[jnsaff2]

On the cars with matrix-led's the high-low has been solved very well. It used to be bad and now it's almost perfect.

Wipers, dunno, they used to be really bad but I have not noticed the issue in the past few months, maybe they have done something.

That said, I am still agreeing with you on "struggle with basic things", there are phantom breakings in the exact same spots this and other teslas have driven thousands of times. There are occasional cases where it would follow the wrong road-markings into a crash would I not intervene and so forth.

[bjarneh]

> with matrix-led's the high-low has been solved very well. It used to be bad and now it's almost perfect.

Yes, it works much better on my new Model Y (2024) than my old Model S (2014). But they didn't really solve the original problem, i.e. detecting oncoming traffic vs. street (or other lights) up ahead. The matrix led's darken these areas in any case, and neither street lights or oncoming cars complain of course. But it does not fill me with much confidence.

> Wipers, dunno, they used to be really bad but I have not noticed the issue in the past few months, maybe they have done something.

Then that software update has not come to Norway at least, here they still start wiping in dry conditions, and fail to detect actual rain; so they need to be manually started all the time.

> there are phantom breakings in the exact same spots this and other teslas have driven thousands of times.

Isn't this the problem with AI though? We've taken something we don't fully understand (neural networks) and applied them. We can give them a lot of training data to the point where they seem to be able to do stuff on their own. But when they fail, we really cannot do anything besides adding new nodes to our network and add more training data, and hope for the best. We cannot really say what went wrong, and fix it.

[natch]

>they still start wiping in dry conditions

That's for safety if a flake of dirt or dust lands on the front window right over where one of the cameras are, it will do a wipe and try to get rid of the thing that is distorting the image. Or it will do it if you are driving straight into the sun sometimes, presumably because it's doing a best efforts action in case the visibility problem is further exacerbated by dust which can be cleared.

It's strange to me that actual helpful features are misinterpreted as flaws, but that's how it is with new technology I guess.

Failing to detect actual rain, yes I see that too a little sometimes. I think they should augment with audio detection. There is a microphone, obviously, for the speech button, and depending on how things are wired sometimes speaker cones can also be repurposed as microphones.

[bathtub365]

Automatic wipers are not new technology and their implementation on cars that use actual rain sensors is much better than Tesla’s.

[bjarneh]

> That's for safety if a flake of dirt or dust lands on the front window right over where one of the cameras are, it will do a wipe and try to get rid of the thing

Not that dry conditions. I live in Trondheim, where it rains/snows well over 200 days a year, so it's not wiping off some dry dust of the camera area. It just starts wiping the clean window in perfectly fine weather. At other times it rains quite a bit and it does not come on.

The software update to soft click the left stalk to engage the wiper menu via the left steering wheel roller is a nice quick fix for these situations, so they are doing something.

[natch]

I was not saying that there absolutely is always dust there. I was saying the system is doing a best efforts action just in case there is dust or snow or other debris there which there sometimes is. I'm guessing they have birds in Trondheim.

I haven't tried the roller for the wiper menu, thanks for the reminder. Less rain around here.

[bjarneh]

> I was saying the system is doing a best efforts action just in case there is dust or snow or other debris there which there sometimes is

I guess that could be the case; but they do seem quite random.

> I'm guessing they have birds in Trondheim.

We do, mostly seagulls where I park my car :-) But you're not dry wiping away anything they produce, that takes a good scrubbing.

> I haven't tried the roller for the wiper

It makes the experience fully controllable from the steering wheel using one hand, which is very good. One light press on the left stalk, and the menu pops up down on the left corner on the screen where you can roll to your preferred setting. I hate having to go into menus on the touch screen while driving.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3...

[illwrks]

Honest question, considering I have never driven or been in a Tesla, when you say “it would follow the wrong road markings into a crash would I not intervene”, are you not concerned for your safety when driving it.

[LUmBULtERA]

As an owner of a Model Y -- I'm aware that its current implementation of FSD would do this. I don't pay for FSD, so it does not do it. Also, this is a bit like someone turning on cruise control and then just letting the car go off the road at a turn. Would you be too concerned for your safety to own a car with cruise control? No, you'd just either not use cruise control, or understand its limitations when using cruise control and steer as needed.

[dustyventure]

That only seems cosmetically similar to me. If cruise control would usually do the same thing but occasionally try to take a curve for me, I would consider it unreliable. Even if it always got the curve attempts it made correct, it is unreliable if its actions are not essentially a mechanical response.

[consteval]

Right, this is the difference between most car functions and then something like FSD. Reliability. Cruise Control always works the exact same, where the car will break/accelerate exactly as much as it needs to, to maintain the speed it is set to go. Same thing with ABS, where the brakes will be perfectly pulsated when heavy braking. Or differentials. Or pretty much any car system.

FSD is a little too wild west. I also lump ACC and LKAS in here, too. Phantom brake and bad directional input exist for those way too often.

[LUmBULtERA]

But it’s a function you can choose not to use. My Model Y doesn’t even have FSD, I didn’t buy it. I could buy and use it, but I don’t. It doesn’t concern me that it exists, the Model Y has been an awesome car. If I did buy and use it, its limitations are widely known and I’d expect to supervise it if I used it.

[illwrks]

Great explainer, thank you.

[benfortuna]

Agreed. Just sounds like a stressful experience all round.

[jnsaff2]

I never paid for any of the autonomous upsells, so for me this is a lane-keeping functionality and I treat it as such, meaning it helps me but I am still fully responsible for my own safety.

It happens rarely enough, and as I mostly drive on the same roads, I know where it happens as well, usually I disconnect the thing before it gets to the problematic place.

So no, it's so much stressful as annoying. But it does remind me that the claims of self-driving is just horse-shit.

[zesterer]

I'm struggling to see how you can be so calm about what you just said. To me, the idea of a system that works 99% of the time and doesn't work 1% of the time is utterly terrifying, far more so than a system that works only 50% of the time. 1% is small enough for a human operator to become complacent, but still many orders of magnitude greater than an acceptable risk factor. It seems like exactly the sweet spot that's going to maximise loss of life.

[jnsaff2]

I guess this is about predictability.

I know what (and where) the problematic spots are for the lane-keeping, so I use it in situations where the benefit is large and the risk is manageable.

There are many places where I won't switch it on and just drive myself.

Also 99% vs 1% depends on how you look at it. The main road I drive is about 200km long, in one direction it does not have any problematic spots. In the other it has 2 lets say 10 meter spots. By distance it's 0.01% problematic. It's not like Desert Bus where it tries to get you all the time.

[crustycoder]

You do realise that matrix LEDs and auto wipers are bog standard auto tech that other manufacturers have been providing for years?

Audi first offered matrix LED headlights in 2013, so it's only taken Tesla a decade to catch up.

[jnsaff2]

> You do realise

Yes. Not only that, my car had the matrix led hardware for 2 years before the matrix feature was enabled in a software update. TBF, I was never sold matrix leds so there was no marketing let down.

Also the auto-wipers on my 2003 Saab were working better than the Tesla ones of the current generation.

That said, it's also funny to think that the only things I could complain about owning a Tesla are: wipers, self-driving marketing and Elon being a nutcase.

Before the last one is solved, I would not buy another one, but other than that it's a very good car.

[grecy]

> Not only that, my car had the matrix led hardware for 2 years before the matrix feature was enabled in a software update

I read That was a NHSTA thing. Tesla weren’t allowed to enable them in North America despite having them in Europe.

The US regulations often lag Europe by a long way.

[jnsaff2]

This car is in EU.

[vardump]

Tesla should have R&D in Europe as well. Then they probably would have gotten matrix lights right earlier.