Gareth wrote:Strangely Brown wrote:GTR1400MAN wrote:The main gripe is the combined washer flick. Dirty gritty screen and you have to flick the arm to squirt the screen. The wipers then drag across a dry screen as the squirter squirts momentarily after.
That's just crap design and should have been identified and thrown out before production. The clue should have been in the name - Wash/Wipe. It boggles the mind how anyone could ever consider that to be acceptable and sign it off.
I'm not entirely sure it is bad design, if you assume a conscientious (police) driver will clean the windows before setting off, and stop to clean if they get particularly dirty. I think it''s designed to handle light dirt or grease that might accrue during a journey, generally for use when it's starting to rain or already raining, rather than for comprehensively washing the windscreen.
The problem is that the system has trouble knowing how dirty the windscreen may be, plus to be effective it would need to take into account ambient temperature, humidity or precipitation, and wind-speed
to know how much screen-wash, and how forcibly, to deposit, and then to work out how long to delay before starting to wipe.
I really cannot see any justification for wiping a dry window when the *washer* is used. The whole point of using the washer is [almost certainly] because there is something on the glass and you want to use water and wipers to remove it. Wash first, then wipe.
In the case of a flick-wipe (single pass) I have never seen one that washes the screen and I would agree that they are usually used as you describe.
Unless I have missed something in the GTR's gripe then he is bugged (no pun intended) by the fact that the wash switch uses the wipers on a dry screen before washing? Is the design so bad that the switch is used for both flick wipe *and* wash/wipe? Still sounds like appalling design to me.