I think the rear wiper blade is a bit too short to clean a decent size area of the window. I'm sure you could place a longer, by about 2"-4" blade there, but what would fit? Has anyone done this "mod"?
I have no idea....it hasn't rained in so long here in Calif that I haven't even used my rear wiper yet.....hope there is a fix out there
I suspect it would and I have not checked the blade myself. I was hoping some one here had determined what needed to be done and explained how it worked, so now I guess I'm going to have to do it myself,
I tried a 10" blade on there (8" is stock) but it hits the spoiler. Then I got the bigger JDM spoiler, which is slightly different. Tried it again. Hit that too.
I haven't looked closely at it, is it difficult or unique in its mounting or similar to how the front ones remove?
It's a plastic blade - similar to other rear wipers on newer vehicles. You have to snap the cover off the pivot of the arm where the nut is, then you can lift the blade, and you tilt it until it snaps off. Check out a Youtube video first because the force required to do both of these things feels like it's going to break the plastic.
It appears with the original blade holder, the stiffener, not the actual squeegee part, has ends on it to prevent the actual rubber to move and that would make it difficult to increase blade length unless it was possible to fine a similar stiffener, only a bit longer. I guess I just have to live with it for the time being. :-(
Replacing wiper blades on the prius is no different than any other car. Just go to Auto Zone or O'rileys and look up what it takes and buy the blades. Installed like any other blade. Don't just buy the rubber inserts buy the whole blade. You can go 1 in longer or shorter on the blades. I recommend the Rain X blades.
Seriously lar.smith42? Anyhow... to address your actual question, I think you were on the right track with the 10" arm replacement. And I'm reasonably confident that you can't just change to a longer blade on the same arm - even if it physically could be done, you'd have no tension on the outer end of the blade and you'd get no better/more clearing of the window. I live in California too, and I'm quite frustrated at the really small swath of the factory wiper...and it looked like a 10" would be optimal (barring the aforementioned colliding with the spoiler). But I think I've also seen retrofit wiper arms that have multiple pivot points that you can select which one to use at the time of installation (essentially giving you like a 1/4"-1/2" shift in the wiper position, instead of being forced to pivot in the exact center). Since this has not only been an ongoing frustration for me, but now I see others are thinking along the same lines, I'm going to look into the wiper arms I described. I'll post any results here.
This has been tried on here earlier. They were able to put a 10" blade on the OEM arm. His blade didn't hit the spoiler (I think he lowered it down so that only an extra 1" was on either side), but the surface area of the actual blade didn't hit the window anymore. The arm tension didn't push down in the right places.
I know this isn't physically possible on our cars, but some models of the Sienna have a really cool rear wiper that solves this problem by being hidden inside the rear spoiler at the TOP of the rear window. Just something neat.
