Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe. Steve Hanley wrote an article this morning about Tesla’s dysfunctional, wacky automatic windshield wipers, among other things. We happened to have a conversation earlier in the morning about them, but I didn’t realize the extent of his crisis in the ...
Steve Hanley wrote an article this morning about Tesla’s dysfunctional, wacky automatic windshield wipers, among other things. We happened to have a conversation earlier in the morning about them, but I didn’t realize the extent of his crisis in the pouring Florida rain, and I also didn’t share the followup problem that I assume everyone has with the wipers.
First of all, perhaps there are a few people out there who haven’t had problems, but from my experience, no Tesla owners think the wipers work very well, and I’m confident their below-par behavior is the #1 thing Tesla drivers are unhappy with when it comes to operation of the vehicle. Furthermore, they have been a problem.
The wipers have been a major issue — if not the #1 issue — for a very long time, and the fact that Tesla hasn’t tried harder to make them work well is truly disappointing and concerning. Windshield wipers are a critical part of a vehicle’s safety system.
When Steve brought the issue up to me, I recalled having similar experiences — the wipers wouldn’t turn on while it was already raining significantly, and then they’d wipe the windshield way too slowly. Later, when it stopped raining, the wipers would keep working on a dry windshield…. Seriously. So, I learned to just not use them.
I tried them out later on again when they were supposedly fixed or improved, and the same issues persisted. Also, when you activate Full Self Driving , that changes the wipers to automatic mode again, an annoying “feature” that confused me a couple of times. Anyway, I don’t use the automatic wipers since they suck so bad, but the manual wipers aren’t great either!
A comment from “Yep, auto should work, or should not exist. And they even managed to make this adjustment feature worse: There was a firmware update a while back so that now if you push the button on the stalk to get a manual wipe, if you were already in any manual mode , it will move to the next faster mode.
So now when I am on the slowest manual wipe setting , if I need an extra wipe for some random spray, I then have to scroll down to go back to the setting that I never asked to move away from. ” Let me explain it further. It starts raining, so you click the button on the side of the right stalk to turn on the wipers. That puts them on the lowest level.
Perhaps that’s good enough for a moment, but then it starts raining harder. You click the button again and it goes up a level. Do it again after that and it goes up another level. But then say that the rain slows in a few minutes.
Now, when you click the button again, the wipers go even faster! Nice — exactly what I wanted. . I guess voice commands should work, but I really don’t like using voice controls, and Steve’s experience shows they didn’t work well for him.
As Jethro also noted, right after you’ve clicked the button on the stalk, you can use the scroll wheel to easily change between levels quickly. However, that initial click still makes the wipers go up a level, and you have to use the scroll wheel while the visualization is on the touchscreen — after that, they no longer work and you have to click the button again. It turns into a ridiculous dance or Whac-A-Mole kind of thing.
It’s really annoying. But it’s better than the disastrous automatic wipers at least! Again, this is all a known issue and has been for a long time. But Elon Musk decided years ago that humans wouldn’t be driving much longer anyway, so why bother trying to fix the wipers?
All of the focus seems to be put into FSD development, not that any of us are going to be able to go to sleep or watch a movie while the car drives itself in the rain anytime soon anyway. With Florida’s summer thunderstorms here, I don’t look forward to wrestling with the wipers again. But this is the way. CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO.
Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about electric vehicles and renewable energy at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao.
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