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Comment by ecesena | Hacker News Reader

Interesting random fact: when it rains, waymo turns on the windshield wipers

They would probably have to go out of their way to disable the auto-wipers, no?

They definitely go out of their way to make significant modifications to their vehicles.

Is this relevant? Are any of its cameras/sensors behind the windshield? Or are there wipers directly on the external cameras?

I think it's just for passengers' experience

Probably also a legal requirement to run them during rain, even if it's not actually needed for the self-driving cars to work.

Plenty of south florida rain is not helped by windshield wipers. Anyway I wonder if waymo sensors actually have better visibility in such conditions than people do

I think the comment you are replying to is implying that it's a bit funny/weird that the wipers turn on, because there aren't any sensors that are looking out the window to see. (As others pointed out, it could just be default auto-wiper functionality, and of course passengers still like being able to see out the window, even if they aren't controlling the vehicle).

> Interesting random fact: when it rains, waymo turns on the windshield wipers

The jaguar i-pace does this independent of the waymo use case.

The interesting part here is... the Waymo has no reason to. There is no driver. All cameras and sensors are outside. It's just for not freaking out the passenger :)

Waymo has wipers on it's LIDAR dome

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/6biyr8/way...

some places have laws that require wipers to be on while it's raining. Seems like a smart thing to have until laws are updated just to prevent your cars from getting pulled over by police.

> The interesting part here is... the Waymo has no reason to. There is no driver. All cameras and sensors are outside. It's just for not freaking out the passenger :)

We have very different thresholds for what's interesting.

The platform provides this feature out of the box, why would waymo go out of their way to disable it. Obviously potential occupants would appreciate seeing out the windshield if it's raining, why that is interesting escapes me.

My 2011 Mazda also did this.

Cars dating back to 2008 if not earlier. It can also be annoying/doesn't work very efficiently

Rain + lidar = challenges

I'm guessing you've never tried driving in a tropical rainstorm. It's as bad a driving in heavy fog. Sometimes you only really have visibility of a few feet.

The.... driverless car... doesn't look out the window....

Who said anything about windows? I would imagine LIDAR looses some accuracy when its refracted by raindrops.

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