Rain-X : A 10 Month Case Study

After ten months of extensive research, I finally drew my conclusions on the performance of Rain-X. Not Good (if you plan to drive in the rain).

After I sell my car in a month, my arsenal of ridiculous stories will most likely decrease by 50%. That's one of the perks of having a German engineered car that was for some reason built in Mexico (where I can only assume some major engineering concepts were lost in translation)! Given this decrease in material, I'll try to get as many car stories in as possible :)

My windshield wiper motor died at some point last year, and instead of replacing the motor (logical), I decided to rely exclusively on Rain-X to get me through any downpours I may traverse in the future (economical (cheap!)). It had been doing alright - as long as I applied it regularly and drove as fast as possible in the rain so that it would whisk off instead of just sit on the windshield in beads. I was okay with that.

This morning, however, DC encountered a rare tropical-style downpour that lasted from the second I left MD to the second I pulled up to my apartment. I hadn't reapplied my Rain-X recently and was unaware that after 3 months or so of wear, Rain-X gets old and turns into something like the equivalent of smeared vaseline across the windshield in the event it should get too wet. I thought that was a strange quality for such a product, but it was even stranger that the vaseline-ness of it intensified only while moving forward (i.e. I could see enough to drive when I was stopped at a stop sign, but as soon as I started moving forward, I might as well have been blind). That picture up there is misleading - as they should have a 3rd window labeled "treated but wearing off" that displays something similar to THIS.

To make a long story short, I made it home and safely avoided the 16 car pile-up which - given the conditions - any other unsuspecting driver would have surely miraculously managed to cause on the 15 mph speed limit empty neighborhood streets I took home...

I'll get my windshield wipers fixed this week.

UPDATE: Apparently tornadoes touched down where and when I was driving. Maybe it wasn't all Rain-X's fault...