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The auto wipers are............working!

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Constant rain this morning in Md and usually I have to fiddle with the wiper settings moving from auto to intermittent to manual push button activation during my commute to get the right amount of wipe. However, today was completely different. The auto wipers worked flawlessly.

Its as if the wipers knew the exact time I needed to wipe and they did it automatically. It was different kinds of rain as well. Heavy constant rain. Mist from passing cars and trucks. Light rain. Every time I thought I would like a wipe now it activated by itself. Amazing. I think that whole neural net thing is learning :)

Seems the auto wipers are improving with every software update.
 
Auto Wiper option will never work for everyone. Everyone has different desired wiping frequency, so there's that.

It has worked for me most of the time, but recently it has waited too long to activate wiper which at that point I could barely see through the windshield.

Not having a lever adjusting wiper is one thing I missed from ICE cars.
 
Auto Wiper option will never work for everyone. Everyone has different desired wiping frequency, so there's that.

It has worked for me most of the time, but recently it has waited too long to activate wiper which at that point I could barely see through the windshield.

Not having a lever adjusting wiper is one thing I missed from ICE cars.

My other EVs have adjustable wiper speed and sensitivity. This isn’t an ICE car feature. ;)
 
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S & X have sensitivity adjustments using the same NN and cameras.

The NN just needs to know that a wipe is needed and then pick a frequency from a matrix.

I was mostly just kidding, but I do wonder exactly how this works. It's not 100% clear to me. Seems like more than just picking a frequency, you need to be able to have different definitions of what "enough" rain looks like, for the different frequencies. Because a higher frequency would clear the rain more...so it would look less like rain...which would mean it would turn off....then turn on again...just wonder how spastic behavior is avoided. Obviously they could do some averaging on the sensing or whatever...obviously it is possible. But curious how well it works.

Mysterious that this S/X functionality cannot simply be added to the touch screen for Model 3. Priorities I guess.

Anyway I don't need to worry about rain for another 6 months or so.
 
I would think they could train the NN once to emit a recommended wiper speed between (say) 0 and 100. Then map ranges of those values to the 5 available settings in the 3 (e.g. 30-50 = wiper speed 2). If you adjust the sensitivity up, lower NN output would map to higher wiper settings (e.g. 20-40 = wiper speed 2), and vice versa (40-60 = wiper speed 2).

As far as I'm concerned, they could also train it to wipe immediately when the overall rain level is low but you get a sudden splash from traffic going the other direction. :)
 
I'm not convinced - a post about this appears every few weeks, and every time views are split. I think that's because the rain-detecting tech just isn't good enough - results vary massively depending on the "type" of rain it encounters and I'm not sure they can fix it. Sometimes it works great then another time, often in a critical situation, you're driving blind and you go back to manual - I've been through that loop multiple times now over several software versions. I never had that happen with the earlier tech (on VWs/Audis) - it just worked and I never thought about wipers or the type of rain.

The rain sensor is one of the few areas on my Model 3 (along with the trunk-soaking back window and handles that freeze) that seems like a design miss on a vehicle not entirely created with different climates in mind. I hesitate to say "California-design" but the Bay area does seem to be the only place where most people have no issue with these aspects of the car.
 
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They are still flaky for me. They don’t work well for road spray when there isn’t water drops near the camera but o the windshield. Also, When the sun is bright and shining on the windshield causing a glare on the front camera the wipers for some reason activate.
 
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