Much has been said about the performance of Tesla’s automatic wipers – most of it not very good. A programming change in a recent software update will hopefully help change that.
The main reason behind the poor performance of the wipers, which can turn on with one drop of water or not turn on during a torrential downpour, is that Tesla does not use a traditional rain sensor. Instead the automaker uses the front camera to determine when and with what frequency the wipers should activate.
The 2021.4.15.5 software update appears to change that. According to the venerable Tesla hacker @greentheonly, input from all of the vehicle’s cameras will now be used for the automatic wipers.
Seems in 2021.4.15.5 the autowiper code is now using all cameras as input.
I wonder what is the logic here. If windshield is clean, it's clean even if sides are dirty and the other way around too.
Not like we have wipers on the pillars or repeaters after all@rice_fry— green (@greentheonly) May 4, 2021
In a follow-up tweet, green notes that the cameras are looking not just for falling rain or a wet windshield, but several other indicators as to whether the wipers should be active.
it looks for a lot of stuff, ice, rain, foggy, sun-blinded, wet road, tirespray, tunnel, indoors, …. to name just a few.
— green (@greentheonly) May 4, 2021
This isn’t the first time Tesla has tried to improve the performance of their wipers. In the 2019.40.1.1 software update, Tesla rolled out their neural net called Deep Rain. At its release the network was trained with over 1 million images, and any manual intervention of the automatic wipers would be captured and used to further train the system.
Just last month CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that the next major software update would improve the performance of the automatic wipers. This is clearly not a major software update, but hopefully this is hopefully a start.
