "accumulates". If I change the tires, the slight difference due to the previous brand and the slight difference due to the new brand do not compound. I only get the last one. And if the older ones were worn, the new ones will have less error, as they are less worn.

If the errors really accumulated, once in a while we would need to recalibrate the speed sensor, else we would be doing 90 and showing 10. In fact the error is limited to some reasonable amount.

Accumulate in this context means that there are several small errors, and it's a function of summing or multiplying those accumulated errors. It does not mean that they accrue over time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

>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).

> 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.

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!

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'!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The stalkless cars have a button on the steering wheel to select the wipers, and the scroll wheel adjusts the speed. No need to use the touch screen to control them.

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

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, it would be good if all the wipers on auto would repurpose the interval time adjustment as a sensitivity adjustment for the auto wipers when in auto mode. Some cars seem to be able to have adjustable sensitivity in this way, some can only change it deep in settings (not good on the fly), and most seem to be fixed sensitivity.

My car (2012 Vauxhall Astra J Hatchback) has 5 front windscreen wiper modes (once, off, interval controlled, medium interval, short interval), controlled by the position of the lever (with fully down being once, which is also momentary, and then proceeding upward in the order above).

It also has a dial on it to adjust the interval when using the interval controlled option. I don't get to control how fast the wipers move in any mode, only the interval between them moving; on the highest setting, the wipers also move a lot faster, as I believe this lever position bypasses the BCM and runs the motors directly. When it's raining I drive on interval controlled position 3 most of the time, with medium interval in heavier rain and I've only used short interval once.

Interval controlled position with the dial on maximum is the same as medium interval position, and the dial on minimum uses the rain sensor.

The same lever also controls the windscreen washers (pull toward you for cleaning the front windscreen, push away for the rear), which also puts the corresponding wipers on medium interval for 5 seconds automatically, and finally has a 3-position button on the far end to control the rear wipers (off, long interval, short interval).

I like this system. You can adjust every aspect of it with a finger and thumb without ever taking your eyes off the road.

https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/southwestvauxhallspares-i...

Yeah, I mean that sounds like just about every car I've ever personally owned across several different makes. Its fine, and I prefer having a physical stalk dedicated to this input for something as critical as managing visibility. Things like visibility controls are very critical and need good physical controls for quick adjustment and activation. I lump things like headlights, turn signals, hazard lights, and stuff like that in that category. They should be physical, easy to control, and very close to the primary driving input (the steering wheel) not far in the center console.

You know what I like even more? Not even needing to think about touching it like 90% or more of the time. Its now pretty rare on my newer cars to ever need to actually touch the wiper control at all. Its still there, and still just as simple to adjust as my 2000 Honda Accord was, but just leaving it in auto means it just takes care of itself the vast majority of the time.

You could make the controls for a manual AC control in your house really nice and easy to use, but I'd rather just set it to a temperature I think I'd like and have it automatically handle it for me. I could choose to water my garden with a garden hose and a really nice, very comfortable sprayer, but I'd prefer just having an automated irrigation system know if it needs water or not. I don't get why one would prefer to have to manually adjust your wiper if you don't really need to the vast majority of the time, and adding the automation costs a few bucks total.

Its the same thing with headlights. Why wouldn't I just leave it on auto? Sure, maybe there's a slight chance where I might end up deciding I'd like to have them on even though the light sensor thinks its bright enough, but I pretty much never have any good reason to set it to "off".

I agree in principle but I don't use my rain sensor because it just doesn't run the wipers often enough for my liking.

Yeah, the problem is when the "auto" setting isn't good enough.

Same for the AC, sure you can have it set to "auto", but mine tends to slow the fan down in auto mode when the car reaches the preset temperature. I find that annoying, because it means less fresh air in the cabin.

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

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.

Great cars! :)

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Accidentally left auto wipers on at the car wash.

Never enabled them again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com