Auto Wipers are awful

[Dilly]

Had to go out in light rain this morning. The wipers worked fine. Not too fast, not too often.
Yesterday might have been a different story. Wall to wall heavy rain all day. The Mrs didn’t walk her dogs so that qualifies as serious rain.
If I’d been out in it, I’d have needed new wiper blades by lunchtime!

 

[Pagemakers]

I’d give auto wipers 3/10. Almost never use them. Too frantic even on the lowest setting.

 

[Bluebell]

Just been for a 40 mile drive in the sunshine. The wipers operated 4 times on a dry windscreen. Just 2 or 3 wipes each time but still irritating.

 

[Artiste]

The worst performance I’ve seen from the wipers was during a hail storm last winter. The hail just bounced of the windscreen leaving it completely dry but the wipers went into overdrive. I guess they don’t have much hail in California.

 

[Adopado]

The worst performance I’ve seen from the wipers was during a hail storm last winter. The hail just bounced of the windscreen leaving it completely dry but the wipers went into overdrive. I guess they don’t have much hail in California.

Crikey, you couldn't be much more wrong on that one!!
Epic hail storm puts out wildfire burning across northern California | Metro News

 

[Dilly]

Just been for a 40 mile drive in the sunshine. The wipers operated 4 times on a dry windscreen. Just 2 or 3 wipes each time but still irritating.

You had sunshine! My wipers have worked more in the last two days than in the six months I’ve owned the car!

 

[tsh2]

A lower sensitivity setting would go a long way towards making them useful. I would still expect to need to switch between settings, but that is better than needing to keep turning the setting between off, 1 and auto.

 

[ChrisA70]

Agree with others. They’re better than a year ago but basically still crap.

 

[LongRanger]

I’d did wonder if it’s an inherent flaw with using cameras.

Cameras need clear visibility to detect things. So at the first sign of rain, auto kicks in a clear of the screen - then it rains a bit more - but the software “knows” it needs clear cameras to detect increasing rain, so it wipes again etc etc.

A rain sensor has different sensitivities and hence is inherently better at gauging whether frequency 1-3 or 1-5 etc is needed

Somebody tweet Elon and ask him the question on whether a software “loop” is self-perpetuating constant motion on wipers for rain where UK folks still wear shorts and sit outside drinking beer.

 

[cwerdna]

The worst performance I’ve seen from the wipers was during a hail storm last winter. The hail just bounced of the windscreen leaving it completely dry but the wipers went into overdrive. I guess they don’t have much hail in California.

I live in Silicon Valley, where Tesla technically is.

No, we don't get hail all that often in the Bay Area. It happens but they seem like freak occurrences a couple times a year. I don't think we'd have more than a dozen days with hail in a given year.

 

[St_EV_e]

The wipers are the only real big disappointment with my M3P. I drove a 2005 Land Rover Discovery (LR3) for the past few years and the auto wipers worked so well I never noticed them. I’m constantly pressing the stalk button to override the Tesla’s auto system, it never seems to get it right. Seems odd that Tesla can’t match a 15 year-old car.

As an aside I also really miss a rear wiper, I find the visibility pretty poor or non-existent in wet weather.

 

[LongRanger]

I’m gonna stand up for auto wipers after today’s experience, they actually seemed to learn after I decided to go with them not rally against them today.

First they went too soon/fast, then they decided not to want to wipe at all, so I did about 5 miles pressing the button when I would have done it, then for the next 20 miles in varying degrees of fine/normal/heavier spray they were completely spot-on.

Could well be placebo effect but are they capable of constantly re-learning or did I just get lucky for 20 miles ?

 

[mtndrew1]

They really are far inferior to any other car i've driven. Especially, as the OP says, when washing the windows. They basically don't know when to stop and end up starting to smudge whatever it was you were trying to clear off. Also at least twice on my long road trip they came on for no reason whatsoever.

Yes, Yes Tesla, it's all very clever using a "neural net" to detect rain instead of an IR sensor like everyone else. However, IR sensors work, your system simply doesn't. To be kind, the one place it does work when an IR sensor doesn't is when you first get in a car that has water already on the windscreen. I always had to do a single press of the wipers on my other cars to seemingly wake up the sensor. Other than that though, they were flawless and this isn't

The stupid thing is that they could have included the IR sensor in the first wave of HW2 cars and used that as a training method for the neural net. Then once the NN was sufficient they could have deleted the sensor in future builds.

But man if you think the wipers are bad now join me on a trip back to 2018...

 

[MrBadger]

Could well be placebo effect but are they capable of constantly re-learning or did I just get lucky for 20 miles ?

Probably just placebo.

Whilst Tesla have said that the car will learn based upon manual interventions, the release notes indicated that the override data would be incorporated into future software updates, presumably after sending it back to mother.

Tesla changed their auto wiping method to 'deep rain' with 2019.40.x, early December 2019

 

[Plagued]

yea, I've seen them get better and then worse with each software revision that comes out. Currently it seems worse than it was. The Mrs hates it as she likes the screen wiping the minute a drop of water hits the screen, I don't mind it, but I do really dislike the attempt to wipe sun off the windscreen, or in the morning if I use the squirters to clean the sap off the windscreen it then starts 2 minutes of screeching wiping of a now dry windscreen that you can't stop.
We can press the button to tell it to wipe, how about allowing a double tap to tell it to stop!

 

[Keeper]

I wish there was a position “0” so that you could actually turn them off! That would be helpful I think.

 

[Pagemakers]

I wish there was a position “0” so that you could actually turn them off! That would be helpful I think.

You can turn them off.

 

[Keeper]

You can turn them off.

Yesterday, the first 20 minutes of my journey consisted of my wipers doing intermittent wipes. No rain or anything. Tried every combination of activating, deactivating, shouting but they would not turn off. I gave up trying, ready to reboot when I stopped but eventually they stopped. But it was at times like this that I would have liked the "0" option.

 

[Pagemakers]

@Keeper which vehicle do you have?

I have a 3 and on the screen, bbottom right on the main page there are the controls for wipers. You can toggle the wipers on and off there. However, it sounds like you had some kind of wiper-runaway if you can’t turn them off at all.

 

[fancealot]

Yesterday, the first 20 minutes of my journey consisted of my wipers doing intermittent wipes. No rain or anything. Tried every combination of activating, deactivating, shouting but they would not turn off. I gave up trying, ready to reboot when I stopped but eventually they stopped. But it was at times like this that I would have liked the "0" option.

The 0 option isn't actually in the 1, 2, 3, 4 and auto area it's the wiper icon above, press that and your wipers will go off. then you can use individual wipe on the left stalk by pushing it inward (like the park on the gar stick side)