Tesla Cybertruck Side Camera Uses Airflow to Keep Water Off Lens

Tesla Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill said on September 8, 2026, that the pickup’s side repeater camera has been updated with passive geometry that stirs airflow to keep water off the lens while driving, calling it a pure vision improvement with no cost penalty.

“The side repeater camera was updated – the version on the left is the newer part which uses passive geometry to create airflow disturbance that better keep water off the lens while driving,” Morrill wrote, posting side-by-side photos of the old and new housings. “No cost penalty, just pure vision improvement.”

The note sits in the same Giga Texas review thread where Morrill has been walking through ongoing Cybertruck hardware changes after production, from function and reliability tweaks to cost and manufacturability. Tesla amplified the camera post from its official account, writing that the company does not wait for model years when it finds a better way to build something.

That framing matches other recent factory-line revisions on the truck, including the aero shield swap to self-reinforcing polypropylene and earlier notes on the thicker windshield push. Vision clarity on the side cameras matters for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Supervised features that lean on those feeds in rain and spray, so a free geometry change that sheds water is the kind of quiet hardware iterate Tesla keeps shipping between model-year freezes.

Morrill’s broader point was that getting a vehicle into production is not the finish line. With the new side repeater already showing up on late trucks at Giga Texas, owners should expect more of these out-of-cycle part swaps as Tesla keeps tuning the Cybertruck in the wild.