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Intermittent wipers
- Thread starter Dishyork
- Start date
Ludalicious
Active Member
These vehicles have the worse wipers by far out of any vehicle I have owned. Its either too much or not enough. Really wish there was a way to control the delay manually between wipes. Complete fail.
Kinda like a system designed by engineers who live in California and never seen a drop of rain before.
Kinda like a system designed by engineers who live in California and never seen a drop of rain before.
True, the AP 2 automatic wipers are weak compared to any other automatic wipers I've ever used, but they seem to be getting better with firmware updates, and they are optional. You can turn them off and then you have two intermittent settings. If that's what you want, go flip the switch. I will say there should certainly be more than two intermittent speed / automatic sensitivity settings, but obviously that's not going to be fixed OTA (and probably not at all).
As we had some rain here in Houston, I found myself thinking about this yesterday. Either there's a great variance in performance from one car to another or a great variance on perception as to what one person considers "worst" and another person considers "great."
Myself, I'm in the "great" category. It would be interesting to see two people with differing opinions on the wipers get together and see if the difference is mechanical or expectation.
Myself, I'm in the "great" category. It would be interesting to see two people with differing opinions on the wipers get together and see if the difference is mechanical or expectation.
In my case, it's definitely expectations, because I had better automatic wipers in a 1998 model year vehicle. That having been said, they do work great sometimes, it actually depends on environmental factors (don't work so well at night, with road spray, with mist) to a degree, too.
Mine work pretty well, not perfect, but as good as many other systems I've experienced. No system I've tried has been perfect, but that's hard to achieve as people have different preferences to how much wiping they actually want. I'm in the minimum wiping camp, so that might explain why I'm happy with them, as the Tesla system does seem to wipe less than others even in the higher of the two positions. I agree that the first position is not much use, so would be better to move the second position down and add an even more sensitive position above. But not a big deal for my taste.
The one I really liked had something like 8 sensitivity settings, and I would use them all 8 in different conditions (or as conditions changed), but changing sensitivity settings as conditions changed sure as heck beat having to hit the manual wipe button repeatedly in some conditions like I do in my Model X.
I agree the sensitivity is terrible. I still have them on, but around 99% of the time I click the button for a swipe before the automatic wipers swipe. I've been hoping it would improve, but there's been no noticeable improvement yet. I've also been wanting to see if there are any conditions that are handled well, but I haven't found any. (By far the most annoying feature of the car, IMHO.)
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That doesn't sound very automatic to me, lol! Our other car has 4 settings, but I usually leave it on the most sensitive.
It meant adjusting a lot less often than I would otherwise adjust intermittent, and it was intuitive, because adjusting up triggered a wipe, so it would be like the manual wipe button on the Model X increasing sensitivity. At the end of the day, if you're like me and don't want them wiping when they don't need to, then it was a great way to deal with the facts that conditions differ and the sensors get a small sample of the windshield. However, I'm probably one of the more picky users out there. My last vehicle didn't have automatic wipers, and while I missed them, I was equally annoyed that it only had 4 intermittent settings (where my previous three vehicles all had 6-8). Interestingly, though, the pad printing actually showed and computer actually technically had 6 intermittent settings, the wheel just didn't click on all of them, so you could actually put it between settings to get a different speed. With the Tesla, I can't even set it to intermittent and adjust because 2 settings is such a far cry from enough. I'm stuck constantly using the manual wipe button, which is crap for a vehicle in this price range (or century, for that matter). If the manual wipe button temporarily increased sensitivity and turning the wipers off and back on reset it, Tesla's automatic wipers might actually be almost as good (limited only by the fact that there is no way to turn sensitivity back down one click at a time after using the manual wipe button to turn it up).
Ludalicious
Active Member
Exactly. The most annoying is trying to get just one extra wipe and you need to click it all the way to the top too achieve only one. Very frustrating.
From the manual...
Press the button on the end of the left steering column lever to spray washer fluid onto the windshield. You can press this button at two levels. Press partially for a single wipe, without any washer fluid. Press fully for both wipe and wash. When washing the windshield, the wipers will perform two wipes after you release the button, then a third wipe a few seconds later.
Update: I was driving in the rain just now, and the automatic wipers acted completely differently! They were actually pretty good. Fine mist kicked up from tires were a weak point, but other than that it handled things quite well. I don't know what has happened, there may have been some improvement in 2018.18, or maybe the service center did something when I had it in last week. I can't be sure when it improved because it hasn't rained for weeks.
Before I thought they were an "F", but now I'd rate them a "B". Just hope it wasn't a fluke.
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