Beyond all expectations, given the syhthetic lubricants that I applied to my system components over many years, I outlasted my eyes, such that I needed a cataract removed. Vision in my right eye had declined to its view of the world seen as through a frosted glass bathroom window. There were many times throughout my driving life, however, when windscreens misted up in severe cold, rain or both, and proved stubborn to demist. I was left in a frosted glass dome. I wished often that car reviews I had read could have tested for something that they never ever do: how well the demister works.
For some years in England, I drove a vintage 49-seat (crash gearbox - no synchromesh) Bristol bus between Earls Court and Slough. It had the best demister of any vehicle I have ever driven. A blower as strong as the strongest hair dryer blasted hot air straight from the engine underneath us onto the windscreen. Demisting took less than a minute from starting the clattering diesel. One night, in a dense blizzard, I drove a work crew the usual M4 route, arriving within two minutes of my normal clear-weather time. A South African girl, sitting frozen with fear behind the glass window at my back, watching the road ahead, burst into tears when we came to a halt. “I don’t know how you did that” she sniffed. “I never saw even one yard of road in front of us”.
It was indeed a scary drive. I am not a “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham. I was simply lucky the weather was so foul that few motorists ventured out. If there had been traffic, I may have landed in trouble, because there were times when passing vehicles threw up dense clouds of snow, coating our large windscreens. I drove from photographic memory of how the road had looked a few seconds before, while the massive, thankfully over-engineered windscreen wipers slopped the snow away. Those few seconds were calculated risks, because it was never truer then that:
So snarled a Brit whose car I had scraped. Of course he was right. English rain and my breath had reduced my windscreen to frosted glass. Too impatient to wait for the demister, I reversed, misjudged, and earned the harsh lesson from the angry Brit.
Back home in SA, I criss-crossed the country for many years both as a roadie and a bus driver. The trucks and buses I drove, like the old noisy Bristol Greyhound, had competent demisters. A roll of toiler paper stashed on the dash did the rest.
Very few of the cars I drove, however, had good demisters. It distresses me, dwelling on such poor thinking and design, because one may as well be in a windowless car when the windscreen mists up. Add night, and dazzling halo of oncoming car headlights, and we effectively become kamikazi drivers. Air cooled cars heated up quicker than water cooled cars, so they demisted quicker. Both VW Beetles and Citroen GS models had quick demisters, but air cooled engines fell away partly because engineers never found a way to solve the problem of “hot spots” in air-cooled engines. The outcome was that air-cooled engines were never as economical as water-cooled engines, nor were they as quiet.
Many of my road trips were shared with my brother, out from Canada. He would hire a car, and off we would go, usually a round trip starting from Jhb, then overnight in Colesberg, visit family in Richmond, on to Grahamstown, PE, back up the east through Cis- and Transkei to PMB, and return to Jhb. He was interviewing young law internees in these places, and that, together with seeing family on the way, meant that we made many early starts in these cars, often pre-dawn, giving us ample experience of their demisting. My brother soon swore off the most reliable of Japanese makes, preferring a lesser rated make, simply because the quintessential Japanese kanniedood became a deathtrap in rain or early morning frost. Can’t see is can’t drive. The lesser renowned make remained drivable.
Now you know why I regret that car reviewers do not comment on this. I realise that often their tests are blessed with good weather, and everyone wants an easy life, but I remain cussed about this. They must find a way. Perhaps an automatic car wash as a test? Or driving into an industrial cold storage room. Just throwing out ideas …
A Brit podcaster, HubNut, is known for routinely using windscreen washers on his reviews, to determine how much cover the wipers give. You will be surprised how many car makers care not a fig for visibility in rain. I hope to comment to Mr HubNut against a future video, asking for him to add demister tests. Ciro de Siena and Juliet McGuire my favourite car reviewers, are you reading this, and can you maak ’n plan, please?
I am a known Citroën lover. There was never such a thing as an uncomfortable Citroën, plus the air-cooled 2CV and GS had excellent heater/demisters. Cure, though, is never as good as prevention.
The last two Citroën models. the C5 and C6, with (usually) glide-along hydro-pneumatic suspension, also featured two things no other car maker, not even super tech-heavy Teslas, have come up with:
The first meant they never misted up in the first place, and the second meant that they did not get coated in dust as do most convex windows.
These simple engineering ideas add very little cost, and what amounts to constant visibility at all times. You can’t get safer than that, yet all the safety authorities are concerned about is whether you survive a crash, not whether you prevent one. Visibility is never even mentioned in safery ratings, strange when it prevents a percentage of accidents from ever happening.
I imagine the new EV models under review will have excellent demisters, since they will rely on electric elements that heat up very readily, but we won’t know until car reviewers add the
CATARACT CAR TEST
to their reviews.