HVAC Auto mode- who came up with that garbage?

[lightgreen]

So I got to experience my 2022 MXP in cold weather for couple months now...

It is obvious to me that whoever came up with the climate control and windshield algos lives in a warm, dry place and thinks the rest of the planet is just like that.

The climate control in cold/ damp weather is a joke. Real joke. And yes- I have cleaned meticulously my windows both on the inside and outside. No residue of any kind is left.

Issues:

1. The side window vents in the dash are inadequate volume- wise and not really aimed at the side windows to begin with. As a result the driver side window is almost always fogged up in any mode except "defog" or "defrost". I do not want to run around in "defog/ defrost" all the time as it does not keep the bottom part of the cabin (my feet) warm.

2. There is no "fan" mode. Really? How about I just want to blow a bit of (dry when presented) outdoor (or even recirc) air to the windshield so it doesnt fog up? Every other car (EVs included) has that option.

3. Speaking of recirc air - I believe the recirc is 100% recirc with no outside air blended in. None. This is why when running recirc with a few folks in the car the windows will fog up in a matter of seconds. I have never seen a car fog up so quickly and dangerously if you manage to press the wrong button at the wrong time. Very dangerous. Please blend some outside air in recirc mode.

4. Please retain "auto" fan option where we can still chose which vents to blow air from. Currently touching windshield/dash/feet selectors will disable auto fan and you are stuck on particular speed.

5. In heating mode in cold weather- never ever... ever blow air from the dash vents in auto mode. Never. Especially in my face with a lukewarm ashp. Blow from windshield and footwells, but never dash. This is really my biggest pet peeve especially combined with lack of auto fan if I select "windshield" and "feet".

6. Bringing up the HVAC screen turns on HVAC. No. Please do not do that unless I specifically turn it on myself.

6. Please introduce auto windshield wipers sensitivity setting. The default one goes into panic mode as soon as couple rain drops are detected (yes- my windshield is clean). You cannot possibly think a single sensitivity setting will work across the board. It does not.

So that is pretty much it. Thanks for bearing with my semi- rant.

 

[mxnym]

Welcome to Tesla. No experience in the palladiums/plaids, but I can give you some ... news ...

Re: (2), you can set the temp to LO and A/C to off to have it effectively operate in "fan" mode. This is stupid, but it will work.

Re: (4), in v8, there were like 4 independent auto buttons so you could set any component to independent. They took all that away in v9 and had the behavior you describe since *until recently*. The auto mode in my 2017 MX100D finally started acting like pretty much every other auto HVAC vehicle in the world sometime relatively recently (I don't remember if it was in the last 6 months or the last year, but since it did what you describe from 2018/2019 through 2021, either would arguably be relatively recent. The components on auto now stay faded vs the components on manual, so you can tell which are set and which will adjust by looking. You can't switch an individual component back to auto, but you can switch the whole system back to auto and then manually adjust one component (like I said, it's finally like pretty much every other auto HVAC vehicle in the world). I know that this doesn't help with your brand new X, but there is someone somewhere at Tesla who does know how this should work, and they might eventually fix yours, too.

Re: (6, the first one), yeah, this has annoyed me from day 1, especially as that is the only way to get to the rear heated seats, which is all I want during parts of the year. Until very recently, it was also be the only way to get to the heated steering wheel, and for a brief period of time after a new interface was released (v11, maybe, don't remember for sure), it may have also been the only way to get to the driver and passenger heated seats. Unfortunately, when it comes to that particular quirk, given how long it has been that way, I'm less optimistic that it will ever change.

Re: (6, the second one), yeah, they've had 6 years to make the vision-based auto wipers work decent, and they still suck at it. I agree that sensitivity settings would be great if they worked, I had like 6-8 sensitivity settings in my 1998 Buick and those automatic wipers were amazing with just an occasional tweak depending on the type of precipitation (i.e. mist vs light rain vs heavy rain vs snow).

 

[sfRonH]

climate control

I agree that just about everything with the climate control is terrible. My issues: the main AUTO button turns blue when on. But the auto button for seat heaters and steering wheel heating is 2 different shades of gray, no blue. How am I to remember which is Auto and which is manual? Why 2 different color sets for one control panel? And some buttons turn red when on. The red is nearly impossible to see for people with red-green color deficiency, which is about 7% of males! There are easy ways to design interfaces that are useful regardless of color vision ability, but Tesla doesn't do any of them. Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.1: Use of Color | WAI | W3C

 

[mxnym]

I agree that just about everything with the climate control is terrible. My issues: the main AUTO button turns blue when on. But the auto button for seat heaters and steering wheel heating is 2 different shades of gray, no blue. How am I to remember which is Auto and which is manual? Why 2 different color sets for one control panel? And some buttons turn red when on. The red is nearly impossible to see for people with red-green color deficiency, which is about 7% of males! There are easy ways to design interfaces that are useful regardless of color vision ability, but Tesla doesn't do any of them. Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.1: Use of Color | WAI | W3C

Best I can tell from your profile picture, you have a Y. This is in tke X forum, and I'm not sure whether even the Palladium X has auto heated seats (though I am curious now). It is interensting how many different variations of color deficiency there are, but IIRC, there are at least 2 red-green deficiencies, and only one of them would make the red difficult to see. Incidentally, that is probably the one I have, I can't tell if my brake lights are on in my IC since they went v10. Prior to that it was quite obvious.

