Windshield Wiper Weirdness

I own a 2000 Nissan Xterra.  I just turned 100k miles on it and I still love it as a vehicle.  It is a lot of fun to drive and has not given me much of any trouble.  I plan on driving it for at least another 50k miles.  There is one main feature that drives me nuts though.  This is the variable windshield wiper setting.  For some reason, Nissan decided to use a strange algorithm when choosing what values to use for each preset on the variable wiper control.  The problem seems to be in the fact that there is such a jump between what we will call position 2 and 3.  This can be seen when the wipe rate (wipes/min) is plotted for each setting:

The thing that appears when all of the speed settings are plotted together, is that the change in rate is neither linear nor logarithmic.  It is more of a hybrid.  This is not a problem on its own but when we look at there the transition occurs, we get a loss of sensitivity right at the spot where we need it (between 2 and 3).  It is also interesting if we look at the wipe separation and the wipe duration.

We see that there is a very large change in wipe separation between 2 and 3.  We also see that there is no change in wipe duration between 2 and 3.  It seems that this change in wipe separation is what is most noticeable (and irritating) to me as a user. 

One fix would be to add one more value (between 2 and 3) to the variable selector and to place it at 6 or so (I’m not too picky).  Another solution would be to move settings 3, 2, and 1 (wrt separation) so that they have more of a logarithmic curve (without slowing setting 3 too much).  Either way I’d be happy to have a setting that would be just right in mist or light snow conditions and a more logical transition between each setting.

6 comments March 31st, 2006