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I have a 2011 car and I have noticed that the windshield has notable scratches. There is no indoor air heater, so I have to manually remove the frost from the windshield when starting on a cold morning. I'm somewhat disappointed by the quickly forming scratches on the windshield, because it may mean I have to replace the windshield before the car gets scrapped. I drive only 5500 km per year, so the risk of having the windshield broken by a stone is minor.

I have a theory of how the scratches form. The theory is that when driving, road grit gets to the windshield. Then, after parking, frost has formed to the windshield on a cold morning, and when manually removing the frost, the grit is harder than the windshield and the manual frost removal causes these scratches to the windshield.

Is this theory correct?

Also, according to this theory I should operate the windshield washers to remove road grit from the windshield just before parking the car. Then, when removing the frost manually, there is no road grit and thus no way of scratches to form. Is this operating of the windshield washers before parking the car beneficial to have a longer windshield replacement interval?

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Your theory sounds good to me. Do run the windshield washers before parking the car. Now, about fixing the current scratches:

There are products that allow you to polish the windshield to remove scratches. In the same way that you would polish the paint. I do it to my car every month, except that I use the regular paint polish rather than the more expensive glass polish. I ran some tests and the results were equal for me. I'm particular of the Meguiar's brand. Polish the windshield once a month to avoid things to stick to it and remove scratches. Good luck.

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  • Which Meguier's product do you use? I have a 2003 Celica GT-S that the previous owner appeared to love to run the wipers on sunny days.
    – Mark Stewart
    May 17, 2016 at 2:41
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    Their standard polish. I know they offer a product to remove scratches from glass but its more expensive.
    – race fever
    May 17, 2016 at 20:20

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