One of the main concerns with self-driving vehicles is how they will react to different climates and weather conditions. Now we get an idea of the potential as we take a look at what Tesla Autopilot can see in a rainstorm at night.

Over the last year, we started getting a much better understanding of what Tesla’s Autopilot can see thanks to the work of Tesla hackers ‘verygreen’ and ‘DamianXVI’.

With access to Tesla’s Autopilot ECU, they have been creating rare looks at what Tesla Autopilot can see and interpret since last summer.

A few months later, They did it again with a new Tesla drive in Paris through the eyes of Autopilot and again using Tesla’s latest version of Autopilot in the new version 9 software.

In a new video, verygreen is now sharing footage showing what Tesla Autopilot is able to detect during heavy rain at night:

The overall performance appears to be quite impressive though there are still some issues to iron out, like the visual detection of the truck was sometimes lacking.

He also made a second video:

Tesla recently held its ‘Autonomy day‘ during which the automaker went into detail about its plan to develop full self-driving capability using its vision based system currently used in Autopilot.

Electrek’s Take

Those are not perfect representations of what Tesla’s system is able to detect through its sensor suite, but it’s the best we have and it’s coming from a third-party. That’s more than we can say about any company developing self-driving capability other than maybe comma.ai and its openpilot.

There’s no other major company developing autonomous driving systems that are already being reviewed by customers to this level.

It’s one of the reasons why I like Tesla’s approach to autonomy. I’d like Tesla (directly) and other companies to release videos like these show just how good their sensor suites can be.

In many ways, they are better than the current sensors used to drive cars: human eyes. Things like that are going to build confidence in self-driving technology.

But in the meantime, please always remember that Autopilot is meant to be a driver assist system and you should always pay attention and be ready to take control.

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