Some BMWs might, but I don’t think our X3 has them (it does, however, have heated front seats and steering wheel; things I thought were ridiculously frivolous, that I’m now hooked on).
Wouldn’t the heat of a thousand suns do a great job at defog/defrost? 
I think you are overestimating your rage. 
[nitpick pet peeve]
Do you really need to describe the windshield by saying front? The windshield shields you from the wind. The wind comes from the front, therefore the windshield is at the front. The thing at the back is the rear window. It does no shielding.
That is almost as bad as using the term ‘hot water heater’ for anything that does not heat air with hot water.
[/npp]
Unless you are familiar with terminology used in different countries, it isn’t a bad idea to say ‘front windshield’. There’s a bit more gray area here. It’s not like ‘hot water heater’.
[Nitpick] Grammar police jumping in w/out adding value to discussion[/nitpick]
Would embedded wires or some other kind of electrical heating work to deice planes?
The rear window is the “backlite”.
I worked at Cessna years ago. The prop deicers were electric (using pneumatic boots there would be a huge engineering nightmare, at the least). I suppose boots on the leading edge of wings is preferred since they blast ice loose quickly. No reason in principle they couldn’t use electric deicers on the wings. I wonder how much power they would consume?
Anaamika, what kind of car do you drive? Just curious.
I have a Ford Fusion with wires in the front. Clears the screen of ice/mist in about 1 minute.
Beats the shit out of scraping ice off on a cold norning, not that we have a lot of ice these mornings anyway
I built that car and didn’t even know that it was an option. Hell, I didn’t even know that front defrosters of this nature even existed, except for the windshield wiper helper defrosters like on Chrysler minivans (with the same ugly painted-on wires).
But the water heater does heat hot water, it heats it even hotter. So it’s right some of the time.
“Added bonus” and “my personal favorite” can still go to hell though.
Not that Ford Fusion, the completely different Euro model of the same name. My humble Ford Focus (Euro model, again) has the defroster wires too.
Painted-on wires? Really? Mine are embedded in the glass.
Yes, and it is in use in some airplanes. The Beechjet 400A (think Learjet-like business jet) uses eletrically heated mats to anti-ice the horizontal stabilizer (tail).
The mats draw a tremendous amount of power from the generators, and the early versions were prone to overheating.
Most jets use hot bleed air drawn from the engines for the majority of anti-ice duties. There is no “warm-up” time like a car, because once a jet engine is running you can tap 400 deg C air from it. The reason electricity is used on some parts (like the tail of a bizjet) is twofold. First, you are heating a relatively small area, so electricity isn’t terribly inefficient. Second, it saves you the weight and engineering complexity of porting very hot air all the way up to the tail. Running a wire instead of an air duct is much easier.