You’ve activated my “thing”. No one seems to have noticed that the bottom of the ecosystem just fucking dropped out.
When I was a child, dad taught me to always clean the windshield when we stopped for gas, and sometimes in between. I have not done this in years, easily more than a decade.
We drive hundreds of miles of back country highway to pick up my kids. Talking the South here, mostly Alabama which is 77% wooded. Nada.
Screw it, I could tell stories for an hour, too depressing to go on.
Took the words out of my mouth. I used to plan for a car wash after every trip through the countryside. Haven’t done that going on 15 years now. Amazing how few people notice.
A part of it is how car aerodynamics have changed.
My work car has a flatter windshield and gets a lot more bug splatter than my personal car.
This is definitely true. I usually drive rentals and totally noticed how safer tilted windshields are.
While we’re at it, I have a bug/air deflector on the nose of my Subaru and I can report that it does indeed appear to work. My truck, conversely, is just a rolling brick and every bug in the county seems to wind up on its windshield. On the Scoob, they splat into the front bumper instead. Most of the ones above that presumably sail right over the roof, except the really big ones.
Bug strike volume overall in my area has not diminished noticeably since my childhood (i.e. it’s still maddeningly incessant) but that sort of thing appears to be quite localized and I don’t have to go too many miles before I wind up in areas that are eerily free of bugs.
In other news, my primary method of transportation is a motorcycle for much of the year and chiseling the little bastards off of your helmet daily – or multiple times per day – is just a fact of life.
Daily
Almost every day. Rural living.
I mean i live in a rural area (The whole state has less people than the city i grew up in, and my town has <2k people) and the bug splatter is way less than growing up in a top 10 US city as a kid in the 80s-90s.
Every day, over and over and over… I have to keep actual glass cleaner in my car and spray the windshield occasionally—like at stop lights by sticking my arm out the window—because not even the “bug remover” windshield washer fluid works well enough. You need something strong like ammonia to loosen all the protein.
Note: I don’t live in a city.
I am positive that the bug removal windshield washer fluid has never actually worked on bug splatters. Not even if you spritz them immediately when they happen, and even if you did you’d go through two gallons of the stuff per day. It’s all marketing; I’m pretty sure they just take the regular stuff and dye it green instead of blue and charge three times more for it.
The front of my car is pretty splattered with bug remains.
Last week.
But cars tend to have more of a slant to the windows then they used to, so less bugs smack and splatter.
I’m driving the same car since 2006. It’s gone way down.
Well a car from 2006 isn’t going to stay pristine forever so it’s no surprise it’s gone down over the past 20 years.
Maybe this question should also request the responder’s general location, because I imagine the situations vary substantially.
I’ve lived in California for most of my life, and we go on frequent drives between LA and SF, usually a few times a year.
In the 80’s and 90’s bugs would cover the front of our vehicles and the windshield would be difficult to see through even with wipers and washer fluid. We’d actually have to stop to manually scrape them off.
In the 00’s and 10’s we noticed that we’d get basically zero bugs on a long drive, and that sparked many conversations about California environmental law.
I just got back from a drive up the coast and I can happily say that we’re back to insane numbers of bug strikes on the highway. Just north of Ventura I drove through a cloud of large bugs that hit like rocks and instantly covered almost my entire windshield. This situation has been noticably turning around since COVID, which I think is a good thing
80’s and 90’s
'80s and '90s
00’s and 10’s
'00s and '10s
Is there a word missing in that question?
“Splashed” can mean to destroy mid flight I think
