Greetings fellow weird car enthusiasts. Last week, I brought you one of my weird car hyper-fixations: Korean brake lights. Today, we are moving to the front of the vehicle and will be discussing windshield wipers.
These dancing little guys are the true underdogs of our cars. Without them, we wouldn’t be driving anywhere. We would all be crashed in a ditch somewhere off some major interstate in the middle of nowhere because our windshields were full of fog, rain, and snow.
Let’s give our wipers a round of applause. They work hard for us to read silly bumper stickers like “my infant ran the NYC marathon” on the back of a dented Toyota Sienna. They allow us to see the beauty of the roads, like dense traffic full of Teslas on the 405. I feel like they deserve some recognition, eh? How about I jump into some of my modern favorites and you tell me some of yours? Deal? Once you’re done, head to Autozone and pick up some new blades for your wipers. They’ve earned it.
FJ Cruiser
Toyota
Oh, man. When I think windshield wipers, I think FJ. Three of them to be exact. Why three? With a steep, vertical windshield, two wipers of small-blade length are insufficient in wiping away moisture. Toyota was smart and stuck on an extra one for three identical wipers lined up along the dash. Therefore, they work as a team in clearing away mud after off-roading in a Macy’s parking lot. How sweet! If you ever buy an FJ, prepare to put aside $8 for an extra blade when you change them once a year. Other than that, wipe away, FJ wiper trio!
[Editor’s Note: I’d feel remiss if we didn’t at least mention the FJ’s tri-wiper pioneer, the MGB, which surprisingly has a windshield of similar proportions, just scaled down a lot:
Don’t forget your elders, FJ. – JT]
Ford Escape
Ford
The second-generation Ford Escape is not particularly noteworthy. It’s got lackluster performance and a plethora of transmission problems. When I spent a summer working at a Ford dealership, I probably drove about 5 of these with bad transmissions. Yikes. However, Ford did implement one creative element onto the Escape: the windshield wipers. The Ford Escape had two wiper arms of identical length that would rest on top of each other in the center of the dashboard. When in use, they would come out one at a time, wiping away on their respective sides of the windshield. It’s seriously genius! Much more windshield area is covered when done like this. I simply do not know why more cars don’t have this. It’s a game-changer and one that is safe!
Mini Clubman
Mini
Modern Minis are full of quirks. The interior has a unique center dash speedometer. The exterior pays homage to its British roots with the Union Jack turn signals, which are a flawed design, as Torch pointed out a few years back. Yet the Mini Clubman had a neat little party trick: barn doors! Barn doors are just cool. Interesting, unique, and functional (I think). Besides the Clubman, I can only recall the GMT800 Suburbans offering this. How does one design wipers for barn doors? GM simply did not include any on the Suburban. Mini, though, did. That’s right, each barn door has its own oppositely mounted wiper that meets in the middle. How cool! It’s almost as if they are giving each other a high five for successfully clearing a path away from the Mini Driver. Now they can see that tailgating Ram 1500 in their rearview mirror. Good job, Mini!
Tell me about your wipers. Do you rip them off in agony when they don’t go at your desired speed? Do you not have any? Wipe away!
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Two thoughts, the first is the 90s “rice boy” of removing one wiper and replacing the other one with a an oversized neon twin blade thing to look race car like was even worse than hearing the blat of a fart cannon. As an aside those double blade things were horrible being both ugly and ineffective.
The second is windshield washer setups. the “wet arm” design with the,nozzles on the wiper really does work better, and came from bus wipers.
Further rambling question is whether any car or truck ever had a clear view screen like a ship. This is rotating glass disc set in the window that clears more effectively than a wiper. The only land use I’ve seen is railroad snow blowers
I think I might have seen that in some very fancy buses. They are the ones with enough glass surface in the front where that may make sense.
There’s… just something so mesmerizing about that FJ gif…
Shoutout to my colleague Pete. He’s fantastic! I stared at it for nearly 15 minutes yesterday.
The Escape actually doesn’t have two identical wipers, one is 2” shorter than the other. My Peugeot 307 uses the same setup (same exact wipers even) and since I was shopping for wipers today that stood out to me.
Hahaha – As the owner of an FJ the front windscreen wipers blades are 16″, 14″ and 14″, and the rear wiper blade is 10″.
