Anyone noticed the rear wiper bug?

1. Turn rear wipers on.
2. Turn off the car.
3. Turn the car back on.
4. Notice that the rear wipers don't operate, even though the switch is on.

 

Yes. Mine is same way. Front wipers are kind of the same way. If you leave it in auto, the auto turns off with the car and you need to press the button again to reactivate them (put them back in auto). It's also strange that the rear wipers only have an intermittent function. On top of that, the little tip of the lever is so small, that it's difficult to tell by feel if the rear wiper is on or off. So if I have them on when I stop the car and then I want them on again when I drive again, I can't really tell if the switch is in the on position so I have to rotate it off and then back on. 50% o the time, I inadvertently rotate it to the wash position and waste fluid.

Not a huge deal, but it's certainly a goofy design.

 

I have the same problem, it's hard to tell if the switch is on or not already, so half the time I try to turn them on only to accidentally spritz the rear window.

 

This is by design so that if forget to turn your rear wipers off, they don't accidentally turn on when you don't want them to, like if it's below freezing, to prevent damage to the motors. The front auto wipers also reset after shutdown for this reason, though that may be changing. I noticed on the F60, you can keep the wiper stalk in the auto position (no longer a button), meaning you can leave auto wipers on even after a restart.

 

That might be true, but then the engineers and the UX designers weren't talking to each other. If the system is supposed to be on-only-until-the-car-is-off, then it shouldn't be a mechanical switch. Otherwise you get what we got, which is a switch which indicates one thing but reality is another. I'd have expected better from BMW.

 

Not positive but I recall there is a bit of time delay before the system cycles "off."

As I remember, at least for the front wiper delay function, if you shut down the car and lock it and return within a few minutes, the delay function remains activated. Might be true for the rear wipers as well.

Still, it is odd to have the rear wiper switch "on" when it's really "off." But that's the design and that is the intent of the feature. But hey, we buy these cars because they are quirky, right?