Wiper judder ... with a twist
I was driving under heavy rain today which for whatever reason worsened the juddering. The wipers were skipping badly that it even sprang so hard across the glass and hit the black plastic trim at the side of the windscreen a couple of times. Like as if there was an enormous amount of friction holding back the wiper arms from functioning properly.
At some point the wipers actually started slowing down. And I'm not talking about how the wipers automatically switch one speed down when the car decelerates close to a stop. I'm still driving through heavy rain, at about 70km/h, and the wipers start moving very sluggishly over the windscreen. I thought ok, did all that juddering finally screw up the motor? But if I switch the wiper speed up to fast continuous wipe back down to slow continuous wipe where it was, things get back to normal for a while ... before going sluggish again.
My question is, do the wipers have some kind of protection/overload mechanism? The juddering was unusually bad today, and I could see that the wiper arms had to really struggle and push to move the blades. Did the motors sense the extra load and slow itself down to avoid burning out?
Max



