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Tesla Auto Wipers: Why They Don't Work and Why There Isn't an Easy Fix
- pavel_lishin 2y ago> This is a result of Tesla’s strategy to rely upon Tesla Vision to replace all sensors – which they’ve successfully used most recently to replace the ultrasonic parking sensors (USS) on their vehicles. Tesla believes that vision is the solution to achieving all self-driving capabilities, and this includes the elimination of extraneous sensors such as USS and radar. Why are they so hell-bent on using nothing but video?
- dontreact 2y agoElon’s belief that humans doing it with vision is proof it can be done with video
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoYou’re right about Elon but I’ve thought about it and it’s flawed reasoning. Humans don’t do it “with vision” we do it with five senses and the human brain. The computer is severely limited compared to the human brain, so in the context of things like LiDAR, the computer needs all the help it can get. And for rain sensing, the camera doesn’t see the windshield like a person does!
- yareal 2y agoConsiderably more than five senses, actually. We rely on a huge variety of inputs beyond the basic ones when we drive.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoVision and hearing are the main senses we use to driving, and touch a distant third. Using taste, smell or proprioception means something is probably wrong with your vehicle.
- SequoiaHope 2y agoI thought about smell but actually vehicles do malfunction, and smell can be an important indicator. “Something is wrong with your vehicle” is a real scenario that actually happens pretty often.
- kranner 2y agoI feel we must be using smell all the time to be able to detect when a burning odour begins to arise. It’s just that we’re not aware of it when nothing unusual happens.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoIf you’re not running AC you can certainly smell rain also
- SkyPuncher 2y agoPersonally, proprioception ranks ahead of hearing for me. Vision is first, but proprioception is how assess nearly everything else. Braking speed, acceleration, throttle input, cornering, traction, hydroplaning, tire pressure (even in specific tires), alignment issues (down to the specific wheel), balance issues, toe rod issues, transmission issues, engines issues, wind, payload, towing, etc, etc, etc. I could probably tell you within 100lbs how much and roughly where payload is in the vehicle simply by feeling how the car is driving. I literally cannot do racing game because I can’t sense the vehicle. Flip side, I used to think professional racers were crazy for being able to call in subtle issues to their crew chief. Turns out when you drive a specific car enough, you learn how it out to feel.
- mkl 2y agoDriving without proprioception is probably almost impossible. That's how you know where your hands are, how the steering wheel is turned, where your feet are, how to move your hand to the indicator lever, etc.
- schneems 2y agoAlternatively: it’s a cost cutting measure and the “humans can do it with vision” is essentially a marketing spin.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dawnerd 2y agoVision would make sense... if the cameras were placed back where the driver actually sits.
- threeseed 2y agoAnd if you could rapidly move the cameras in multiple dimensions.
- _yb2s 2y agoThat is a reasonable argument that it is likely to be theoretically possible. It’s absolute madness to jump from “theoretically possible” to production without actually inventing and testing the technology. What is going on over there at Tesla? I suspect an emperors new clothes type of situation where employees are too terrified to state basic facts, like “we tested 20 ideas out but none worked, we haven’t figured out how to get this to work yet.” Not the kind of culture I want designing a 2 ton vehicle I’m trusting my families lives to.
- selcuka 2y ago> I suspect an emperors new clothes type of situation where employees are too terrified to state basic facts, like “we tested 20 ideas out but none worked Or maybe the emperor is a "idea #16 is good enough for me" type of person?
- fastball 2y agoGiving Musk the benefit of the doubt, probably his thinking is more along the lines of: "I'd like to solve this with vision. Sure, we can ship a $5 part to do it the tried-and-true way, but if we do that then we're probably never gonna solve it with vision, because there will no longer be a pressing need to do so. So I'm gonna force us to not ship our cars with a proper rain sensor in the hope that it will continually push my teams to get this shit done and do the improbable".
- lucianbr 2y agoThat sounds so cool when a billionaire vision-guy says it. Too bad reality is that "pressing need" isn't magic, and sometimes just isn't enough. Like this time.
- _yb2s 2y agoThere’s no doubt to give him the benefit of… even in your version they still decided to ship a basic feature that doesn’t work in a production automobile. Other car manufacturers push teams hard to develop new tech also, but they also test the heck out of them so they’re 100% functional before they would put it into production. Piech was famous for outlandish demands on engineers at VW, but his demands took the form of the desired test results: the Phaeton had to be capable of being driven all day at 186 mph with an exterior temperature of 122 °F whilst maintaining the interior temperature at 72 °F. And they did it…
- bryanlarsen 2y agoHumans do it with variable focus vision. The Tesla cameras are permanently focused at infinity.
