Flat wiper blades are by now well known as the an indepensible accessory to complete any car personalisation project. Of course, just as many vehicle owners buy them for their modern looks as for their aerodynamic performance.

Originally Flat wiper blades were only available as original equipment on more expensive cars. This meant that if you weren’t lucky enough to own a new car with Flat wiper blades as original equipment, then there was nothing short of a big engineering job that you could do to convert your car to the new flat wiper blade look.

There was then, and still is now, a bit of a sting in the tail for those vehicle owners lucky enough to own a car with Original Fit Flat Blade Wipers. Because the connectors are patented, there’s very little or no competition at all when it comes to choosing replacements. Consequently, the prices can be exorbitant to put it mildly.

Recently, however, several manufacturers have brought out Retrofit Flat wiper blades. These fit virtually any car made in the last 30 years, except unfortunately, those vehicles fitted with Flat wiper blades as Original equipment. For those unfortunate owners, sky high prices remain the norm for the moment.

As well as their looks and aerodynamic advantages, Flat wiper blades have another great advantage over Standard Wiper blades. That is that they are designed and constructed to be one-piece. Standard Wiper blades have a multi section metal frame, and all the sections are joined together by joints with pins or rivets. This is the weakest point of quality Standard Windscreen wipers.

During hot conditions the joints expand and loosen, so allowing the rivet or pin to move and chatter inside the joint. In the immediate term this causes the Windscreen wiper blades to chatter and judder and wipe unevenly. In the medium to long term, the effect of the rivet or pin rattling around in the joint is to stimulate wear, so that, when the joint cools down, it is still loose and chattering, and so the wear accelerates until in the end the wiper blade is chattering at all temperatures and has to be replaced.

At the opposite extreme, very cold temperatures make the joints shrink and tighten. This makes the wiper blade frame stiffen, so it can’t flex to follow the windscreen shape, and in the longer term causes the metal parts to grind into each other and wear each other down. This time the wear only becomes apparent when the wiper blade warms up a bit, when the symptoms are exactly the same as those created by chattering in hot weather.

The One Piece construction of Flat wiper blades doesn’t just look fantastic, it means that they don’t suffer from any of these problems, so they are ideal for use even in extreme temperatures.