rkao

Raining cats and dogs here in NYC and just noticed that the W210 E-class still had the single arm wiper, which I've always considered to be such an elegant and simple solution.

Wonder why MB ever did away with it and returned to the conventional two arms setup on the W211?

[cross posted on W211 AMG forum]

pinebaron

I feel it is useful to have a spare . I personally dislike the single wiper concept though it does look elegant.

Tymah123

Had a single wiper in W220 and it never failed me. It actually cleaned a bigger area of the windshield than the 2 wiper system. I miss it, it looked so good....

C43AMG

I love the one wiper - sexiest thing put on a car since Lambo doors.

Davel

You were lucky, they were prone to fail and expensive to fix. The up and down movement on high speed was the cause. i had it on a earlier MB and i did think it was cool

C43AMG

The failure cause was the grease drying out on the armature pivot.

ProV1

chicks dig it in my W210, so i like it

lkchris

Not only were the mechanisms failure prone, the rubber blades didn't last very long and wiping performance is typically not very good. They'll go down is history as a cool idea that never had the bugs worked out.

Tymah123

It defiently had a greater sex appeal than the conventional system...

Quadcammer

I love the single wiper, no issues with blade performance or longevity. Wipes perfectly fine, and for $7 a blade, I can afford to replace it every 6 months.

Hard to go back to two arms.

Barry45RPM

Like SBC

harkgar

I agree totally. My sold 1999 E55 had the W210 body and single wiper and I dislike it so much. When the wiper was going fast in heavy rain it sounded extremely rough, almost as if it was about to fly off. The wiper arm has a counter weight balancer because it has such a large area to cover. At high speeds there was this terrible thumping noise at the end of each and every cycle.

When the wiper breaks there is no cleaning. With a two wiper system you still have 50% function.

The one arm bandit is such a bad design.

rkao

Admittedly, I've never owned an MB with the single arm wiper.

The aspect I am very impressed with though is how large an area of the windshield that one wiper arm was able to cover and clear.

But if reliability is an issue, then I guess it wasn't such a great feat of engineering after all...

Barry45RPM

Single arm system causes a side to side rocking of the car in heavy rain at stop signs & lights. Personally I thought it looked ugly... but that's just an opinion. My Dad has a 2001 E which I wouldn't have bought because of its so "old world" look against its field of competitors at the time.

Gullwing

I have never seen any problems with the single arm wiper systems.
I have heard they can rip out of the car if the blade is frozen to the windshield, since the motor is so strong.
I think old style two blade systems cover 76%
The single arm system covers 95%
The new style two arm systems cover 97% I think.

Geh

The Single Arm Wiper System Wasn't very Prone to Failure, I honestly in my Time working at a Mercedes-Benz dealership for 6 months hadn't seen one problem with them, My Cars 18 years old and the Wiper is Original And Still Working like the Day it rolled off the Showroom floor

Long Islander

When my brother and his wife bought a 2000 E430, his wife's biggest complaint about the car was the mono wiper. She too said that it rocked the car during slow traffic in heavy rain.

Interesting how other manufacturers had the mono wiper and then abandoned it. Remember the VW Scirocco? And Jaguar XJ-6 starting in 1988?

I always felt that the mono wiper had to travel twice as fast as two wipers to cover the same area, so during a heavy rain it has to really race across the windshield.

Anyone remember Jaguar E-types from the late 60's, perhaps early 70's with THREE wiper blades?

Yacht Master

I believe the new two wiper systems incorporate the eccentric cam on the drivers side. It is basically a scaled down version of the mono wiper. The largest contributing factor to return to two wiper system is dimensional constraints imposed by the size of the windshields, that are smaller top to bottom and wider with greater aerodynamic curvature in it's profile than previous models.

jschade

I had the single wiper arm on a few of my past MB's. I liked it. I hate the constant line of spray that I get down the center of my windshield with the two blade system. It's especially annoying when I use the washer. The blade on the drivers side throws a line of spray down the center of the windshield on the down stroke, so I use the one sweep setting to clear it. The passenger side blade clears the spray on the up stroke, and the driver side blade throws it again on the down stroke. Very annoying.

Barry45RPM

Its sort of a unique feature of the MB blade set up. I don't have that with my other cars. (Maybe 1 extra swipe is necessary on the other cars, but on the MB many are needed.)

Germancar1

Does anyone know of a good aftermarket blade for the 1-arm wiper system? As many have stated here the standard blade isn't that good. I love the design of it though until a heavy downpour, then it can't keep up.

I think this concept could have been perfected, but that would have taken a lot of money to make it quieter, faster and more reliable. The old Mercedes-Benz would have done that, being they were engineering driven. The new Mercedes is engineering + customer driven. Hence the pivot arm on some models on the driver side and a regular arm on the passenger side. I still think this was one of Mercedes' more brilliant ideas.

M

tanktube67

try micheling blades

rkao

I think I disagree with this quote slightly: like all auto manufacturers these days, Mercedes has been driven by cost...or more accurately, cost savings.

Of course we've seen the downside of this goal with the lowered quality and customer satisfaction scores the past few years, all of which MB is now correcting and has already seen some returns on this investment.

I, for one, am sorry to see MB's change from being an engineering company to a consumer products company because the W124 was, and still is, a very solid car - not sure if our W210/211 will hold up as well 20 years after it leaves the assembly line.

ZedStyle

the single wiper is hot, not to mention i've never failed to get a 'wow, that's cool!' the first time someone someone sits in my car and it starts to rain.
the only problem with them is that the ricer crowd thinks you're one of them...




they can't be all bad though, they're making a comeback!



http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/au..._go_go_go.html

Germancar1

Not sure what you're disagreeing with. I think I touched on the fact that in the old days Mercedes would have spent the money and perfected the single-blade idea regardless of what the customer really "wanted". In those days it was what the engineers wanted.

M