- nradov 2y agoNormal human eyes also have more dynamic range than the cheap cameras used in Teslas. This matters in some difficult lighting conditions.
- cma 2y agoFor seeing rain it's mostly that they are offset back from the windshield more. People over 50 barely have variable focus vision and it isn't really important in driving.
- tedunangst 2y agoThis is true in a sense, but humans incorporate so much more information. Like if I drive past a sprinkler, I know there will be a short burst of water hitting the window. But this requires a fairly complex assessment of the surrounding environment.
- snailmailman 2y agoBut it can be done better with more sensors. Why handicap the technology? It seems to me like the compromise isn’t worth it here. My phone can take my face scan in a room that’s pitch black, because it uses infrared sensors and a projection of dots. It’s able to check who I am, regardless of the natural light in the environment. If that technology was limited to “only a camera” it would be way worse. A camera is cheaper than LiDAR. But it’s also less capable. As best I can tell. Other cars just use a dedicated infrared sensor to detect the water? Seems like a weird corner to cut. Seems like tesla cut those in favor of just having other cameras attempt to fill in? But seems like that isn’t working.
- heavyset_go 2y agoI think that's more of justification and excuse than a legitimate belief.
- dontreact 2y agoI know a few people who work/worked there. I don’t agree with it but it is a genuinely held belief
- heavyset_go 2y agoThat's terrifying
- CamperBob2 2y agoIt's cheap.
- debatem1 2y agoGuessing, but the cheapest sensor is the one you already have installed.
- ghostcluster 2y agoIt feels to me like another one of Elon's stubborn whims. Sometimes these result in great innovations, like Tesla's giant car part 'gigacasting'. Other times, they result in deciding to rename Twitter "X" and forcing a team of engineers to spend over a year combing meticulously through the codebase to remove all references to "twitter.com"
- sho_hn 2y agoRegarding the gigacasting: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-retreats-next-generation-gigacasting-manufacturing-process-2024-05-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
- fbdab103 2y agoArticle really would have helped if I could have understood how much cheaper/faster it is to make one piece instead of three.
- yreg 2y agoThat article states that they are retracting to their previous method of gigacasting. The one that other carmakers are starting to use too, inspired by Tesla.
- fastball 2y agoIt actually says that they were attempting to gigacast their new vehicle as a single piece rather than three pieces, but that proved difficult so they are going back to gigacasting three separate pieces. But your point stands: they are still gigacasting, just for now they are not doing the very ambitious "gigacast in a single bound" plan.
- abracadaniel 2y agoProbably related to them dumping the model 2 project.
- 2y ago
- hanief 2y agoI think they falsely believe human only needs one sense to navigate: sight. But we actually use our hearing, smell, and touch too. So, multiple type sensors is actually better than only one.
- jimberlage 2y agoFully agree - also it’s a bit weird on Tesla’s part to think that there could be no possible way to make things better than a human in some regards. If humans had radar, it would probably make us more capable, not less.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- binkHN 2y agoI imagine smell and touch are less valuable when driving a vehicle.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoTouch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see, hopefully at low speed... but taste, yuck!
- ohmyiv 2y ago>Touch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see I think you're underestimating the importance of touch, especially when it comes to steering and pedal control.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoThat's a limitation of us. We need touch and indicators to gauge how effective we are, but a machine can precisely throttle 23% or keep the steering wheel at 19 degrees without need to gauge how hard it is pushing the actuators. Touch is nice, but hardly crucial for driving.
- ajcp 2y agoFrom the article: > Tesla likes to avoid solutions that only solve a single problem – such as adding a rain sensor. It is an additional manufacturing complication, adds additional cost to vehicles, and segments Tesla’s vehicles between model years.
- ra7 2y agoCombination of cost savings and “first principles” thinking. They tried to save $5 per car by not including a rain sensor. It’s a few million dollars in savings at their scale. At the same time, they spend time and resources engineering a “smart” solution to auto wipers using cameras. And they continue to spend effort on that because it still doesn’t work. Penny wise, pound foolish.
- selcuka 2y agoObviously it's not the $5, but the research that matters. We are beta-testing their vision based rain detection algorithm for them, for free (in fact we are paying $5 to test it).
- benhurmarcel 2y agoThat data would be a lot more valuable to them if it was paired with an actual rain sensor though.
- SkyPuncher 2y agoThe rain sensor is the one component that I’m shocked they would just spend the $5. It works so freaking well.
