I brought in my Mazda for some routine service and ran into the guy who sold it to me. I told him the only thing I wasn’t crazy about was that it doesn’t have a rear window wiper. He looked a bit puzzled and said, “Sedans don’t get a rear wiper.” And he said it in a manner suggesting that nobody makes sedans with rear wipers.
This was a completely novel idea to me, but my decidedly non-scientific observations seem to be confirming it. I’ve seen them on almost every type car, including hatchbacks, wagons, SUVs, and vans. The only four door sedans that I’ve seen that have a rear wiper are a bunch of Priuses(sp?). And I’m not even sure it’s classed as a sedan. The Toyota website doesn’t refer to it as a sedan.
A bit of online research comes up with a bunch of sites agreeing that sedans don’t get rear wipers. Most of them seem to agree that sedans don’t need them because, unlike a hatchback, a sedan has a smooth enough airflow over the roof to keep the window reasonably clean.
But none of these were any more authoritative than any other – all in special interest message boards. Nothing more authoritative than opinion.
It seems to be a trunk thing: any car that has a trunk does not have a rear wiper. This is probably because the typical trunk lid might collide with the wiper arm pivot. They can and I think do make trunk lids that would never be an issue for the wiper arm, but tradition seems to be dissuading them from doing that. Do the Priuses that have rear wipers have unified hatches that open the trunk and rear window together?
The issue isn’t so much that the clean laminar airflow over the back window of a sedan keeps the rain off, it’s that the areas of lower pressure turbulent air behind the rear of a hatchback or wagon tends to pull in road grime and get the window dirty.
Can you tell me something about the origin of the pic? The rear wiper isn’t listed among the standard or optional items for the 6, or the sedan version of the 3. I wonder if it’s something custom. Of course, maybe it a model from a prior year.
It doesn’t sound incredible, it’s just a whole new concept that hadn’t hit me before. I didn’t expect that my lamentation of an accessory my car lacks would lead to some universal truth about car design was – that was odd, as was my failure to confirm or deny it through Googling with my Googly eyes. .
Thanks for calling my attention to an everyday phenomenon that I’d never thought about before (i.e. which types of vehicles do and do not have rear window wipers).
Both sites seem to confirm GreasyJack’s explanation: that sedans’ rear windows don’t tend to get dirty to the same extent as hatchbacks’ and minivans’.
The only sedan (well, saloon in the UK) car I ever remember seeing with a rear wiper was the Ford Orion, back in the nineties. It looked a little odd, really, not a good addition:
Funny it was just a couple days ago that I commented to my wife that substantially all SUV / family wagons have rear wipers and zero sedans do. At the moment we were looking at the arse end of 4 different brands of SUV / family wagons blocking the view ahead on the road.
The rear window on my sedan does get dirty quickly, although I suspect it’s more from our daily rain and ocean salt than from road grime. I’m not sure I’d want a single rear wiper; the hemi-circle pattern would look like crap. But something more comprehensive like the typical dual front wipers would be an option that I bet would sell, at least on the fancier models.
Brakes. It’s a hatchback. The brake panels are divided by the trunk seam. There’s a Mazda 6 sedan model and a Mazda 6 hatchback model. A hatchback trunk has the rear window glass included in the lift, a sedan does not. Though in this case, the argument about the sloped rear window not getting a wiper can be argued because the hatchback model pictured looks very sedan-like in how the glass is sloped, so why the need for a wiper - except that it’s technically a hatchback so there is one.
I would have looked at you funny, too. I think of the hatch vs sedan thing as common knowledge and would be surprised during a conversation to discover someone didn’t know. I suck at hiding what I’m thinking, so yeah, you would have seen my eyebrows go up.
There’s also the matter of where you put the mechanism to move the wiper. It seem like most SUVs and station wagons have fairly think rear doors; thick enough to embed the wiper motor at the pivot point for the wiper itself. Try that on a sedan and the motor would be right at the front of the trunk opening. it would intrude into the cargo space in just the wrong spot; try sliding a big suitcase into the trunk and the wiper motor is in the way.
I suppose they could mount the motor to one side or the other, but there’d still be a linkage you’d have to deal with when loading large objects into the trunk.
Not to start a debate, but historically a sedan was defined as a “car” (not a truck, van, station wagon, or suv) that had 4 doors, while anything else not in those terms was a “coupe” I realize I’m dating myself here and there may be no “official” definition for the term.
Who’d a thunk?
