I can attest that. I drive a Land Rover Defender which, you know, has the aerodynamics of a wall. It's full of bugs after driving on the highway for more than 30 minutes.
Sadly, also in Denmark as the article mentions, I’ve only had to clean my windshield once this summer (by clean I mean scrubbing, I do use the windshield washer more often). 1995 Defender.
I only have to look outside at my neighbors winter wheat field to find one of the reasons. It’s been sprayed 3 times already this fall after sowing.
Are you from the US? Never thought anyone would drive them over there because they tend to need repairs quite often and not every shop wants to work on them. And also the thing with the spare parts.
Yeah. I bought mine because it was half the price of a similar year 4runner or similar. I ended up getting rid of it for the reasons you state, but had a blast with it while I had it.
haha, had to be the reason. I would also love a 4Runner, love the look. But the mileage and the eletronics, apart from the fact that they aren't sold in Germany make it nearly impossible.
The new Defenders are awesome. I got to borrow one for the day from a buddy in Colorado and it was the ideal vehicle for the terrain. My only qualm was that the turbo lag felt pretty significant but it scoots once it's all spooled up. Very luxurious and very capable vehicles.
Yeah, agreed. Very capable and probably better than the old ones. But I like my old one because it has almost no tech and I can easily fix things even in Mongolia or something. No computers needed!
> Many smart people we spoke with, including entomologists and wheat farmers, speculated that maybe the cars have changed, not the bugs. As vehicles become more aerodynamic, the thinking goes, their increasingly efficient airflow whisks the bugs away from the windshield instead of creating head-on splatters.
> But when we called experts in the arcane art of computational fluid dynamics, they sounded skeptical. Yes, today’s sleek sedans can have half the drag of the land boats that ruled the road just a generation or two ago. But that improved airflow won’t do much for a bug.
> For starters, many aero improvements happen on the rear of the car rather than the bug-hitting front. Consider the optimally aerodynamic teardrop shape, with its blunt, round front and long, sleek tail. But more importantly, it’s just surprisingly difficult to use air to push a bug out of the way of an onrushing Buick.
> If it were possible to design a bug- and debris-proof car, then Kevin Golsch probably would have done it by now. An auto-industry veteran, Golsch has spent decades around wind tunnels, both real and simulated, and is now vice president for strategic fluid design and simulation at Altair, a global tech company that makes simulation and AI software. Altair’s customers include massive automakers that would be thrilled if airflow could protect both windshields and the delicate sensors on self-driving cars.
> “From an aerodynamic standpoint, I’ve done a lot of studies on contamination of sensors, especially for autonomous vehicles,” Golsch said. “And I think most everybody’s given up on trying to influence what happens at the vehicle level for dust and particles and rain.”
> Consider raindrops. They’re about the size and weight of a larger insect, but nobody thinks fewer raindrops hit our windshields these days. Any forces that cleared our windshield of bugs would presumably do the same for rain and road debris, Golsch said.
> To be sure, one element of modern auto design could be reducing bug spatter. Windshields today often have a lower slope than the more-vertical front windows of yesteryear, and while the broader shift to SUVs and trucks with bigger, steeper windshields will negate some of that, it might reduce splats for people who are driving similar vehicles.
> “If the windshield was laid back slightly more than another windshield, that bug may have a chance of just skipping off and going up over the windshield rather than hitting the windshield,” Golsch said. “It might be a glancing blow at the last second rather than a splat.”
> But we also saw 60 percent declines in insects between 2004 and 2021 in a British study from the Kent Wildlife Trust, which built on a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds effort in which thousands of people used “splatometers” to measure bug splatters on license plates, which aren’t much affected by aerodynamic advances elsewhere.
