3 ms·

It may be "within spec" for a Tesla, but other brands with traction control don't have this problem. And that is a typical issue with Tesla, they have too many

It may be "within spec" for a Tesla, but other brands with traction control don't have this problem. And that is a typical issue with Tesla, they have too many software guys and too little real world automotive experience. So they'll create these kinds of problems by implementing their own things instead of going with proven existing tech. The most rampant example was the rain sensor on the early model S. They decided not to buy the same perfectly working sensor that any German car had for 10+ years at the time, no they decided to implement the rain sensor by training some image recognition on the camera that's behind the windscreen. Worst idea ever, because it meant the 100k+ euro Model S had no automatic wipers for a long time and when they got there it was worse at detecting rain than the standard sensor on a 20k euro VW Golf...

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Mine thinks that a chip in the windshield is a raindrop. I had to turn off automatic wipers.
jonahrd 6y ago
To specify further: this is a problem in Teslas with autopilot 2.0+ hardware, where they switched from 1 front facing camera to 3. That left no room for the Bosch rain/light/humidity sensor, so they put developed their own light/humidity sensor, but still didn't have enough room for rain sensing hardware. The solution was left up to the autopilot team since it was assumed (wrongly) that sensing rain using a camera was easier than using specific optical sensors designed for the task. Source: I worked on the replacement TH sensor.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  It is an odd design decision, since I assume a rain sensor at its core is simply an LED and a light sensor carefully arranged. Total cost of the core components: $0.03. Neither need to be physically large either. It's even more odd considering the cameras can totally also be used as light sensors (simply read back the exposure time for example). Why get rid of one unnecessary sensor without getting rid of another? I wonder if perhaps it was done to force the vision teams to become less science/research oriented and more 'we need this result now, we have angry customers waiting' based.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Mine thinks that a chip in the windshield is a raindrop. I had to turn off automatic wipers.

jonahrd 6y ago

To specify further: this is a problem in Teslas with autopilot 2.0+ hardware, where they switched from 1 front facing camera to 3. That left no room for the Bosch rain/light/humidity sensor, so they put developed their own light/humidity sensor, but still didn't have enough room for rain sensing hardware. The solution was left up to the autopilot team since it was assumed (wrongly) that sensing rain using a camera was easier than using specific optical sensors designed for the task. Source: I worked on the replacement TH sensor.

londons_explore 6y ago
It is an odd design decision, since I assume a rain sensor at its core is simply an LED and a light sensor carefully arranged. Total cost of the core components: $0.03. Neither need to be physically large either. It's even more odd considering the cameras can totally also be used as light sensors (simply read back the exposure time for example). Why get rid of one unnecessary sensor without getting rid of another? I wonder if perhaps it was done to force the vision teams to become less science/research oriented and more 'we need this result now, we have angry customers waiting' based.