Tesla Renamed the Bug to Make It a Feature

Tesla’s latest software update supposedly fixed the automatic high-beam adjustment. The release notes said as much. Mine still doesn’t work — and I think I’ve figured out what happened.

The car is not switching down to low beam when it detects an oncoming car. The blue high-beam indicator on the dash stays lit the entire time. That’s why other drivers keep flashing me — I’m still driving at them with high beams that the car has, in its own opinion, politely dimmed by turning off “individual pixels” of the high-beam pattern.

That’s the feature. Not a bug. They renamed it Adaptive Headlights, updated the owner’s manual to say the blue indicator now means “high beams are on AND Adaptive Headlights is active and may automatically adjust,” and called it a fix. There’s a Tesla owners’ forum thread out there literally titled “PSA: no, auto highbeams aren’t broken. New feature: Adaptive Headlights!”

So Tesla shipped a system that does not turn off your high beams when an oncoming car is detected, decided the partial pixel-dimming is good enough, documented that the indicator light will lie to you about your state, and counted the whole thing as resolving the bug owners were reporting.

I don’t think they ever acknowledged the original problem was real. The fix was to rename it.

This wouldn’t be as frustrating if there were a physical control to override it. There isn’t. The whole car is engineered on the assumption that everything will just work, and on this car, in my experience, “just works” is the exception, not the default.

While I’m at it: I’m not sure my park assist has ever actually been available. And I’ve lost count of how many times the right-pillar camera reports as “obstructed” for no reason I can identify.

And before anyone jumps in — yes, I’ve rebooted it. Many times. Two-finger reset, full power-down, the works.

I’m old enough to remember foot-pedal high-beam controls. They were easier, faster, and more reliable than fighting rogue software that thinks it’s protecting oncoming drivers and instead is blinding them. Tesla’s low beams alone are bright enough that I sometimes get flashed even when the car is, by its own admission, in actual low-beam mode. Now that I know the high-beam indicator stays on whether the car is in “high” or “adaptively dimmed high,” I’m getting flashed in both states. The other drivers were right.

Why.