It’s really with a mixture of amusement and concern that I see thousands of Brits setting off every year for their annual skiing holiday. Some of them will have Snow Chains in the back, very few of them will have got winter tyres, and just about none of them will have Wiper Blades capable of withstanding and operating in alpine winter weather.

It seems to be somewhat the same with organisers and participants in extreme trekking trips. To be just, most of these participants will have invested in a robust 4×4 vehicle, and fitted it with tyres suited to the terrain, according to whether they’re journeying into Arctic, Tropical or desert areas. They’ll have got and fitted all types of survival items such as winches, extra fuel & water capacity etc, but as usual the good old Wiper Blades will have been well and truly forgotten or at least taken for granted.

If you’re covering long distances in extreme conditions or in remote parts of the world, clear vision is vital, especially at night, when the wild life start to come out. These can be a problem even in misleadingly urban looking areas of Scandinavia where Moose roam quite freely. These animals are dark coloured, utterly ignorant of traffic dangers, weigh up to a ton and a half, and carry the bulk of that mass exactly at car windscreen height.

To see and avoid these and other dangers, it’s really important to have excellent lighting and High Performance Wiper Blades.

But what are High Performance Wiper Blades and how can you identify them? Well, first it’s probably best to identify what are normal Wiper Blades.

Normal standard Wiper Blades have metal frames with 4, 6 or 8 legs. Each leg has a foot at the end which holds the rubber blade in place. The key problems with this sort of wiperblade are:-

The force holding the Wiper Blades onto the windscreen is patchy, with each foot creating a high pressure point. This leads to patchy wear & thus poor wiping. The joints in the metal frame are subjected to the stresses of expansion & contraction as the temperatures vary. In extremis this causes seizing and wear of the joints, which in turn causes juddering and poor wiping. The joints are also vulnerable to dust and sand attack in desert or arid environments.

Finally, the rubber blade itself is degraded by Ultra-Violet, Ozone, Pollution and the chemicals used to stop the Screenwash Freezing. It also goes rigid in arctic conditions, and so cannot flex to follow the windscreen curve and thus ensure a clean wipe.

Some manufacturers offer a traditional wiperblade frame, and fit it with a silicone blade. They like to call these High Performance Wiper Blades, because the blade itself can endure temperatures down to -60°C whilst remaining flexible, and temperatures up to 200°C without softening or degrading. On top of that the silicone blade is resistant to Ultra-Violet, Ozone, Solvents etc. However such a wiperblade still suffers the drawbacks of the jointed metal frame.

Others offer the new Flat Blade Wipers as their High Performance Wiper Blades. This surmounts the problems of the traditional jointed Wiperblade frame, but if it has a rubber blade, it will still suffer from the drawbacks of operating temperature and vulnerability to environmental and solvent attack.

So the ultimate High Performance Wiper Blades are Silicone bladed Flat Blade Wipers, because its blade operates flawlessly between -60°C and +200°C, and it withstands environmental & solvent attack. On top of that, the frame itself has no joints to seize or wear, and applies the force evenly along the length of the blade.