I was driving the other day and this giant SUV raced past me to get to the back of a line of cars stopped at a red light. Surprisingly, it wasn't the driving that irked me.
It was the tiny wiper blade.
The 2016 Cadillac Escalade is a $70,000+ luxury vehicle. Why is it that the engineers/designers can’t make a rear wiper blade arm that cleans more than 1/4 of the rear window?
That window is around 66” x 24” which is an area of 1584 in². So when it’s raining or when there’s snow and there’s all that salt and gunk on the window, it cleans a spot roughly the size of a dinner placemat. It also looks stupid.
Here's 25% of the Cadillac logo during winter if it were going to be cleaned by the rear wiper blade.
That’s a big vehicle! I would think you’d want to be able to see through the back, even with the advent of backup cameras and collision detection and all that other stuff.
GM isn’t alone in this but they seem to always put the tiniest rear wiper blades on the biggest vehicles.
SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscreen_wiper
Why not use something similar to the eccentric arc system that you used to see Mercedes use on the front windscreen but deploy it on the back? Seems to me that with the number of these things on the road that the manufacturers could get the price down to something competitive.
And they could promote it as a safety feature.
END of RANT