Do they actually do anything or just something fancy to make you think the car is more techy?
I assume they’d be useful in snowy areas.
I think they are suppose to help in snowy conditions.
I have lived in Alaska for 11 years and have never had them on any car I have driven.
I am gonna go with overengineering
IMHO over engineering and most likely to break quickly if you live anywhere it snows (much like cars with flip up headlights).
Granted clean headlights do give you better visability but all you need to do is remember to clean them off when filling up with gas with the window washer squeege at the gas station.
Where salt, dirt and other chemicals are used to keep ice off the road during the winter, headlights may get clouded over. When driving in unlit areas, that can be a problem. I would like to have washers/wipers for my headlights, for it would save having occasionally to get out and clean the headlights.
The person that owned a car with the blades told me they did help in certain conditions. They can break, but so can the windshield wipers. The car had what I always dreamed of having standard in a car. Heated steering wheels!
Driving in the rain can cause dirt and crap from the road to accumulate on the headlights of your car. Because the headlights are very warm, this causes the water to dry off and leave a thick film of crap on your headlights. That film of crap acts like sunglasses, and lowers the amount of light that is passed by the headlights.
Ever since I started driving I have noticed that after a few days of rain that my headlights didn’t seem to work as well.
I found that if I cleaned them, that all was good for several more days.
Now we have cars that either have washers and wipers to keep the lenses clean, or some just have a high pressure jet to clean the lenses.
Either way it is way easier to see with clean headlights then it is with dirty ones.
Having just gotten out of Toronto where I was driving in slush, I can tell you the headlights, and windshield gets dirty a lot more often then the car needs gas.
I see them as a functional feature, and damn handy to have.
ETA: The wipers can freeze to the glass overnight in very cold areas. This is one reason car makers are moving more toward high pressure washers instead.
How many, exactly?
One steering wheel for the front, and one steering wheel for the back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWI_jc4agYs
What the heck type of car do you drive that only has one steering wheel?
According to my Hella Catalogue, Xenon (Gas Discharge) dip headlights require cleaning and self-leveling to be ECE compliant. link Though I’m not sure what the ECE bit means.
Due to the increasing popularity of Xenon lighting, that may be why the OP has seen more lens cleaners lately?
I do note that keeping my lights clean helps a lot with visibility, it’s just that I have 10 lights (one set of headlights and 8 work lights) to clean any time I do night work :smack:
I drive a $900,000, 25-ton truck on icy, winter roads at 120 km/h at night and I dream of having headlight wipers every day.
Have you considered maybe sleeping during the night and driving the gigantor truck during the daytime? During the daytime you don’t need headlights because of this wonderful new invention I like to call The Sun. 
Wouldn’t the wipers smear road dirt over the surface and cause scratches?
The wipers only come on with the washers, so there is a spray of fresh cleaning solution to prevent this.
Ah, beaten on preview by Rick, so all I have to add is that on Dad’s SAAB and Volvo, they seemed to die pretty quickly. We’re a fair bit south of Scandinavia so it makes no difference really, but its nice to have them as a gadget.
They can make a big/noticeable difference in situations with a lot of road dirt or snow. I had the sprayers on my last car and on a few occasions it let me see the road when I otherwise felt blind. If you don’t have them on your car, you simply don’t realize that the lack of visibility is due to stuff on your headlights.
On the old SL class Mercedes, the headlight wipers, in addition to being ugly and mostly useless ( if anything because even people in cold climates tend to not drive big RWD convertibles in the middle of winter), had a great tendency to short out its motors and possibly cause a fire in the engine bay. Most people removed them, and the feature was removed on later revisions of that particular model (later replaced with spray nozzles).
HID headlights are somewhat more regulated in most other countries, because they have a much higher potential of dazzling other drivers if they are aimed incorrectly or dirty. Thus, washers are required, as well as auto leveling mechanisms that adjust the aim of the beam to account for bumps in the road. I really wish Canada would adopt the same regulations and clamp down on ignorant people who set up illegal and dangerous “HID kits” on their beater cars with none of the other requisite safety equipment.
While I’m not someone who drives for a living, I don’t think you have to be to understand that you can save a lot of time (and hence money) by driving when there is less traffic on the road. Unless you’re a driver who’s paid by the hour :dubious: .
Many years ago, I was driving from Tahoe back to the Bay Area, at night, in slushy conditions. Every ten or fifteen minutes, I had to pull over to clear the dirty slush off my headlights, or I’d be driving nearly blind.
My current car, an Audi, doesn’t have the little wipers for the headlights, instead there’s a high-pressure spray I can activate. Of course, since owning the Audi, I have not had occasion to drive back from Tahoe at night in slushy conditions. But back when I did, that spray would have been a life-saver.
If I remember correctly, starting in the late '90s Audi stopped putting on headlight wipers and just pumped up the pressure on the washer nozzles to spray away the grime. My 2000 A4 did this and it seemed to work fine.