Tesla is preparing to release another update that will hopefully, once and for all, improve the performance of their automatic wipers.
Tesla’s automatic wipers have been a topic of conversation among owners for far too long, with the overwhelming consensus being that there is substantial room for improvement. The main reason Tesla’s auto wipers are so bad is that the automaker uses the vehicle’s cameras to detect precipitation instead of a traditional rain sensor that has been a reliable workhorse in all other cars for decades.
The company has tried to improve the automatic wipers, introducing a ‘Deep Rain’ neural net in 2019 that was supposed to learn from manual adjustments made by the driver to improve future performance. However, Tesla’s untraditional attempt at solving a problem that didn’t need solving has never panned out. The auto wipers are still notoriously unreliable, frequently activating on a perfectly clear sunny day for no reason, and conversely not turning on at all during a torrential downpour.
Despite a claim from CEO Elon Musk back in June 2023 that they will “get super good,” we have yet to see any improvements, and if anything they have gotten worse. But that may change soon, according to Senior Staff Engineer in Tesla’s AI department, Yun-Ta Tsai, who responded to a post on X from Canadian Model Y owner Somi, saying “improvements should go out soon.”
The new improvement should go out soon.
— Yun-Ta Tsai (@YunTaTsai1) February 19, 2024
There are still some questions about this update, like when it will actually arrive. Tsai used the famous “soon” wording in his post, which in Tesla’s world could be a few weeks, or a few years. However it appears to be the former, as Tsai said in a separate post on X last week that wiper improvements are included in software update 2024.2.3.
We just received that update on our Model Y yesterday, and there is no mention of auto wiper improvements in the release notes (but that wouldn’t be the first time that has happened). We will test it out as soon as it rains, which according to our local weather forecast, is this afternoon.