- makeitdouble 2y agoThe weirdest part from the outside: reliably detecting it's raining should have obvious positive impact on the driving side as well. For instance to better interpret the tires slipping, or even anticipate worse precision from some of the sensors.
- relaxing 2y agoYou do not want to start making handling adjustments based on rain on the windshield, when the road could already be slick from prior rainfall or other conditions.
- infecto 2y agoI like this take a lot and think its spot on. It feels very much like one of those decisions within a startup where the team decides to build their own tool that does the same thing as an equivalent commercial offering and consider it cheaper without thinking about the time to develop, maintain and improve.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago> successfully I don't know anyone who thinks the vision-based parking "radar" actually works well. Indeed, I've heard of several incidents of people bumping into things.
- thebruce87m 2y agoIt’s… ok. Much better since the update. Normal parking sensors aren’t infallible either. My colleague scraped his BMW i4 last week and it has proper sensors.
- devwastaken 2y agoThere's multiple videos demonstrating Tesla's that self drive themselves into obstacles, including trains, because video cannot properly figure out obstacles.
- rgmerk 2y agoBecause they think they can build a cheaper car that way. Same reason they haven’t even offered an instrument display in front of the driver as an option, and replaced the indicator stalks with buttons (which from reports works acceptably well in California, not so much in, say, the UK). Underlying it all is Tesla’s belief that the driver is a legacy feature that is going away Real Soon Now. Frankly, it seems like they’re 90% of the way there (with all that implies about how long it will take to get the rest of the way).
- ikiris 2y agoBecause if they had something in addition, that might cost another dollar that wouldn't be going to his Twitter debt.
- klyrs 2y agoThere's totally an easy fix. Buy a squirt gun, and shoot your windshield near the camera whenever you need a wipe. Edit: ooh, better yet, make a magnetic hood ornament with a squirt gun and a camera pointing at the lower half of the windshield... add GPT4o and Bob's your uncle!
- Nition 2y agoYou could have a graduated dial to control the squirt gun. Off, then intermittent water squirts, then light, and finally heavy. You could put it on a stalk coming off the wheel area and have complete control of the wipers. With your GPT-4 solution you could even have 'auto'!
- doubloon 2y ago[flagged]
- yreg 2y agoI don't mind most of the common Tesla complaints, but this one I can agree with 100%. The auto-wipers work ridiculously bad for me and it would be a non-issue if they had just used a dedicated $2 part, like everyone else does. It is a good example of how the 'use nothing but computer vision for everything' dogma is stupid. In the end it's not a big problem for me, I just use manual wipers, the same as I did on my previous, rather old car. But it's dumb.
- yareal 2y agoAutowiper sensors are some of the simplest, well understood technology around. You place an infrared led at a low angle to the windshield, you place an ir collector so the light from the LED hits it. (Remember that at shallow angles, light reflects off glass.) When water is on the sensor, the angle of refraction and reflection change, and the ir collector suddenly sees much less light. Two components, plus a microcontroller. Usually two such sensors are on the windshield. Absolutely dead simple and cheap. Why the fuck would you replace that with a camera trying to parse video?! That's so much more complicated. That's like trying to determine vehicle speed from a camera rather than sensors on the tires or whatever.
- marricks 2y ago> That's like trying to determine vehicle speed from a camera rather than sensors on the tires or whatever. Don’t give him any ideas
- marricks 2y ago> That's like trying to determine vehicle speed from a camera rather than sensors on the tires or whatever. Don’t give him any ideas. Seems like he has the “not built here” complex
- kccqzy 2y agoActually I'm somewhat certain that the vehicle speed is determined by the motor RPM, the known reduction gear ratio, and a known tire size. That's why speed can be inaccurate if you switch to incorrectly sized tires.
- shiroiushi 2y agoNo. The vehicle speed is determined by a single sensor, the Vehicle Speed Sensor. It measures the rpm of the driveshaft (or one of them), the shaft that is the output from the transmission. You don't need the gear ratio. But yes, it does assume that the tires are a certain size, so if you put the wrong size tires on, it will be wrong. Also, it's not super-accurate: tires sizes differ slightly by brand/model, plus they change their outer diameter as they wear down. That error accumulates.
- Stratoscope 2y agoFor anyone curious, Technology Connections has a good video on how traditional automobile rain sensors work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm7Q92xMjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm7Q92xMjQ
- OptionOfT 2y agoHe mentioned that they aren't perfect. I had a BMW which had an absolute perfect calibration of the sensor. It just WORKED. Then I got a new windshield and all fell apart. As it was a BMW, I had to go to the dealer and have the rain-sensor re-calibrated. And then it worked flawless again.
