Windshield Ghosting

[davider]

Is anyone else experiencing windshield "ghosting" at night where you see vertically (and sometimes slightly horizontally) shifted opaque copies of light sources? It seems the worst on LED based lighting, but I can see some effects of it on most lights at night. See a sample cropped image below for what I'm talking about. It is *really* distracting when driving behind lots of tail lights, and it also causes headlights to create additional glowing points at well, making it hard to drive at night.

And if anyone else has experienced this, were you able to get Tesla to replace your windshield? And did the problem go away?

I'm attaching the (nearly) full size image taken from my camera below out the windshield, and lest you believe it is my camera causing the effect, I also took a picture aimed out the rolled down drivers side window for comparison.

Windshield:


Rolled down Window:

 

[CharleyBC]

Wow. I can't say I've ever noticed that, and I think I would. But you can be sure I'll look for it next time I'm out at night. That left turn arrow is even ghosted twice!

I do know a bit about optics (enough to be dangerous). Those are internal reflections in the glass. Each ghost is a double bounce: the light comes into the glass, bounces off the inner surface, bounces again off the outer surface, and then you see the ghost.

A key thing that affects this sort of thing is the quality of the surface of the glass. So a couple questions for you:

1. Has it always been like this, or did it start at some point? If the latter, can you identify a change that might be causal? Like some cleaner or glass treatment product you started using.
2. Have you tried really thoroughly cleaning the glass, both inside and out?

Keep us posted, and good luck!

 

[davider]

Thanks yeah that is what I figured bouncing off the layers inside. I've only had the car a couple of months so I'm certain it's been happening since I picked it up. I haven't tried an inside glass cleaning, that is worth doing, but I have definitely cleaned the outside of the glass.

 

[TLLMRRJ]

I didn't noticed it on my M3 until someone posted about it on here a couple of weeks ago. Now I am busy trying to un-notice it again.

 

[PianoAl]

I saw that in our Leaf, and it was because my torso is longer than most people's. See if it only happens when you look out certain parts of the windshield.

 

[davider]

I saw that in our Leaf, and it was because my torso is longer than most people's. See if it only happens when you look out certain parts of the windshield.

I see it happening everywhere that I could reasonably contort my torso/head to view, the level of separation between the source and first reflection does change in magnitude on certain areas of the glass, but is present everywhere.

 

[Schlott]

Hi davider. I just signed up to the forums just to reply to this post. I have a model 3, and I thought my eyes were starting to trouble me driving, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I'm 50 so thought it just might be bad eyes. However I started to notice it's only bright lights I could not focus on. There were multiple copies of headlights and traffic lights particularly at a distance. As I looked more I noticed it more and more. Getting out of the car stopped them completely, it's only looking through the front windshield where this effect happens. I've never noticed it on any other car I've driven, and now I can't un-see it. It's actually making driving unpleasant

Have you contacted Tesla about this? All windshields cannot be doing this or we'd see a lot more posts about it.

 

[davider]

Hi davider. I just signed up to the forums just to reply to this post. I have a model 3, and I thought my eyes were starting to trouble me driving, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I'm 50 so thought it just might be bad eyes. However I started to notice it's only bright lights I could not focus on. There were multiple copies of headlights and traffic lights particularly at a distance. As I looked more I noticed it more and more. Getting out of the car stopped them completely, it's only looking through the front windshield where this effect happens. I've never noticed it on any other car I've driven, and now I can't un-see it. It's actually making driving unpleasant

Have you contacted Tesla about this? All windshields cannot be doing this or we'd see a lot more posts about it.

Sure did, took it to my local Tesla service center. They have a test where they put a LED inside a piece of black paper with a circle on it some distance in front of the car, and you look at it from within your vehicle. If the reflection is outside the circle, then your windshield is out of spec and they'll replace it. Mine was literally on the edge of the circle and they refused to do anything about it, really infuriating honestly, as it is apparent both at night AND in the day.. and like you said, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Do you have any pictures of what yours looks like? I was thinking about Tweeting Elon with a picture showing how bad it was and that his shops wouldn't fix it.. but haven't gotten around to it.

 

[Silicon Desert]

Hmmmm, many threads about this on all models all the way back to 2017.... and maybe even earlier. I just don't notice it any more. On my MX, it is more or less pronounced depending on driver height.

 

[aisid]

Went into a service center to get this looked at, they said "it's within tolerance", tech and I evaluated my 2021 M3 against his and a customer's 2021 MS Plaid and all had the same issue, though the MS had it about half as bad.

Do you "just live with" the front windshield ghosting?

The strange thing is that when try to take a picure with my phone it doesnt show it nearly as bad as i see it with my eyes. Are you holding the phone below your eyes to see it better? I've never seen it, but I am short - maybe it's a tall people angle problem? That might explain why some have...

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