We got a couple of inches of very fluffy, very pretty snow last night. The roads are (mostly) fine, and once you clean off your car you’re good to go.
Except, of course, some people don’t clean off their cars – they run the wipers to get partial visibility out the front, and don’t do a damn thing on the back window.
Why? It takes a minute, maybe two, and you can see where you’re going and what’s coming at you. By not cleaning, you, um, save a minute, maybe two, and increase the risk that you’ll be in an accident.
Seriously – is there anyone here who doesn’t clean the snow off his or her car? And if so, why not?
Not only do these people not clean off their back window, they don’t clean off the side view mirrors or even their back side windows, either! How the hell do they expect to merge/pass/etc. without being able to freakin’ see what is heading up behind or beside them?
Sure, I believe in looking out for the other person, but damn! You’ve got do something for yourself sometimes, right? Cleaning off all your damn windows and mirrors is a BIG plus!
aren’t there laws against that over there? Must be in a hurry, or don’t want to get their mittens wet.
Also, cleaning the headlights and rear lights off is a plus. Being able to see and be seen comes in handy.
Oy. This drives me bananas. But then, I’m pretty anal about clearing off my car as much as possible. I figure that taking a little time to do it all, and do it properly, just makes it safer for both me and other drivers out there, because we’re both able to see just fine.
It seems every time I don’t take the time to do it right, I pay for it in anxiety until my defroster gets up to speed, and it’s not worth it.
Clean off your cars, people! Pay special attention to your lights, in front and back, too.
This pisses me off too, but what really, really pisses me off is when a huge sheet of snow will come flying off their car and cause a veritable white out in front of me for a few seconds.
Or worse, when a sheet of ice comes flying off the top of a semi doing 70mph.
They don’t clean off their cars because they don’t have a snowbrush. The arrival of snow came as a complete and utter shock to them. Just like it did last year. Some people just suck at life.
Yesterday we had an incident in Utah where a 14yo girl was run over in a crosswalk in front of her school by an 18yo driver. It wasn’t snow on the car, but a faulty heater and a fogged up windshield so the driver couldn’t see anything in front of her.
Fortunately she wasn’t going very fast and the girl will recover, but for crying out loud, people, if you can’t see you shouldn’t be driving.
Get this! My son was on the bus pulling into school (years ago) and the driver was blinded by the sun and did a left turn…IN FRONT OF A DUMP TRUCK SHE DIDN’T SEE. All the kids had to go to various hospitals in the area. It scared the crap outta me, but my son was fine. Broke a window with his head (which he thought was very cool). Others were more seriously injured.
Possibly. More likely they took it out of their car over the summer. Now, they aren’t quite sure where it is. No time to look now since they are late for work and this damn snowfall just came out of nowhere. So turn the wipers on and drive man.
Some of them may be, er, driving rental cars up north even though they come from a far Southern climate and didn’t know that was what that thing in the back window was for. I was quite surprised to see nasty threads last winter on people who don’t sweep their roofs off - I had no idea I was supposed to do that. It never even would have occurred to me. Hell, until last winter or so I didn’t even know you couldn’t always just unfreeze your windshield with your wiper fluid, because it always worked for me before (never got cold enough not to.) Sorry 'bout that. I’ll do better next time.
(Warning - I’m coming to Pittsburgh for Christmas. Duck.)
I need to get me one of them brush things. I’ve got an ice scraper, and our vehicles live in the garage at home, but when it snows during the day at work, best I can do is knock off as much as I can with the little scraper. And since I drive a minivan, getting the entire windshield is a challenge - I’m only 5’5" fercryinoutloud!
I promise - next trip to an appropriate store, I will score a brush.
I’ve got a combination brush/scraper – the end of the long handle is a scraper, with a brush sticking out perpendicularly at that end. This lives in my car year-round, though it does live in the trunk April through November or so. I also keep a squeegee on a nice long handle in the car as well, since I don’t have a garage and often have to clear the condensation off on spring and autumn mornings.
Since, yanno, I’m into that whole visibility thing.
I’ve had this happen to me, not because of a faulty heater, though. PBSWAS. (Problem Between Steering Wheel and Seat.)
It was cold as fuck, but no snow or frost on the windshield, and I was in a rush, so I jumped in the car and took off before letting it warm up. Well, my moist mammalian breath started meeting the cold windshield and condensing. I turned the defroster up to full blast and kept going. But the car wasn’t warmed up, and the dry cold air from the defroster wasn’t doing the trick, so it continued to get foggier. In fact, the AC’d air from the defroster might have been cooling down the windshield even more (though this is hard to imagine, because, as I mentioned before, it was colder than fuck.) Did I stop like a non-idiot? Noooooo. Kept going. At, ya know, 55 mph. Despite the fact that I was traveling east, in the morning, so the Sun was in my eyes. Finally, completely unable to see the road ahead, I pulled over to the shoulder and sat there, feeling like a complete moron, with my flashers going, while the car warmed up enough for the defroster to clear the windshield. When it finally did, I saw I was barely on the shoulder, and I really should have pulled over farther—but, then again, it’s a miracle I didn’t end up in the ditch, or the other lane, or . . .
So, yeah, I’m a bit obsessive about making sure the car is warmed up before we leave the driveway now, which my husband thinks is stupid. Not a problem when there’s frost or snow, of course, because you just turn on the car and let it warm up while you brush, scrape, or brush and scrape. But those clear but deadly days, when there’s no frost and no snow because the awful, bitter cold has snatched every last molecule of oxygen and stuck it to some surface . . . you gotta watch out.
It’s not just semis. It’s the morons who just had to have that huge SUV (for the snow, of course), but can’t be bothered to sweep the snow off the top of it. So they’re driving down the street with a whirling vortex of snow behind them.
I just bought a new car (a Chevy Trailblazer) and I took a plastic stepstool outside with me today to make sure I wasn’t one of those morons as I left the house. I made damn sure all the snow was off the top.
And yeah, I’ve seen people driving down the street with a little 4 x 4 inch square scraped off the windshield, right in the center of the driver’s side. WTF are they thinking?
“Yeah, well, it’s all right turns to get to work, so I should be fine. I don’t need to look left.”
Oh, yeah. Around here it is fasionable to leave the snow on top of your car to show that you live in the mountains, and are therefore superior to us flatlanders. Said snow flies off at speed, blinding the cars behind and getting them all muddy to boot. There are times it’s a good thing I don’t have a cannon in my truck…
You guys must have weird (i.e. heavy, icy) snow. NO ONE here cleans off the surfaces of their car if they don’t need them to see out of. It all just blows off anyway, since it’s so light.
