Quote:
Originally Posted by 37 RUBY
I find road traffic film and car wash was make the sensor on my XC70 less sensitive/inoperative or even activates on a dry screen.
From my experience if the sensor see's large beads of water it activates quite well but if the water upon the screen is fine/flat the operation is poor.
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This.
The sensor works by firing IR light outwards. When raindrops fall on the sensor, some of the IR is refracted within the raindrop back to the sensor.
This works really well with beads of rain, it works poorly with flat/oily film. It also works well with a flat windscreen, but one that's a few years old with thousands of fine wiper scratches in it then not so well.
You can massively influence the sensitivity of the rain sensor by properly decontaminating and then polishing (ideally machine polishing) the windscreen. You need to use an actual abrasive polish, not just "glass cleaner".