 

[Alex Besler]

It really does suck, any time it goes below freezing within 5 minutes I have fogging on the side windows. This is with auto 22 degrees no recirc and air blowing to windows. I can see that auto never turns on a/c when its below freezing so for me to prevent fogging I have to turn off auto and enable a/cc manually. So dumb to have to constantly do that.

 

[RoBoRaT]

So I got to experience my 2022 MXP in cold weather for couple months now...

It is obvious to me that whoever came up with the climate control and windshield algos lives in a warm, dry place and thinks the rest of the planet is just like that.

The climate control in cold/ damp weather is a joke. Real joke. And yes- I have cleaned meticulously my windows both on the inside and outside. No residue of any kind is left.

Issues:

1. The side window vents in the dash are inadequate volume- wise and not really aimed at the side windows to begin with. As a result the driver side window is almost always fogged up in any mode except "defog" or "defrost". I do not want to run around in "defog/ defrost" all the time as it does not keep the bottom part of the cabin (my feet) warm.

2. There is no "fan" mode. Really? How about I just want to blow a bit of (dry when presented) outdoor (or even recirc) air to the windshield so it doesnt fog up? Every other car (EVs included) has that option.

3. Speaking of recirc air - I believe the recirc is 100% recirc with no outside air blended in. None. This is why when running recirc with a few folks in the car the windows will fog up in a matter of seconds. I have never seen a car fog up so quickly and dangerously if you manage to press the wrong button at the wrong time. Very dangerous. Please blend some outside air in recirc mode.

4. Please retain "auto" fan option where we can still chose which vents to blow air from. Currently touching windshield/dash/feet selectors will disable auto fan and you are stuck on particular speed.

5. In heating mode in cold weather- never ever... ever blow air from the dash vents in auto mode. Never. Especially in my face with a lukewarm ashp. Blow from windshield and footwells, but never dash. This is really my biggest pet peeve especially combined with lack of auto fan if I select "windshield" and "feet".

6. Bringing up the HVAC screen turns on HVAC. No. Please do not do that unless I specifically turn it on myself.

6. Please introduce auto windshield wipers sensitivity setting. The default one goes into panic mode as soon as couple rain drops are detected (yes- my windshield is clean). You cannot possibly think a single sensitivity setting will work across the board. It does not.

So that is pretty much it. Thanks for bearing with my semi- rant.

Copy paste to [email protected] 
I would.

 

[Gumball]

No experience here with a Model X, but on my 2014 S, I always, year round, have the HVAC on auto and 20 degree (celsius, that is) and never have problems with windows fogging, but it could be the S is better designed that way.
Also, our 2019 Model 3 has no problems either, so maybe this is a typical X thing?

 

[FirstInTown]

The 2022 MX is just as the OP describes. Terrible side defrosting. On the refresh, there are no little dash vents that aim at the window where the side mirrors are. All our other cars have little vents that aim there.

It is even worse in cold northern Wis. When it's 10 deg f or cooler, the side windows don't just fog, the foggy moisture freezes and becomes impossible to see though to the side mirror. Just a cr%p design. No solution, as car is too wide to reach across and scrap the ice off the window while driving like I use to do in my crappy cheap 1980s car that also did this. Of course that was a cheap piece of junk(bough used for $300), not a $100k+ "luxury" car.

 

[BMWM3Man]

We live in hell...Georgia in the Summer and have never had an issue with our two Teslas fogging up or other related to the climate control.

 

[mknmike]

I realize this is an old thread and not for model 3, but assume the software is similar. It took me a while with the help of others to figure out that the defrost button is not my friend, and manually controlling the climate control is not all that hard (if you stay away from that button). Defrost / Defog: Just want fan

 

[mknmike]

I learned that if you have your seat heaters on “Auto” and the air temp on LO, the seat heaters will shut off. I didn’t realize the two were connected. So that’s another item I now run on manual mode. 3 bacon strips warns me up, but I need to turn it down manually. I do like the seat heater to be on auto because it keeps your butt from getting too hot. Learning.