It's hilarious that anyone would consider this an acceptable work around for such an idiotic design flaw.

It's fine for 99.9% of the time, and saves you energy. Also reduces noise when moving.

Yeah well that they omit a windshield wiper stalk is also idiotic and furthermore outright dangerous. I've done overtakes next to trailers some times in heavy rain where in a second I had to hit the wiper stalk to max. Relying on their camera-based AI to do that (yes they skip on the cost of the industry standard IR sensor for rain detection) is crazy. A german guy actually died a few years back because he was searching through the UI to find the control to set the wipers to max..

The charitable take on this is that it's an optimistic design that anticipates a future where an AI will deal with all these minor decisions. The cynical take is that it's a cost cutting measure so Tesla can sell cheaply-made cars at premium prices.

That's not charitable, that's deluded. There's nothing charitable about giving you an inferior product in the name of a hope that at some point in the future, other things will be done just as poorly.

I don't even get the AI/ML wipers. Like you say, IR (and I believe some, though a definite minority, even use electrical conductivity/resistance) auto wipers have been reliable[1] for nearly three decades now. Why do we need ML for wipers? Are we anticipating new types of rain that existing auto wipers won't recognize?

[1] To those about to say "they're not reliable", I'm yet to find one that can't be tweaked with the sensitivity controller. If anything the only flaw I have had is when my wiper _blades_ are near the end of their life and they leave a 'streak' of water droplets over the sensor, and increase the false positive.

My guess is that they already have the front-facing camera so someone suggested they can cut costs by removing the IR sensor and "just write some AI" for it. Likewise the stalk is a cost saving.

They also removed the ultrasonic parking sensors from October to use the cameras for it to save cost. Good luck for all who happen to back into stuff at night or into glass windows or something..

Love taking my gloves off to use an app in freezing weather.