Cold mountain climate owners: how necessary is your heated windshield or rear wiper if you have them?

[lukine]

Hello folks! I'm seriously considering upgrading to a Macan this year. I live in Vancouver, and one of the nice things here is that the CPO market is always turning up almost new cars (some under 10.000km!) due to how many people lease cars, for much better prices than new, and used cars enjoy lower taxes too, so overall you can save a lot buying a CPO.

However, with the Volvo wagon I have today, I suffer a lot with the grimy road conditions we have in BC in winter when travelling, especially with sludge and salted snow making it impossible to see from the rear window without a rear wiper. Many of the Macans I see listed omit the rear wiper, and some also omit the heated windshield.

My Volvo doesn't have a heated windshield, but boy do I wish it did when driving up the mountains in winter… Having to crank the heat up to keep the windshield clear heats up the cabin and opening the windows just gets more moisture in. Awful.

So my question is: if you have those options, do you see them as essential? Since the car has a hatch trunk shape I would expect it to need a rear wiper, but Porsche making it an option tells me it might not.

And the heated windshield is something I never had so I don't know how effective it is.

Since buying CPO is almost a lottery when it comes to options, I wanna know if I should really prioritize those.

Thanks in advance!

I have both options, and the rear wiper doesn’t get used a lot honestly. Only thing I sometimes use it for is when there’s snow accumulation and I am lazy to clear it so I clear it with the wiper

The windshield heater however I use more often. But I believe that’s standard.

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[lukine]

99km north of you, more or less - the rear wiper is close to essential for me. And the standard washer for the rear camera is even more essential! The back of the Macan is the biggest grime-magnet of any car I’ve owned.

The windscreen is probably useful but since I don’t know how foggy the screen would be without it (there’s no on/off switch) I can’t be certain.

I do like the rear camera washer, however when you don’t use it for a while, it seems to stop working. Have you run into this issue at all? In order to get it working again, I have to continuously run it until fluid comes back out. It seems the washer fluid dries up inside the line and it takes a while for the pump to push new fluid back through the line.

 

[robrain]

I do like the rear camera washer, however when you don’t use it for a while, it seems to stop working. Have you run into this issue at all? In order to get it working again, I have to continuously run it until fluid comes back out. It seems the washer fluid dries up inside the line and it takes a while for the pump to push new fluid back through the line.

Yup! When we first got the car I thought the feature was useless - turns out it needed priming as you suggest. Winter in the Whistler bubble means it gets regular use so it hasn’t failed since.

 

[shawn]

Also in BC,
The wiper is very handy given all of our rain but heated windshield not really

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