The car ahead of me decides to clean their windshield and 3 droplets get on my windshield? Tesla: WIPER LUDICROUS SPEED ENGAGED!
I just drove next to a semi and got blasted with a tsunami of water in a rain-storm? Tesla: ...
There are two ways cars currently do automatic wipers.
One way uses a very clever, simple, cheap but very effective sensor. Technology Connections did an episode [1] a few months ago on these sensors. The electronics in it are just a couple infrared LEDs and infrared photodiodes.
The other way is to use a camera, such as the camera you already have for your driver assist functions, and try to use computer vision software to figure out how much rain there is.
Pretty much everyone except Tesla uses the first way. Tesla uses the second way.
What baffles me is that of the three options they might have pursued:
1. Use a rain sensor like the ones everyone else uses,
2. Use a camera and computer vision software which doesn't work as well, and
3. Do not have automatic wipers,
it seems to be that #2 is the worst option. Automatic wipers aren't really needed. Once you get used to where the controls are and how they work on a car without automatic wipers adjusting your wipers for the current conditions becomes one of those things you do completely unconsciously.
So if my next car, like my current car, does not have automatic wipers it is not going to bother me.
But if it has them and the don't work well, that very likely will annoy me, at least until I get tired of having to manually intervene and turn auto mode off or until manual intervention becomes something that I do unconsciously and so forget about them. In either case I end up back in a situation equivalent to a car that doesn't have automatic wipers, but with a lower opinion of my car maker.
Thus this seems like a feature that the car company is better off not doing unless theirs will be as good as what everyone else has which currently means using the IR LED/photodiode sensor.
I completely agree. I'd rather have manual wipers than automatic ones that perform poorly. It's a major safety issue here in the PacNW where the volume and intensity of precipitation varies greatly.