Love him or hate him, and my opinion flips back-and-forth frequently on him, the guy is a genius. You can’t deny his accomplishments. They’re truly generationally amazing. That said, I do wish he would just assign one person to this auto wiper issue, and fix it. I mean, really…you can fly spaceships into outer space, and you can’t get a person to fix the wipers on a car?
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v11.4.7 (2023.7.30) auto-wipers seem drastically worse
- Thread starter gsmith123
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It also doesn't bear the facts. Tesla is tops in luxury, beating BMW, and has the top selling car, beating Toyota. They are in the top for repeat buyers, and have the highest margin for any EV in production today. They are the most American car company in existence, with the majority built in the US.
I'm imagining the board, hypothetically, did fire Elon. And in a Tesla blog post announcing it the only problem they cited was the auto-wipers still not working
Seriously, though while I'm not happy about the wiper situation, I don't think the underlying Tesla culture is a problem. Tesla empowers people to take risks, move fast, have a huge degree of autonomy and they get a tremendous amount out of their R&D investments. On the flip side, sometimes these bets don't payoff. Or the team managing some feature is bad at prioritization or execution. It's a tradeoff. At least, this is how I've seen things happen at the tech companies I've worked at.
Some other examples of bets that haven't paid off, or choices that haven't worked out great:
- No ultrasonic sensors on newer cars
- Dashcam can only record 4 of 7 cameras and has big blind spots
- Brake covers to make the brakes looker bigger (on some cars)
- Charge port on CT is too far forward, imo, and will not work great with a bike rack or long load
I obviously don't personally know the guy, but I can see the quality of his work, some of which was also noted above. It's not just auto wipers, it's a long list of screw-ups, including the stuff he does when he should have been paying attention to Tesla and its customers. With so many of his bets rolling snake eyes, his performance review by the board should reflect that and replacing him should be on the table. That's all. I know the Muskophiles have a hard time with that kind of criticism, but it's legitimate and well-deserved. 
I've been bitching about all the dry wipes for months but it hasn't rained much in Atlanta lately so no problem with the wipers NOT coming on.....until today. Damn it is so f'n crazy that on a sunny day they will wipe and wipe and wipe but today in the rain thay stayed off and the "FSD is degraded..." message flashed over and over. Was on a wide and open residential street so I let it play. Finely as was reaching for the wipe button they wiped once and quite wiping to let it build up to near blindness again.
So weird that just a few versions ago they wiped too much/fast in light rain and now it is completely opposite. I wish Tesla had just spent $10 on a Bosh rain detector (and a bright light detector too) and be done with it. Years after "Deep Rain" and it is still shallow sh$t and WORSE than ever.
So weird that just a few versions ago they wiped too much/fast in light rain and now it is completely opposite. I wish Tesla had just spent $10 on a Bosh rain detector (and a bright light detector too) and be done with it. Years after "Deep Rain" and it is still shallow sh$t and WORSE than ever.
Conspiracy theory: Tesla is going to make the V11 series so absolutely awfully horrifically terrible that when we get V12 we'll be brimming with praise.
I was driving to work today with no rain, no cruise control, no FSD, and got 4 dry wipes. After the 4th one I hit the stalk button to change to OFF and it already said OFF. So now it seems I am getting dry wipes even if the wipers are OFF unless it turned them off when I hit the wiper stalk button. Who Knows!
I just got 2023.27.12 (FSD 11.4.8.1) yesterday and today I tried out the new "single pull to activate FSD" feature... Immediately it starts dry wiping the windshield and pops up the "FSD degraded because of bad weather" alert. So I'd say there's no improvement to auto-wipers, seems we will need to wait for the V12 holiday update for any chance.
Damn. I was really hoping they'd be fixed. A few revisions ago my auto wipers were great. Now dry wipes all the time and no wipes when it rains. Today it rained hard, the auto wipers refused to wipe. After it stopped raining I put them back in auto. Yep, you guessed it; they started wiping continuously at that point. WTF, over.
MrFixit1094
Member
How to best get Tesla's attention on this ????
What if everyone starts reporting this to the NHTSA as safety issue. It is certainly a safety issue if the wipers don't wipe when it is raining, BUT the fact that the Auto mode is optional lowers this risk. Of course, Auto is not optional in Autopilot (but there again, Autopilot is 'optional')...
Legally we may be stuck between a rock and a hard place, but it might at least create more of a public relations 'problem' and get more of Tesla's attention?
Maybe we all need to start capturing videos of Dry Wipes, and Non-Wipes when raining hard and post them on YouTube.
If this becomes more embarrassing for Tesla, maybe they would act ! Or, one really good video set to music with a comical array of wiper behaviors could go viral. If only I had some artistic talent !
