Automatic Tesla wipers set to improve as drivers are tasked with adjusting their sensitivity

Tesla's engineers in general, and Elon Musk in particular, have been promising a fix for the erratic behavior of the automatic windshield wipers while hurtling down in driver-assist mode for a good while.

When the car is on, say, Autopilot, and rain comes on, the wipers sometimes fail to register its intensity and either don't start, or work in a leisurely pace.

Instead of installing an extra sensor to control the wipers, Tesla insists on using its Vision-only approach that has the car cameras in charge of everything, from complex road situations in Full Self-Driving mode, to parking duties and detecting the first drops of rain.

The cameras, however, can be easily bamboozled, even by bugs smashing on the windshield, sending the wipers in a cleaning frenzy over a dry windshield on a bright sunny day.

The problem is obviously not easy to solve without extra sensors and costs, so Tesla keeps beating about the bush with it, introducing incremental improvements and upping the level of manual control.

In the 2024.14.3 software update, for instance, Tesla switched from changing the wipers speed with tilting of the scroll wheel, to actual logical scrolling up or down.

Now, with the Spring Update that brings cornering headlights and other niceties, Tesla will also introduce a manual mode for the auto wipers' sensitivity adjustment.

When the driver taps on the wiper button when in automatic mode, their sensitivity will increase for a certain amount of time, allowing them to react more vigorously to the change in conditions outside. This would potentially help Tesla learn from driver input, rather than only rely on cameras.

Needless to say, that is only a part of the problem with Tesla's automatic wipers, and not even the most pressing part. People would much rather have a way to prevent the wipers from activating on a sunny day and dry-wipe the windshield for no apparent reason.

Tesla's insistence on everything Vision deems a simple rain sensor to be a monkey wrench in the wheels of progress, though, so it still has a long way to go in the wipers saga.

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