Somewhere around March, the blue high beam indicator on my Tesla stopped switching to green when another car was approaching. I called Tesla. I waited months for an update. Eventually I gave up.
This is the same company making the self-driving car.
For non-Tesla owners: blue means I’m blasting full brights, green means the car has dimmed them so I don’t blind oncoming traffic. When I called customer service to ask why it had stopped working, the response was “That’s the way it’s supposed to work” — a strange answer given that it wasn’t how it had been working before. Then: “You’ll need to take your car in for service.”
The nearest service center is approximately the distance to the moon from my house, so I figured I’d wait for a software update. Tesla pushes these out constantly. Surely they’d fix something this basic.
Narrator: They did not fix it. Not for months.
After enough updates came and went, I assumed Tesla had quietly changed how the lights worked. The adaptive headlights did seem to adjust when cars approached, and nobody was flashing their brights at me, so I figured the system was working behind the scenes even if the dashboard indicator couldn’t be bothered to tell me about it.
Then last night — PLOT TWIST — the blue indicator actually shifted to green when an oncoming car appeared. There was a visible dim and then the brights came back up. Victory. Sort of.
Because what stopped happening was the smooth adaptive adjustment that lets oncoming drivers know the lights are pointing away from their eyes. Now the car goes FULL BRIGHT, NOPE NOW DIM, FULL BRIGHT AGAIN. Which means I’ll start getting flashed by angry drivers again.
Wait, scratch that. After more driving, the new behavior only kicks in at lower speeds. Over 35 mph the system goes back to keeping the brights on and adaptively adjusting. Why high beam behavior would change based on speed, I have no idea.
So now I get to see the green indicator at low speeds while the lights are being impolite, and at higher speeds we’re back to the original problem. Progress…question mark?
If the dashboard can’t accurately reflect what the headlights are doing after months of software updates, and customer service tells me it’s working as intended when it clearly isn’t, it’s hard not to wonder about everything else. The Tesla still gets me where I need to go. But every update lands with a little less faith than the last one.
Even that's Odd 
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