The Californian company has just filed the patent. Here’s how it works
Tesla is certainly not a conventional company and not only for its technological cars, increasingly similar to smartphones with wheels, but, above all, for the histrionics of CEO Elon Musk, who with his ideas is trying to modernize and simplify the auto industry.
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Tesla innovations
After all, it is enough to see the latest Tesla Model S Plaid to understand the essence of Musk: the old steering wheel has given way to what has been defined as Joke, that is, a steering wheel that lacks the upper part of the crown. Or gear changes and direction changes operated via the touch screen. And in the future we will be able to add another gimmick: the laser instead of the wipers.
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Goodbye to the old windshield wipers
Windshield wipers, as we know them, have existed since 1903. Okay, at the time they were operated through a crank before switching to electricity several years later. But the principle has always remained the same: a blade of soft rubber is dragged on the windshield to remove impurities. So here is Elon Musk’s intuition: why use rubber when lasers are definitely cooler?
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The patent filed
The will of the American entrepreneur to want to implement this technology thus replacing the outdated wipers dates back to about two years ago, however, only a few days ago it was filed the patent to the trademark and patent office in charge. So now Tesla officially has a patent for removing dirt from a windshield using the laser.
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The other applications
According to the patent, which has a captivating title: Laser cleaning of debris accumulated on glass elements of vehicles and photovoltaic panels, the system would automatically detect dirt on a surface, then hit it with a laser beam that is pulsed at a precise speed. to ensure that the laser never penetrates deeper than the thickness of the glass. While the most obvious use of laser technology is cleaning windshields, its use may be even more valuable elsewhere, such as on car camera lenses.
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To remedy Autopilot errors
As Tesla explains in the Background text of the patent, dirt on the lenses of a camera mounted on a vehicle can cause errors in image acquisition. This last feature is very important for Tesla since the latest versions of the Autopilot use only the cameras present on the vehicle to reconstruct the image of the surrounding environment. Or, again, the laser could be useful to clean the accumulations of dirt on the photovoltaic panels, which can cause a decrease in efficiency.
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September 16, 2021 (change September 16, 2021 | 16:43)
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