As a wiper enthusiast, you need to lookup the Toyota Mega Cruiser (BXD20). 5 wipers!
It’s awesome!
My Bolt has the center wiper arrangement like the Escape you mention.
And a shoutout too all the Euro cars with headlamp wiper setups! I love those little dudes, and also I love finding out how much they cost to replace when they inevitably die on you.
The Escape you reference is a third-gen, not second.
My 2nd gen Volt has opposite arm wipers. I hate them. There’s always a dribble of water that runs down the middle of the windshield after they stop.
I am partial to the windscreen wiper arangement on my citroen BX; it’s got a single wiper arangement, incorperating a spray bar for the windcreen washer, so you get a reasonably even spray just where you need it. It doesn’t neccecarily do the greatest job (I’m sure a dual wiper setup would probably be better), but I like it anyway; I didn’t exactly buy a 34 year old french car for the sake of practicality. I’m less partial to the rear wiper arrangement, which is again a single wiper; however, due to the spoiler (my car’s an 8v GTi, with the up-and-over spoiler, not the flat ledge of the 16v’s), you can’t hinge it up to change the wiper blade, and instead have to un-bolt the arm (also, it doesn’t work at present, due to 34-year-old french electrics; need to fix that…)
For pure maximization of cleared surface, I haven’t found a better example than my Mazda5. It’s a rather large, tall windshield, and the big/little design gets a huge portion of the screen wiped. Yeah it leaves a big uncleared spot on the upper-right that’s tall drivers will see in their peripheral, but that area is rarely necessary for safe visibility.
My son’s 1st gen CRX-Si had a rear wiper with a parallelogram linkage. It stored on the right side of the glass and cleared an impressively large portion of the jig back glass.
About that spot – unless the manufacturer doesn’t flip the wipers for RHD markets. Mazda wouldn’t do this given the home market is RHD, but Peugeot didn’t flip them for the 206 in RHD markets, I remember reading in one of the British car mags when it was still in production.
The W124 Mercedes deserves recognition, as others have said. The Mk1 VW Scirocco only had one wiper as well, but not the cool oscliiating Mercedes-Benz linkage.
And I’ve always liked the parallel-linkage wipers on some tour buses and RVs, especially when the two motors are slightly out of sync; it’s fun to watch them come into phase with each other, then gradually drift out of phase, and back again.
I can’t say a specific windshield wiper has ever captivated me. But I do have a rear wiper that left mouth agape when I first saw it back in 1990: the one in the first-gen Renault Clio. It still does, actually, because it’s very rare to find an early Clio with this rear wiper intact.
https://preview.netcarshow.com/Renault-Clio_1.7_RT_5-door-1990-1600-02.jpg
It doesn’t look like much of an oddity nowadays, but back in the day it seemed like a robot arm. Most cars had off-the-shelf wipers without any kind of specific design attributes, and suddenly Renault just slaps one of these in one of their entry level models.
Sadly they’re not made of the most durable plastic on earth, so like I mentioned above, it’s very rare to find one with the screw cap still there; I’ve embarrassed my self more than once having a bit of a meltdown at the sight of an intact one, much to the complete bafflement of whoever I’m with.
Missing the Mercedes mono-wiper and GM’s hidden wipers on the C3 Corvette.
Part 2… stay tuned.
A fun wiper setup is the Panhard 24. They are similar to the opposing wiper setup of the Ford, but with the mounting points in the center of the car rather than the edges. Nor do they wipe their arcs at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxU3KbSHH3o
When I bought my ’67 VW squareback the wipers seemed to work just fine. However, I found that prolonged use resulted in them stopping. Recall that the ’67 Type 3s were the start year of 12v instead of 6v. It seemed like the motor was overheating and just stoped. I found that I could reach under and bump the mechanism and they would start again.
When they did stop, all I had for visibility was about an inch tall a few inches wide opening -under- the wiper. For some reason that area stayed clear.
Years later I was working on itI found that the (only) PO had replaced it with a 6v motor. BTW, that mechanism is strong enough to easily take off a finger.
Don’t forget to highlight the various washer spray mechanism types. I have a story about them too.
The best wiper arrangement of all was on the Lancia Flaminia, forget if it was the coupe or sedan, they had two rear window wipers on the inside, and a matching pair on the outside.
