Monday, October 26, 2015

Automatically close a vented roof if rain is detected

The sun has finally returned to Houston now that the remanent of Patricia has passed, and that has me thinking about skylights.  I absolutely love the things and have plenty of them at home, so naturally the Tesla had to be equipped with the panoramic roof.  It's awesome by the way, especially for the rear seat passengers.  Anyway, many new skylights are vented and automatically close when they detect rain, so why do I have to manually close the vented roof when the car has all of the necessary rain sensing hardware?  It's not hard to close the roof using the app, but it's still effort and I still have to notice that it's raining.

Suggestion: add an option to automatically close the vented roof if rain is detected while the vehicle is in park.  

I'm sure there are some safety issues I haven't fully considered, such as tiny fingers getting wedged in the roof, but I'm that can be mitigated by (1) using the weight sensors in the front seats and (2) detecting resistance while closing the roof.  For example, if weight is detected in either front seat, then maybe an alert should be displayed on the main infotainment screen rather than automatically closing the roof.  Also, don't leave little ones or pets unattended.  Ever.

EDIT (10.28.2015): I tried closing the roof the other day using the app.  The car closed it without complaint, so I see no reason why I can't easily have an automatic rain sensing roof.  Clearly the car already has the appropriate safety systems or it just isn't as big of a concern as I thought.

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