Tesla is a company that wants to do as many things as it can differently compared to the traditional automotive industry. One of the areas where the company has shown ideas is when it comes to cleaning the windscreen of some of its future models.
You may remember that for the Cybertruck, Tesla proposed (and filed a patent for) a system that relied on laser beams to clear the windscreen of water and debris. Well, after making some noise with that idea, now Tesla is again making headlines with another unique way it wants to clean the windshield of the upcoming Roadster model.
This patent (which has already been approved by the U.S. Patent Office on January 12) doesn’t preview anything nearly as exciting as lasers, but it is still sounds pretty cool, if a bit complicated and hard to grasp at first:
The disclosed electromagnetic wiper system may include a linear actuator that may include a guide rail and an electromagnetic moving block. The guide rail may include a plurality of permanent magnet bars that may be disposed horizontally along a curvature of the windshield of the vehicle. The electromagnetic moving block may act as an electromagnetic train, and may include a plurality of perforations and at least an electromagnetic coil that surrounds the plurality of perforations in the electromagnetic moving block. The linear motion of the electromagnetic moving block through the plurality of permanent magnet bars may be controlled to steer the wiper arm that may be coupled to the electromagnetic moving block, back and forth across the entire length of the windshield to wipe a defined region, for example, the entire transparent area (i.e., near cent percent area) of the windshield. This may result in minimal friction during the linear motion of the electromagnetic moving block.
Basically this means there will be wiper connected to an electromagnetic linear actuator and it will have the ability to wipe nearly one hundred percent of the screen’s surface. In theory, it should provide considerably better coverage than conventional wipers and allow the car to hide its (single) wiper blade completely (under the rear edge of the hood) when it’s not in use.
We don’t know if this innovative windscreen wiping system will make it into the final production version of the Roadster, expected to debut around the summer of 2022 and potentially blow any and all performance cars (electric or otherwise) out of the water.