- fewald_net 2y agoI had a similar experience with a BMW. The rain sensor in every car after that has been much worse.
- frabjoused 2y agoExcellent watch, thanks.
- fbdab103 2y agoI really enjoyed how he was struggling to balance the laser with a lightbulb. That seems like one of the worst household objects available for the task.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoTBH, I hate auto wipers and have always believed them to be a tech solution looking for a problem. Never once have I been in rainy weather and thought "gee, what should I do?". I currently have a car with auto wipers (I'm not sure but I think they use the "standard" infrared sensor to detect rain) and I find them worse than manual, intermittent wipers in every way. I think the biggest problem is that the wipers tend to only go on when water is flowing down the windshield. But we get a lot of "misty" rain where I live, where the small drops will stick in place for some time. So my windshield will become covered with drops and difficult to see through before the wipers turn on, and since the car doesn't let me control the speed for intermittent wipers manually (there is just "high" and "low") I find myself manually hitting the wiper button every ten seconds or so. I know this may seem like "Old man yells at cloud" (literally), but it's just a huge pet peeve of mine when the lower tech solution works great only to be replaced by something more complicated that does the job worse.
- ryukoposting 2y ago> the car doesn't let me control the speed for intermittent wipers manually What's the manufacturer? I'm in the market for a new car, and this would be an instant deal-breaker.
- thorncorona 2y agoThis just sounds like you bought a crappy car. There are great implementations of auto wipers available in the wild.
- shiroiushi 2y agoExactly. This is one of those cases of someone using an extremely crappy implementation of a new technology, and then claiming that all implementations must therefore suck. My last car (a low-end Mazda, now about 10 years old) had excellent auto-wipers; I never had a complaint about them. The controls were simple, the sensitivity could be easily adjusted, they were great. I never wanted to switch back to manual wipers.
- lathiat 2y ago
- photonbeam 2y agoIs there an aftermarket addon from anyone to route around this problem?
- brysonreece 2y agoJust manually enable the wipers instead of having it set to auto?
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoThe newest teslas don’t have wiper or indicator stalks. They don’t have functioning auto wipers or auto indicators either. Manually enabling wipers is buried in the center mount touchscreen. The indicators are tiny crappy buttons on the wheel that turns when you turn making them a pain on roundabouts.
- cssx 2y agoThe stalkless cars have a button on the steering wheel to select the wipers, and the scroll wheel adjusts the speed. No need to use the touch screen to control them.
- resolutebat 2y agoUntil recently this was a pain in the ass, because you could only adjust wiper speed via the touchscreen. This was literally my #1 problem with Tesla's UI. However, they recently rolled out a software update that lets you adjust the wiper speed easily with the left scrollwheel.
- jbotdev 2y agoI get it, he’s trying to do everything in software (with the existing cameras), since software is “cheap” and can do anything in theory. Unfortunately they keep showing how they’re in over their head with some of these features (like FSD). But it’s fine because their customers agree to keep beta testing while they figure things out on production cars.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>But it’s fine because their customers agree to keep beta testing while they figure things out on production cars. This is the bottom line right here. It's the same with many other products too. It's not really wrong to run a business this way, because SO many customers apparently like it and continue to support these companies. Other examples are Microsoft and the ads it's baking into Windows, and Netflix and its price increases combined with feature degradation (like cracking down on password sharing in families).
- ohmyiv 2y ago> This is the bottom line right here. It's the same with many other products too. This is how I feel about some released "MVPs". "I gotta show something even if it's crap. If it doesn't work, we'll fix it along the way." Anytime someone mentions they're releasing an MVP, I make note of it to revisit later when they're done with alpha/beta testing. Incomplete release products kind of bug me and it seems to be more common, but I guess that may be a "me" thing. I'm glad my clients are tiny to small businesses and want things to work properly before they take over.
- jeffreportmill1 2y agoOne thing that would improve them immensely is to make the algorithm much more aggressive if I manually hit the wiper button. When I hit that button it should be a strong hint that conditions are rainy.
- eurleif 2y agoI strongly suspect this is already the case, based on repeated experiences of pressing the wiper button and then having the auto wipers come on.
