Good news for Tesla owners who are frustrated with the perpetually finicky auto wipers: a Tesla engineer says there's a fix coming "soon."
This news should be taken with a grain of salt, though, because it was said in response to a video posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a Tesla owner of the auto wipers clearly not working while it was raining.
Tesla AI engineer Yun-Ta Tsai commented, "The new improvement should go out soon."
In 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a neural network called Deep Rain that would improve the auto wiper system, and there are still major glitches.
Since Tesla first introduced the auto wipers in 2018, their performance has been inconsistent at best and laughable at worst. According to multiple stories over the last several years, the wipers have a tendency to kick on when there is no rain, and not when there is, or sometimes just not enough to match the amount of precipitation.
Tesla was kind enough to install an update in 2023 that allowed owners to turn off the auto wiper feature.
Other high-end car brands also have auto wipers but have not had issues to the extent that Tesla has had. Other brands use rain sensors, while Tesla uses Autopilot cameras to determine the amount of rain and the necessary speed of the wipers or whether they need to turn on at all.
In January, the former head of AI Infrastructure at Tesla even trolled the company over the issue. In a post on X praising the latest update to Tesla's Full Self Driving, which the company had struggled with for years, Tim Zaman wrote, "I now wonder if they will solve self-driving before solving the auto-wiper" with a crying laughing emoji.
He added in a subsequent post, "Full Self Wiping when?"
While malfunctioning wipers don't seem to be discouraging people from buying new Teslas, as they remain one of the best-selling electric vehicle brands on the planet, current owners can't help but wonder what other glitches may exist.
"It lowered the level of confidence in Tesla's self-driving effort if it can't get its neural nets to work for something as simple as wipers," Electrek's Fred Lambert wrote. "Hopefully, these improvements coming soon are meaningful ones because last week again I had my wipers start automatically for [no] reason."
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