You’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.
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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 spray-on, wipe-off product that can only be applied to already clean windows, and takes just a minute or two to apply.
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It was a bit difficult to find sleet and snow in Auckland, but we can confirm that it genuinely makes a big difference in the way rain glides off your windscreen. Essentially, the result is much like the way water beads off a freshly polished paint job. During average-type rain, when our test vehicle was travelling at anything above 65kph, the water simply slid up off the screen.
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While we only tested the product 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.
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For a retail price of around $25 for the 473ml bottle such as the one we tried, from most automotive retailers, we’d highly recommend it. We used around 10 squirts of the trigger for an average-sized car window, so can imagine that one bottle would see you right for years to come. Want to get your hands on a bottle, or find out more? Head to rainx.co.nz.