I am happy with my car. Almost totally happy. Only one thing annoys me. The wipers.
They wipe, yes. Great clean sweeps without shudder or squeak and nary a drop left behind. *When* they wipe.
When the Mazda designers were locked in their little planning room, brainstorming the Mazda 3, they forgot the cardinal rule: don't reinvent the wheel. They left the wheels alone, but they messed with the windshield wipers. Instead of the intermittent setting, where you decide how fast the wipers wipe, they added a moisture sensor which does the thinking for you. Duh. 'Cause me no can see rain. Me drive with eyes closed.
And of course, the sensor has its quirks. It doesn't wipe when you think it should. When starting the car this morning, it was *pissing* rain. The sensor had no idea. I manually had to switch to the "wipe fast" setting and back to wake the sensor up. WIPE! WIIIIIPPE!! How is this convenient? I ask you.
Once the wipers are in motion, the sensor is still in control. It doesn't simply set the wipers to a particular speed, it actually makes the decision to wipe with every sweep. The little pea-brain is thinking furiously before every swish: "Should I wipe now? Should I wipe? Should I?" This makes the wipers more efficient, yes. It also causes a sort of wiper arrhythmia in the strict sense of "no rhythm" that drives me bloody bonking barking mad.
You can't switch it to manual. Twiddling the knob adjusts the moisture sensitivity of the sensor but twiddling your thumbs is at least as effective. If the sensor is supposed to do my job for me so I can keep my eyes on the road, why, Set take you, PROVIDE A KNOB?
I figure if someone is too stupid to know how to adjust his or her windshield wiper speed, that someone should not be sitting in the driver's seat in the first place.
Wow, I had never heard of a moisture sensor for windshield wipers. The things they try to automate. Next thing you know, they'll automatically set the temperature in your car based on how much you're shivering or sweating...
~Fawn
I don't know how much Set would want the Japanese windshield wiper designers, considering that he was mainly the God of the desert and I seem to recall that the definition of desert involves a crapload of sand and dirt, but very little rain (I'm also pretty sure that there isn't one located in Japan). I'll bet you wish you lived in a place like that this week, eh?
Oh, and this is where telekinenis would come in handy, because then you could manually control your wipers using nothing but your mind - no stupid, inefficient knobs needed. Okay, that didn't come out sounding right...
Oh, your excessive use of the word "wipe" is kind of creepy and I assume that it, along with the caveman speak has resulted from the trauma of encountering a computer that won't listen to you.