Sadly, the heated window element came into popular use shortly after, stopping development and widespread use of the inside wiper.
https://youtu.be/rfi6nuEDKDI
No Alpine A310? (25 second in the video)
I think later E types had three wipers too
The best wipers are headlight wipers like on old Mercedes and Volvos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl3BsR1i64g
The Saab 99 had really neat headlight wipers, which acted more like a squeegee that went back and forth across the light.
The opposite arm wiper configuration on that Ford is super common. Most of Chrysler’s minivan’s had them like that for ages. Here’s the fun part with them: opposite arm wipers (generally) require two motors. Automakers try to reduce cost, and generally don’t think about the wipers until near the end of the development cycle. So many of the cases where you see the opposite arm wipers in the wild, it’s usually because there wasn’t the space for a single wiper motor in the middle – no because it’s better. The exception is where there’s a unique windshield condition where opposite arm would clear better (I actually think this is the case for the gigantic windshield on the Chrysler minivans).
Why do I know this? I think I stumbled on a article a while ago when PO’d at how shitty the wipers are on the Model 3. Seriously…it’s like the Tesla designers never drove the cars in rain or snow.
Also, an notable wiper you missed: The ’92 – ’96 Camry wagon with two tandem rear wipers. Considering the number of CUV’s that’ll be happy clearing a couple square inches and that’s all, the sheer clearing capabilities of the Camry wagon are impressive.
I loathe opposite arm wipers simply because I think they’re a visual distraction while driving and presents a weird element in one’s field of vision. I actually dislike them enough that it is a big negative when comparing cars I might purchase, such as 8th and 9th gen Civics (also don’t like their digital speedometer only two-tier IP displays).
The Ford Escape for opposing arm wipers made me feel old, as it was pretty common on minivans to have them growing up – the 3rd and 4th gen Chrysler vans, GM FWD vans starting with Dustbusters, Toyota Previa, original global Odyssey. For them to be on regular sedans or coupes was less common – first-gen GM W-bodies did which was odd to me as a kid, I don’t think it was until the 8th-gen Civic that another regular car (in the U.S. anyway) that had it, then Ford used it on the Focus, Fusion, and Escape. In theory, Ford wouldn’t need to change the wipers between LHD and RHD markets so there’s an advantage there, but I’d be curious to know if they did adjust it so the “leading” wiper was flipped.
Another notable opposite arm wiper setup: SEAT did vertical-parked windshield wipers that would tuck in the nook of the A-pillars, on the Altea and Toledo in the 2000s. Wiki says it was for pedestrian safety, may have been useful for keeping the blades clean too since gunk wouldn’t get trapped in them.
For that center motor, makes me think of small cars like the Yaris (pre-monoblade!) and Fit with a big driver wiper blade and tiny passenger wiper, often with a sharp angle to the arm to get up in that corner.
For Tesla – didn’t they want to engineer some wiperless windshield cleaning method? So maybe less effort going into the wiper setup because they couldn’t do that…
Doesn’t Mercedes use those Ford Escape-style wipers a lot?
I’m gonna throw this out with absolutely zero research, but I believe the Escapes wipers may be robbed from Citroen/Peugeot. I know they share the occasional engine, but I’m sure that’s not all.
I have always loved how CJ5-7 and YJ’s wipers rest on the windshield. I love the look of the exposed wipers.
You can’t write about awesome wipers without mentioning the W124 Mercedes.
The only way he gets away with this is by having stuck with the plural for the entire article. The singular W124 kung-fu karate chop windshield wiper stands alone (and non-plurally!)
Came to make sure the best mono wiper there is was mentioned. I am satisfied
Next time!
What, no cybertruck?
I think it’s key to note that the triple wiper setup for MGBs and Midgets was specific to the North American market, and also only introduced for the 1970 model year onwards. Rest of world cars retained the two wiper setup, and cars prior to 1970 had two wipers regardless of market sold in. Having had both a 1970 and 1977 model year MG Midget, I can say I like them.
I’d also vote any car with a single wiper arrangement, like the Lotus Elise. They just look so cool on high speed in a downpour, and yes, I did drive mine in the rain and snow (with the appropriate winter tires fitted of course).