The automatic windshield wipers in Teslas is a joke. They're so bad that I'm having trouble even formulating how bad it is, you really have to experience it. They've clearly not been very well tested in areas places where it rains so often, and in so many different ways, that we have dozens of different words just to describe what it.
1. It will take multiple seconds to react even if the entire windshield is completely covered in water. Like zero visibility. I've had this happen on multiple occasions where water from the opposite direction is splashed over on my car. To manually start them I have to first toggle it with my left arm on the left stalk, then set it to full speed with my right arm on a touch screen. All while at high speeds and trying to perform an emergency stop / regain control. The manual toggle on the right stalk wipes one time, in the slowest speed. You also have to wait for this to finish before it will actually adjust the speed you selected on the touch screen.
2. When they're in automatic mode and I enter a tunnel they will turn off, which is good, but you'd imagine that Tesla with all these supposed self-driving capabilities were able to deduce that it will most likely be raining at the other side of the tunnel, and be prepared to turn them on quickly. They don't.
3. When I manually toggle a single wipe it seems to reset whatever algorithm they use to decide if the cameras are detecting that it's actually raining. I can't really see any reasonable scenario where I'm not also using windshield wiper fluids that this makes any sense.
4. It will randomly just start in glaring sunlight, often at maximum speed. To add insult to injury, if you're in a country that uses a lot of salt on the roads during winter it will then coat your entire windshield in it, causing it to speed up, making it progressively worse, until you can do the "toggle dance" with both your hands to disable it.
Recently Tesla decided that you can't turn off things like automatic windshield wipers and high beams when you want to use adaptive cruise control or similar features. I understand that it has to be able to detect cars in front of it, but I don't understand the rationale of forcing these features to be on automatic. Just let the drivers know they have to turn this on in situations where the car isn't confident it has enough light or visibility to do it.
They recently fixed some of the issues with high beams. You don't go around blinding everyone like you did previously all the time. But it will also just randomly turn off because it sees a sign or a parked car, or take 4-5 seconds to turn back on again. Making them practically useless. In scenarios where I have to use high beams it's often critical that they turn right back on after passing ongoing traffic. If I have them in automatic mode you can't toggle it back on again. You have to wait for it to figure it out. The type of headlights that Tesla now uses, often referred to as "matrix lights", are capable of selectively turning blinding off parts of the light beam, but for some reason they don't use this capability for anything other than making them write "Tesla" on walls in front of the car if you perform the "light show".
I bought a aftermarket product[0] that connects to the ODB-port that lets me overrides these things. And it lets me put programmable physical buttons to do things like toggle windshield wipers in the car. The concept of having user programmable buttons in the car is something I really like, and I think this is a concept that should be explored much more. All the buttons in a car should be programmable. There's more[1] and more aftermarket upgrades to Tesla's that adds capability like this, but everything is living on the whim of a guy who'll just terminate people's API access on Twitter, so there's that. The weird thing is, besides the windshield wipers, automatic high beams and some of the questionable choices Tesla has made, like removing ultra sonic sensors, I really love the car.
[0] https://enhauto.com/product/six-s3xy-buttons
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ctrl-bar--4#/