These Self-Smacking Wipers Knock Ice Off Your Windshield

Great clouds almighty: is winter over yet? Snow, sleet, freezing rain, hail—come on now! It’s been a season of much precipitation and through it Raleigh has received a hard lesson: we’re not quite as equipped for winter as we thought we were.

As we drove through neighborhoods frozen by winter weather, however, we did notice that many residents had one trick down pat: keeping windshield wipers off the front window overnight so that they wouldn’t be frozen to the glass. As commendable as that is, many of us know that ice can still form on the wipers themselves, not to mention the glass, and trying to break up a half-inch layer of ice in the morning cold is no picnic.

One company has come up with a rather innovative way to circumvent this seasonal annoyance. Motor City Wiper is a company based out of Rochester Hills, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. They’re so far north that they’re nearly into—gasp!—Canadian levels of latitude, and at that area of the U.S., they encounter serious amounts of snow and ice for not just days, but months.

MCW’s solution is a special, wiper-banging arm mechanism that installs right in place of your normal wiper arms, only looking a bit more muscular. Do you sometimes tap your toothbrush against the sink to knock the water off? Same principle. The wipers themselves are nothing special, just whatever you happen to own. The muscly arm, however, smacks them against the glass with enough force to dislodge any ice on the blades or your windshield. Observe:

You’ll notice that it’s a very confident, assertive rapping that isn’t overly violent or overbearing. As you can see at the end, the smacking isn’t automatic, but rather, triggered by the driver instead pushing a small, custom installed red button. That way you never have to worry about rogue wipers smacking you around the parking lot—unless you’re being chased by someone with a sense of humor behind the wheel.

As of yet this system isn’t for sale to people. Its inventors are shopping it around the major automakers in hopes that it will be either invested in or implemented across a brand’s lineup. In either case, we wish them well as this is one more device intended to keep us in the car where we belong while technology does the outside work for us.