Elon Musk announced today that Tesla has a neural network called ‘Deep Rain’ to improve its automatic wiper system, which has been a feature that owners have complained about.
Like most premium vehicles today, Tesla has an automatic wiper system that automatically matches the speed of the wipers to the intensity of the rain or snow.
However, unlike most other automakers, Tesla doesn’t use a rain sensor for its system.
Instead, the automaker is using its Autopilot cameras to feed its computer vision neural net to determine the speed for the wipers.
It has been deployed in Tesla vehicles since last year, but some owners have been complaining that it is not as accurate as other systems using rain sensors.
Now CEO Elon Musk says that Tesla has a new Deep Rain neural net for the automatic wipers.
Deep Rain™️ neural net coming soon. We’re not trademarking any other Autopilot neural nets, just this one, because rain is deep.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2019
While it sounds like a joke, and it is, Musk said that it is a real new and improved neural net for the wipers:
“It is actually called deep rain, as sort of a joke at Tesla. Takes a surprising amount of deep learning to know when and how fast to move the wipers.”
Musk confirmed that the new neural net is also going to detect how the rain or snow is affecting the road conditions and it will adjust the speed of the car if using Autopilot.
The CEO said that the new neural net will come as an over the air update and it doesn’t require the new Hardware 3.0 computer.
He didn’t say when the new update is coming other than “soon”.
On top of the new software, Tesla is also planning some new wiper hardware.
As we reported earlier this year, Tesla is developing new futuristic-looking electromagnetic wipers – pictured above.
Electrek’s Take
I am glad to hear that there are improvements coming on this front. I have heard complaints from owners, but I haven’t experienced many issues with my own car.
Maybe there were a few times when I thought the wipers could be a little faster on automatic, but it was nothing dramatic.
I am curious to see if I’ll notice the difference.
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