Think about it…at first, both wipers are sitting at the bottom of the windshield. Driving through pouring rain (wipers on at HIGH speed), the windshield is instantly full of water. The wipers begin the cycle by both moving up and over to the drivers’ side. The drivers’ wiper swipes all of the water from his/her field of view, clearing it.
Then, an instant later, the passengers’ wiper reaches the end of its travel, stops abruptly, and throws all of the water from the passengers’ side directly into the drivers’ view!! Then, the both wipers swing back down and clear the entire windshield.
The cycle then repeats, giving the driver a clean/flooded/clean/flooded windshield view cycle.
The passenger, meanwhile, gets successive clean swipes, and never suffers this repetitive view obstruction.
The solution is simple enough, just reverse the action of the wipers! Or, become a mailman…which raises the next question:
Which way do wipers swipe in countries where they drive from the right seat of the car??
So, “teem”, what gives?
JJ Richard
P.S. Other than some Mercedes (which have both wipers starting in the middle and swiping to the outside simultaneously), every car that I have ever seen has this problem.
I live in Hilo, the rainiest city in the US. My Yugo has two synchronous, reciprocating windshield wipers. But they don’t operate as you describe. In fact, they would probably work fine if they worked at all. I use RAIN-X.
Oh God, TC, Would I love to rib you about that. And I could get away with it too! Why?
Becacuse during my last year of college I bought a brand new car…A 1986 Yugo GV. I think I paid $3800 for it. Boy, did I take some ribbing for driving that thing. So much so that I put personalized plates on it that read “HA! YUGO”. Thing ran cruddy in the rain. The drivers side wiper stopped working, so I had to bend the passenger side one over to cover both sides. Put 86,000 on it, then it died a gruesome death of a blown engine. Anyway, I used Rain X on it too, that stuff works good.
As for the op, I wonder how much thought Detroit puts into these things. Some cars seem to exhibit the same traits as others made by the same manufacture. I wonder how many letters they get making suggestions about things like this. Do they listen to those letters? Bet not!
I live in Japan so I just went down to the parking lot and checked maybe 20 cars, representing all major Japanese car makers as well as one RHD (right-hand drive) Citroen and one LHD Audi. All the cars had wipers set up the way you describe - when stopped, the wiper motor is on the driver’s side and the wiper points towards the passenger side. I’m 90% sure my RHD Volvo is set up that way too. So it seems that the direction of the wipers is so important that they switch it for LHD and RHD models. (At least, more important than the fresh air vent which is on the passenger side of my Volvo)
The only reason I can think of is that the wiper does not reach the top corner on the passenger’s side. If you reverse the setup, the wiper would not reach the top corner on the driver’s side. I guess a periodic flood is better than a completely untouched area.
PK! I might have known. I make up the most unbelievable story I can think of, and I find out that you ‘channeled’ it to me in my sleep. No foreign cars for me buddy! My 2000 Honda was made right here in America!
I seem to remember this as being fairly common for all cars back in the '60s. But I wasn’t very old, so I may be wrong.
I think scr4 is probably right–it’s most likely a matter of coverage. The usual way gives full squeegeeing (ugly word, that) to the driver’s side of the windshield, and less-than-full to the passenger side.
"Imagine, the salesman said, a brand new car with stereo and air conditioning for only $4300 (I got them down to 3800) I had originally gone to the dealership to put $5,000 down on a $11,000 car. That salesman talked me into a cheaper car, can you believe that !!? With all the money I saved we were able to put more down on the house we bought a year later. Now I only buy American cars like Fords, and Dodge…Which are probably put together in Mexico or Canada!:rolleyes: