Tesla Finally Fixed the Auto Headlight Issue, Sort of…

Tesla Finally Fixed the Auto Headlight Issue, Sort of…

In which I discover that even smart cars can have stupid issues – both with their drivers and their own dashboard.

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Green Light

Somewhere around March (I think), I noticed something odd with my Tesla’s high beam indicator. The blue high beam light would stubbornly refuse to switch to green when another car was approaching. For those not in the Tesla club, this is supposed to happen automatically – blue means “I’m blasting my high beams at full power” and green means “I’ve thoughtfully dimmed them so I don’t blind the poor soul driving toward me.”

Being the optimistic Tesla owner that I am, I called customer service. Their response was puzzling:

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” they said, despite this clearly being different from how it had functioned before.

Then came the part that really bothered me: “You’ll need to take your car in for service.”

With the nearest service center being approximately the distance to the moon from my house, I figured I’d just wait for the next software update. Tesla pushes these out regularly, and surely they’d fix such an obvious issue, right?

Narrator: They did not fix it. Not for months, anyway.

Adapting to My Unadaptive Headlights

As update after update arrived with no fix in sight, I eventually gave up hope. I just assumed Tesla had decided to change how the lights worked because, well, that’s how software updates go sometimes. Features evolve, sometimes in unexpected ways.

I did notice that the adaptive headlights seemed to adjust when cars approached, and people weren’t flashing their lights at me in anger (a common universal language for “YOUR LIGHTS ARE BLINDING ME, YOU JERK”). So I figured the system must be working behind the scenes, even if it couldn’t be bothered to update the little colored dot on my display.

The Plot Twist

Then last night – PLOT TWIST! – I noticed the blue light was actually shifting down to green when oncoming traffic approached. There was even a noticeable light shift down and then back up with the brights.

Victory! Sort of.

Because here’s the kicker: what stopped happening were the adaptive adjustments that let oncoming drivers know the lights are adjusting away from their eyes. So now, instead of maintaining those subtle adaptive shifts, the car just goes “FULL BRIGHT! Nope, now DIM! FULL BRIGHT AGAIN!”

Which means I’ll likely start getting flashed by angry drivers again.

The Plot Re-Twists

Wait, scratch that. Maybe I spoke too soon.

After more driving, I’ve discovered this “fix” only seems to work at lower speeds. When you’re traveling over 35 mph, the system still keeps the brights on and does that active adjusting thing instead of switching to the green indicator.

What an extremely odd choice. If you’d never driven a car before, this might seem perfectly normal. But for anyone who’s spent time behind a wheel, it’s bizarrely inconsistent. Why would high beam behavior change based on speed?

And now, instead of blissful ignorance where I didn’t see the green indicator but my lights were being polite to oncoming traffic, I get to see the green indicator at low speeds while my lights are being decidedly impolite. And at higher speeds, we’re back to the original problem. Progress…question mark?

Trust Issues

All of which leads me to my final thought: This is the same advanced technology platform that’s developing self-driving capabilities?

If there’s a disconnect between what my Tesla says it’s doing (on the dashboard) and what it’s actually doing (with the headlights) after months of updates, it makes me wonder about other features too.

It’s not that the engineers aren’t brilliant – they absolutely are. But when customer support tells you something is “working as intended” when it clearly isn’t, and when updates claim to fix issues but change the behavior in unexpected ways, it creates a trust problem.

My Tesla is fine – it gets me where I need to go – but these kinds of issues make me think twice about putting too much faith in software updates that promise more than they deliver.

Follow my Tesla adventures at EventThatsOdd.com, where we celebrate technology that’s simultaneously amazing and occasionally confounding.