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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Scraping By Vehicle Amenities Abound, Until It Freezes

Jess Walter Staff writer

It’s the major failing of the automobile industry in America.

Engineers can design navigational computers, passenger-side airbags and really cool cup holders, but when the temperature drops to 15 degrees, as it did in Spokane this morning, you still have to scrape the ice off your windshield.

“Every fall, I decide I’m going to sell this van,” said Mark Quincy as he scraped his driver’s license across the windshield of a vintage Volkswagen van on West Mansfield in Spokane.

“When it gets really cold, I have to stop every few miles and scrape.”

So what is the automobile industry doing for the people of Spokane as they head into this latest cold snap?

Not a thing.

“It’s not a major focus of work,” admitted David Strickler, a researcher and chemist who designs windshields and other automobile parts for an Ohio company, Libby Owens Ford. “Basically, you’re stuck with ice scrapers.”

Strickler is one of several researchers who send car parts to International Falls, Minn. - which boasts 68 subzero days a year - to see how the parts handle the cold.

Researchers throw rocks at windshields, start and stop cars, turn on the heater, check the brakes, the traction, the paint and the durability. But even the auto industry’s own experts have to scrape their windshields in Minnesota.

Strickler said carmakers have long toyed with building something into the front window - like the electronic grid in a rear-window defroster.

“The problem has always been visibility.”

In the mid-1980s, Ford Motor Co. looked at a special electronic, gold tinting that wouldn’t reduce visibility yet would melt ice immediately.

“It cost too much,” said Francine Romine, a Ford spokeswoman. “If you got one stone chip it was $1,000 to $1,300 to replace.

“And it required so much power, you needed a second alternator.”

What about building little ice scrapers into the windshield wipers?

“That makes no sense,” Romine said.

What about jets of hot water that would melt the ice?

“That could crack the windshield,” said a spokesman for the Minnesota Cold Weather Resource Center, a clearinghouse for cold-weather research.

High-powered lasers fired from that mysterious place where wiper fluid comes from?

“That’s idiotic,” said a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md.

The Spokane woman in a red Mercury Cougar wouldn’t have called ice-melting lasers idiotic.

Instead, let down by a lack of American ingenuity, she peered through a 4-inch defrosted hole in her windshield as she drove through Browne’s Addition on Tuesday.

Researchers insist there have been major innovations in defrosting. The garage, for instance.

The most incredible improvements have come with the ice scraper - like the furry glove attachment, an invention that surely resides in some automotive hall of fame.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said an official at the Henry Ford Automobile Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

So while Japanese automakers most likely are building windshield wiper/scrapers or running tests on that laser idea, American engineers can offer only advice.

“You know what works pretty well?” offered Ford’s Romine. “A VISA card.”

, DataTimes