I wish I was that smart to remember to do that. Sometimes I do, but usually I forget. I always clean as much off of my car as possible. I also cleaned my wife’s car this morning as well. Why am I always the one to freeze my ass off?
I clear snow off the entire car as much as possible, i.e., all of it. I clear frost/ice off my vision points: forward, behind, right mirror, left mirror, right blind spot, left blind spot.
I also make sure that neither my headlights nor taillights are covered, nor my rear license plate, as I don’t care to have to stop on ice for a cop pulling me over.
::: raises hand :::
I do.
I also brush off all the snow and scrape all the windows. I have a telescoping brush so I can brush off the roof, too, so I’m not one of those morons driving down the road blinding other drivers with a whirling vortex of blowing snow.
This is what I don’t understand. You need to scrape the whole windshield to be able to see properly. What about the back window? And the sides?
I’d be scared to drive if I couldn’t see out of all the windows.
We just got 14.5 inches of lake effect snow dumped on our house. Nice and powdery, and beautiful when you’re inside, or in our hot tub, but a pain for driving. I should be used to it.
I’ve learned thru bitter experience to remove all the goddam snow on my car from the bumpers on up, clearing brake lights, headlights, hood, trunk, windows, and roof. Otherwise I end up not seeing what I need to, or causing someone else to not see what they need to.
Oh, I check the goddam wipers now too. And scrape the windshield. I’ve given myself too many headaches trying to clear them with windshield wiper fluid. NOT a good idea. It all too often refreezes in seconds, and makes my windshield all blurry.
most times i clear every inch from front bumper to back bumper. of snow however I let the defrosters take care of ice on the front and back windows if there is a light layer of ice. however foe thick stuborn ice i use the heated hair dryer. that i bought the wife last christmass that conventally plugs into the cigarette lighter in combanation with my ice scraper. I do a weard almost dance with this manuver but it works pretty good.
Off the hood, windscreen, roof, backglass, trunk lid and back lights. Dad taught me to leave the wipers in the up position, less area to freeze.
Upstate NY. Lake effect snow area.
Coating the glass with Rain-X helps too. Frost comes off easy(er)
Every inch. I also make sure to scrape all of the windows when it’s just frost. I don’t know if it’s a matter of me being really safe or really anal. Probably a little from column A and a little from column B.
Just this morning, there was a thick frost on all the cars when I went outside to go to work. As I was walking to my car, I saw someone driving through the parking lot with MAYBE a 12" long, 8" tall scraped portion on the windshield. The rest remained heavily frosted.
[Digression]
I’m not convinced that putting the wipers up preventing freezing to the glass is meaningful. On my recent road trip, the wipers never froze, in temps of -10 to -20 C. The usefullness for that, I think, is that you are not tempted to try to use the wipers to clear 20cm of snow, nor are you tempted to use them to clear frost or ice. Of course, having the wipers already out of the way makes it easier to clear snow/ice/frost.
I’ve had my wipers freeze to the windshield a few times this winter already, during the eight or so hours I’m at work. On my drive in, the windshield warms up from the defroster, and if it’s snowing (which it invariably has been), that makes a nice surface for melting and refreezing once I’ve parked.
The other advantage I’ve found in leaving the wipers up (and by this I assume you mean extended out toward the hood, and not contacting the windshield at all) is that it causes the wiper to “un-spring”, so that just the act of letting it flop back against the windshield will break loose all the little pivots that have frozen while the car is parked. This assumes you’re using a conventional wiper, and not one with a rubber boot (which, on my car, ceases to contact the windshield at all above 40 MPH).
Oh, and yes, all glass and lights are cleared before I take off, as well as any ice in the wheels. Driving in winter is hazardous enough, without reducing your ability to see or be seen.
I would think that putting wipers up would be more useful in places less cold than the Canadian prairies. At temperatures closer to freezing you’d be more likely to have sufficient liquid water around to make actual ice. Fluffy snow at -20 and frost will never freeze a wiper to a windshield (unless you left a goopy mess of snow half-melted by your defroster there when you parked).
Yup, every last molecule. It doesn’t take much effort, really.
I’m another one in the “clear everything” camp. I was really bummed yesterday as I left work to head home and discovered that in all the shifting stuff in and out of my car that I’ve been doing in the past couple of months, I must have taken my scraper out and left it at home in the garage. The stuff on the side windows and rear hatch was fluffy enough to fall off when I opened and shut the doors firmly. The windshield was another story. I ended up scraping it with a little rigid plastic sewing kit I had in my purse, which provided me with a scraping edge about an inch-and-half wide. Not fun.
Because you have the penis.
I clear the snow and frost off off all windows, front hood, top of car, and all lights. The trunk I don’t worry about too much - it’s a tiny trunk, and doesn’t hold much snow. My biggest peeve in winter is truck owners who don’t clear their license plates (especially the raging assholes who hit my car on the street and just keep on boogeying, while I watch them drive away and can’t see the plate). If there was any justice in the world, these jerks would get tickets for obscured plates the instant they pulled away from the curb. Or truck manufacturers would adust the placement of the plates so they don’t have that convenient shelf under them.
(When people have all the snow blowing off their cars onto the cars behind them I call that “their own private blizzard.”)
I always have cleaned off the whole car. Here in Pa., I think they passed a law recently that makes it a ticketable offense if you don’t have it completely clear.
Good point. I hadn’t thought that through.
Back when I was at home in Ontario I always cleared the entire car/truck off including lights/bumper/license plates and was always pissed at those that didn’t. Of course I haven’t had the pleasure of this task in well over a decade now.
He he 
This thread reminds of a commercial going on one of the channels over here:
a well dressed man with a briefcase (you know, the stock broker dressed type) comes out to the parkinglot to find his car covered in snow. So a sequence follows with him scraping snow and ice off the car with his creditcard or somesuch (he looks mighty pissed of and cold doing this, and he even bananaskids in the snow one time). In the next sequence he has cleared the car of snow and ice, and points his remote control car key to open it, only to observe that it is the car beneath the next heap of snow that start blinking and beeping.
Yeah I know, I’m very easy to entertain, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Anyway, hands up for the windshield wipers ceremony. However, I have a huge roof-rack on my truck so I never bother to clear the snow off my roof: it stays up there until sometime in April.
I doubt it.
You probubly look like a Haley’s Comet as you drive down the street. I have a roof rack too, and sometimes the ice can still fly off onto the guy behind you.
I’ve never heard of the windshield wiper thing. When y’all say “up”, do you mean extended out, so they’re essentially in midair, or “up” on the windshield, more vertical than horizontal?
Don’t they get bent from the weight of the snow?
I’ve never had a windshield wiper get frozen to the glass while driving. Overnight, sure, but the defroster and a wiggle releases it.
Well we had a nasty bout of snow/rain/ice yesterday, and I spent 20 minutes warming up my car and getting all the debris off that I could. There was still some ice on my car, so I took a non-highway route to work with low speed limits in hopes the ice wouldn’t fly off. It didn’t, and when I parked my car was warm enough to get the rest off, because I will be taking a 2-hour highway trip later today. Hopefully I won’t be assaulted with anyone else’s snow or ice today.
I hate when people refuse to clean the snow off the tops of their car, or just the car in general. Some people only do the front window! How do you see out of the back? I bought a nice telescoping scraper/squeegie/brush for like $10 at Sears last year. You should too.