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1994-2002 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
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I love my 2000 9-3's well thought over features that make the car so much a pleasure to drive. For instance the fact that the rear windshield wiper wipes when you shift in reverse while your front wipers are on. They could've spared the effort of putting all the logic in the 'shift up' light, though...
One place where they goofed up to my opinion is in the design of the windshield wiper stalk. Actually I think three things are wrong with it.
The first thing that's so wrong is where the intermittent position is. The order is i-0-1-2. I guess this goes back to when intermittent wipers were first introduced, and people were used to having 0-1-2 in that order, so they just added intermittent opposite from 0. Any time you need intermittent is when it's varying between no rain, some rain and hard rain as you're driving, so the order you typically switch in is 0-i-1-2, and you end up switching back and forth between i and 1 frequently.
The second goof-up, which aggravates the first, is the amount of force it takes to move the wiper stalk; as a partcicle physicist I'd call that a high potential barrier to cross, or in lay terms a big heavy 'clunk'. So to switch the wipers between i and 1, it's 'clunk-clunk' back and 'clunk-clunk' forth all the time. In most other cars I've driven you just need a light touch with your finger tips to move either the windshield wiper or turn signal stalks.
The third fault is the little slide switch that controls the interval length. I'd say 3a and 3b, actually. The size and position are such that you have to take your hand off the steering wheel to operate it. Besides, if you move the switch to a different position, it takes a whole cycle for the interval length to change. Not much use if you get spray from a passing car and want to wipe more for a while. I can't believe how a company that claims to have learned from building jets has built in such a delay in a control that affects critical visibility.
As an example of how they could have simply improved on all three of these faults, in my Dodge minivan there's a single rotary knob at the end of the left stalk that gives you a seamless range from off to double speed. As a tactile feedback they've built in light clicks as you move from 0 to i, from i to 1 and from 1 to 2. Across the interval range there's a series of miniclicks. Each time you change the interval to a shorter one, the wipers wipe immediately and start with the shorter cycle from there. I wish I could transplant that into my Saab....
As said, this is in my 2000 9-3. Does it still work that way on newer models and on the 9-5s? Does anyone have experience with the automatic wipers? Is there some way to calibrate the sensitivity? The 9-5 that I'll pick up in Europe in December will have auto wipers. It's something that will have to either work perfectly, or else is no use at all since you'd still be overruling the auto wipers. I'm hopeful, though...
posted by 199.197.1...
, Sun, 30 Oct 2005 15:28:28
, Thu, 27 Oct 2005 18:25:36
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