This curved windshield would be twice as high, but be half-embedded in the roof and behind the dashboard. It swings up and down with tracks or radial arms on the sides. A wiper at the edge of the roof would be lowered to the surface only when the windshield moves downward, and the wiper by the hood would be engaged only when the glass is moving upwards.

Violin! No whipping wiper or un-wiped water vexing your vision.
-- FarmerJohn, Aug 22 2003

Okay, it's not much for looks . . . http://bz.pair.com/fun/cshield.jpg
The centrifugal way. [35Kb image] [bristolz, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004]

Does the actual windscreen move. Nifty, I always wondered when we would be driving cheesy sci-fi bubble cars.

When it really buckets down, the screen would have to move quite fast, I would like to see this in action in a Tropical cyclone.
-- Trodden, Aug 22 2003


Why not replace all of the vehicle windows (and support structures, roof, etc) with a glass cylinder or truncated cone? Then you could just spin the glass past a static wiper blade, similar to the trick they use to clear the view for on-board NASCAR cameras. This would, of course, force some interesting changes in the design of the passenger compartment and the doors...
-- Don Quixote, Aug 22 2003


Why not just build a giant electrostatic generator into the car so it emits so much electrostatic energy as to repel all water before it even hits the car? Like a force-field for rain...
-- DeathNinja, Aug 22 2003


Or use Rain-X which is amazingly effective.
-- bristolz, Aug 22 2003


Not quite what I had in mind, [bristolz], but certainly more practical. If you spin glass really fast you wouldn't need the blade.

Yep, Rain-X is great stuff. The same company makes a product you can add to your washing fluid -- it's not as effective as Rain-X, but it does seem to preserve the beading surface for a while.
-- Don Quixote, Aug 22 2003


Perhaps if your car was also powered by a gas turbine engine, then you could emit the exhaust gases upward and over the windshield effectively evaporating the water before it had a chance to hit the windscreen (or would evaporate soon after).
-- bevnap, Aug 22 2003


Yeah, my so-called "design" is intended to be without a blade, hence the "centrifugal" name, but much like the cinema systems for use in rain and watersprayed location shoots (rapidly rotating optical glass plate in front of the camera that throws the water off instantly and invisibly to the camera). The vertical structures in front of the disks were my attempt to show a drive train to spin the disks as well as an attach point for the glass.

In real life it'd probably be different.  Really, really different.
-- bristolz, Aug 22 2003


[bristolz] You did make that clear -- sorry about that.
-- Don Quixote, Aug 22 2003


Nice one bris. I was out kayaking, in the rain.
-- FarmerJohn, Aug 23 2003


If you need to wipe going down the road, you should have gone before you left. There was a service station just a few miles back, why didn't you say something?
-- BunsenHoneydew, Nov 29 2005



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