My ex (one of my best friends), born and raised in Seattle, used to give me serious grief anytime I mention rain in Boston or NYC. She had no belief in what I would describe.
Work finally ships her out to (NYC). She calls me up to say she just ran ~2meters from the hotel to the taxi and is soaking wet.
Many years ago we had a guy working for us who was sent over from our company's parent company in Southern Cali. He was not keen on going out in the rain at all, and was absolutely terrified that we still drove at 60mph when it was raining. "But what if you skid? It's raining!" he'd wail.
He'd never driven in rain. He just did not take well to a Scottish January, especially the bit where you get 140mph winds for a couple of weeks.
When it rains after being dry for some time an oil layer forms on top of the water. This is why he is afraid of skidding. In Southern California, where it is very dry there can be very substantial oil buildup.
There's a map here that shows that most of the eastern US gets more rain than Seattle, but Seattle is very high on the number of days of measurable precipitation.
my 2003 Honda Accord allows you to change wiper interval the same way you enable/disable it -- moving the right-hand stick a notch.
setting it to a high speed will fuck up the wipers when there is little rain, a /low/ speed will be useless when there is appreciable rain, and when driving you often move from one to another.
I can't help but feel like we've made a mistake by concentrating so many of the people who design our standard software UX patterns in California. From Tesla designing car interfaces that don't understand how wipers need to work to Apple designing weather apps that don't clearly communicate wind chill to smartphones that require use of the touchscreen to answer a phone call rendering it impossible to answer while wearing gloves. It's like they only understand the concept of weather from TV shows set in New York.
Why wouldn't the safe thing be to reach out from the steering wheel with one of the fingers of your right hand, and move the little slider thing on the wiper switch to increase the wipe speed?
You know, like on my appallingly primitive 1998 Range Rover, or pretty much anything from the same era?
They meet crash standards, yes. But the interior design of them encourages unsafe driving. Between putting almost everything inside a touch screen and pushing autopilot (which encourages drivers to pay attention less), they are creating more distractions from controlling their 2-ton metal boxes.
Drivers are licensed operators of heavy machinery that travels at high speed. Let's not encourage systems that turn us into more dangerous operators.
If they were "death traps" the stats would have them as the most dangerous cars on the road rather than one of the safest (in terms of deaths per mile). The grandparent was speaking absolute nonsense.
It's a critical function--high speed in light rain will cause problems from the rubber moving across basically dry glass, low/intermittent speed in heavy rain won't clear your view properly.
We should be very careful not to include the kitchen sink in with "essential" items.
Turning the wipers off and on, is critical, adjusting delay timings is not