- tempestn 2y agoThere are other issues with Tesla's auto wipers. The main one is that, in other cars, you can have the wipers on auto, while still manually increasing or decreasing their speed. So if the wipers aren't going fast enough for you, you can bias the speed upward while maintaining the auto function, and vice-versa. On Teslas you don't have that option; you need to choose between auto and a fixed speed. (My guess is that the ability to increase or decrease the speed of auto wipers is patented, and Tesla doesn't want to license that patent, but that's just a guess. Maybe it's just laziness.) And that's bad enough, but it was made far worse by the fact that for most of Tesla's existence until just recently, the only way to change that fixed speed was via the touch screen. This was, thankfully, finally fixed just recently! (But only properly so for older vehicles.) The turn signal stalk on Teslas that still had turn signal stalks has a button on the end that activates the windshield wipers. It will cause them to wipe once, and will bring up a control on the touchscreen to choose between speeds or turn the wipers off. Until a few months ago, that was your only option to change speed: use the touchscreen while driving. (As a result, Tesla drivers like myself would often just control the wipers manually, pushing the button for each wipe, as that was more convenient than fiddling with the screen!) Then, they added the ability to long-press a steering wheel scroll wheel, and then turn it to control wiper speed (although backwards, with an up turn on the wheel making the wipers go slower). This was a hassle, but better than the screen. For several months that was the situation, until just finally a week or so ago the logical link was made so that pressing the dedicated wiper button on the stalk allowed speed to be adjusted using the wheel. Not as good as a proper, adjustable auto function, but at least usable - finally.
- why_at 2y agoFYI I have owned a model 3 for about a year now and I have always been able to manually set the speed by pushing the button and then using the horizontal part of the scroll wheel to cycle through the settings.
- tempestn 2y agoHa, maybe that's been an option for longer and I just never thought to try that particular incantation. I even googled this issue and didn't discover that. Will have to try on mine now. I do find it amusing that you now have the option of long pressing the scroll wheel or pressing the stalk button to thrn turn the wheel to change speeds... But the direction of the change in those two cases is reversed; in one case up on the wheel is faster, and in the other it's slower.
- 4b11b4 2y agoThey'll probably learn something by trying to do it with vision though
- creativeembassy 2y agoThis is my #1 complaint with our new Model Y. The "Auto" setting is completely worthless. It almost never turns on when it's raining. When it does turn on, it's either too fast or too slow. It'll turn on randomly when there's no rain. But it's not just the sensor, which would be inconvenient. The lack of control makes it *dangerous*. You have to push the button in _slightly_ on the left stalk, which makes the wipers go once. And then you have to push the left scrollwheel left or right (but not up or down!) to turn the setting up or down, while staring at the bottom left part of the screen to figure out what setting you're on. All of this takes your eyes much further away from the road, while driving in more dangerous conditions with reduced visibility. If any hardware manufacturers are listening, I'd gladly pay $200 for an aftermarket part that lets me control my goddamn wipers.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago> Tesla vehicles lack a rain sensor. Here’s how a proper rain sensor works https://youtu.be/TLm7Q92xMjQ?si=Yb-_TBYbPIuPXk_p https://youtu.be/TLm7Q92xMjQ?si=Yb-_TBYbPIuPXk_p
- pseudosavant 2y agoGood thing Tesla saves $1 on a few IR LEDs and photoresistors. That $50000 Model 3 is now $49999.
- thebruce87m 2y agoYep, and if you sell 10 million of them you have saved 10 million dollars.
- pseudosavant 2y agoIt would seem like you could sense rain hitting the roof through its acoustic signature using a contact piezo mic. That'd probably have a much larger effective sensing area than the IR sensor.
- 2y ago
- fortyseven 2y ago"Early Access: The Vehicle" -- I swear for every positive Tesla thing I've ever heard, there's two or three absurd things. Shit we'd never let any other company get away with.
- SoftTalker 2y agoWipers are a critical safety item. There should be a way to activate them manually, in fact I thought this was a legal requirement in the USA but perhaps I'm mistaken.
- nsguy 2y agoThere is, by pressing a button on the left stalk. But that only wipes once and is also not intuitive when you first drive a Tesla.
- eurleif 2y agoWhen you press that button, a wiper control pops up on the screen, and allows you to keep the wipers on by pressing one of the four speed buttons. You can also use move the left thumb wheel on the steering wheel left and right to switch between those options while the pop-up is visible on the screen.
- murgurglll 2y agoIf they can't solve this it means the FSD system has no idea if it's raining either. Which implies FSD drives the same in dry and rainy conditions.
- Woshiwuja 2y agoJust use rain sensors. Why would you make it like this for any reason.