RAIN EXCELLENCE

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ou’d be hard-pressed to find a true car lover who hasn’t heard of Rain-x, but just because a product has been around for decades doesn’t necessarily mean it can live up to the hype. So when a bottle of it arrived on our desks this month — a month that’s been a fairly wet one — we figured now was our chance to put it to the test and see if it’s all that it’s hyped up to be.

According to the packaging, the product treats glass with a “super-slick, non-stick invisible barrier that repels rain, sleet, and snow on contact”.

As you’d expect, it’s a sprayon, wipe-off product that can only be applied to already clean windows, and takes just a minute or two to apply.

It was a bit difficult to find sleet and snow in Auckland, but we can confirm it genuinely makes a big difference in the way rain glides off your windscreen. Essentially, the result is much like how water beads off a freshly polished paint job. At anything above 65kph on our test vehicle, the water simply slid up off the screen during average-type rain.

While we only tested it out on late-model daily driver vehicles, the results would only be amplified in an older vehicle with antiquated window wipers, and certainly worth applying before heading off on a marginal day, or to overnight events. Although we didn’t try it, headlights can also be treated with the same product to help improve night-time visibility, as can shower glass to help water beading.

For a retail price of around $25 from most automotive retailers for the 473ml bottle such as the one we tried, we’d highly recommend it. We used around 10 squirts of the trigger for an average-size car window, so can only imagine one bottle will see you right for years to come.