What if everyone starts reporting this to the NHTSA as safety issue. It is certainly a safety issue if the wipers don't wipe when it is raining, BUT the fact that the Auto mode is optional lowers this risk. Of course, Auto is not optional in Autopilot (but there again, Autopilot is 'optional')...
Legally we may be stuck between a rock and a hard place, but it might at least create more of a public relations 'problem' and get more of Tesla's attention?
Maybe we all need to start capturing videos of Dry Wipes, and Non-Wipes when raining hard and post them on YouTube.
If this becomes more embarrassing for Tesla, maybe they would act ! Or, one really good video set to music with a comical array of wiper behaviors could go viral. If only I had some artistic talent !
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If you don’t want to wait for months for the allegedly improved V12, just create a YouTube site related to some aspect of Teslas. You will find FSD works almost flawlessly — and the “dry wiping” issue will never occur.
So AP is not optional, all cars have that feature and it is available at all times.
Now I can set my wipers to "off" to avoid dry swipes but the next time I use cruise control at all, something I might want to do during highway driving on a dry road, the system turns my wipers to Auto. And that setting persists into the next time I use the car. The wipers don't revert back to "off" when cruise control is disengaged.
Therefore, dry swiping is not avoidable.
The same is true for not working well in rain. If I switch from off (my usual state) to auto because I might need wipers or I've used cruise control, and the wipers are not swiping sufficiently to provide a clear view, I have to turn the wipers on to whatever setting I want. When I stop the car, the wipers don't stay on the setting I used last, they go to auto, which in theory I appreciate because that saves me from having to turn the wipers off (or having them try and start after the water plus low temps has frozen the blades to my windshield.)
So avoiding auto is impossible and means drivers have to switch to 'off' when they start driving after last using the wipers on manual.
The question the regulator will ask is if this situation is any worse than a regular car with regular switched wipers that don't have an auto function. Distraction would be the concern for regulators. On my previous vehicle, I had to turn my wipers off when I stopped the car or they would start swiping when I restarted it. So I got in the habit of stopping my wipers when I parked (again because where I live, the chance of wipers being frozen to the windshield when returning to one's car is well above nil.) Then I'd turn them on when I needed them. In my Tesla, I need to turn my wipers to "off" or to manual speed when auto doesn't work but in fact I'm no worse off than when I had a car without an auto wipers setting.
Thus I don't think we can get regulators to care about this issue. If I was a regulator, I'd just tell the driver "turn on your friggin wipers yourself, there is a limit to how lazy you can be and still be allowed to be behind the wheel on any car." Then again, I'm not diplomatic.
I'm pissed about the auto wipers because it is a feature that other vehicles have that works for them. Heck it used to work for me (and as someone who had never had auto wipers, it felt AMAZING.) But this is not a safety feature. I still have the ability to change the speed of my wipers or turn them off. I'm just not getting a feature I paid for. That's an issue for compensation from the manufacturer, not safety regulators.
The only, possible, safety regulator issue is since Tesla code updates have broken the auto wipers, what other features that aren't used regularly or we don't notice and aren't obvious, are no longer working? Do our brake lights turn on and off when they should, for instance? I find it very hard to tell when I'm driving from the icon (it is too small and not bright enough to see clearly while still paying attention to the road.) And when I'm a passenger and can watch the screen, I don't feel like monitoring that. (I've seen a video using a Go Pro on a Hyundai to show their brake lights are not coming on during aggressive slowing, but I haven't seen one with the same set up, and the most recent versions of software, to confirm what Tesla is doing.)
That is not the intended outcome, and not what the majority experience. Disengaging ADAS functions returns your settings to what they were previously. If your wipers were OFF before, they will be OFF after.
There may be an issue with your profile, or some software corruption. Have you restarted your car, let it deep sleep, or tested a new profile in the car?
MrFixit1094
Member
Sorry, I meant to say that the use of AP is optional. But, I completely agree with your thoughts. Unfortunately it is probably not a regulatory concern.
But as a new Tesla owner, I was floored by how unusable such a simple function is, particularly given Tesla's (probably unwarranted) reputation for being so far ahead of the rest of the industry when it comes to driver assist and 'autonomous' operations.
Off topic, but I will also mention we felt FSD (which we had for a trial period) was horrible. I would never purchase it in it's present form, and in fact would not use it even if they paid me to do so. Well, here comes V12... It will be interesting to see if V12 is actually a step forward, or will it really be no better (maybe even worse)?
The only person that can fix the wipers is Elon Musk, when he tells his engineers to put the rain sensor back in but that would mean he was wrong and so he will never do that. He took out a $10 part because he thinks shallowly.
There is no way to 'fix the wipers' in software significantly better than now because the hardware they are trying to reuse is wrong for this task.
They did fix auto-brights (which were once a problem) in software, because the hardware was designed to image at distance which is what is needed to fix auto-brights.
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