Sounds like my wife’s car, which is over 10 years old.
Except these:
I think every car I’ve owned for my driving (I’ve bought cars for others, like my wife).has had a back windshield wiper. Going back 40 years. It is one of several required safety features.
Just beware of this one. There’s also the option to turn them off completely (say, you’re in the airport cell phone lot, facing another car, it’s cold enough that you want to keep the engine on but you don’t want to cause the person across from you to fly into a fit of rage because your damn headlights are continually blaring in his eyes, so you kindly turn them off like a reasonable, thoughtful person would). Have you ever noticed lately that quite a few people are driving around in the dark without their headlights on? This is why. They forget that they have to turn them on again.
My 20+ year-old car turns on the daytime running lights immediately upon starting (front only) AND the actual-strength headlights turn on automatically if dark enough, or I can choose to keep them on. Fun thing: the actual-strength headlights turn on automatically only after the hand-brake (a real one, not a button) is released.
When I first bought it, well-meaning but ignorant drivers would “warn” me that my lights were on during the day. Those lights were so other drivers could see my car (I guess it worked!) in sometimes harder to see days, like fogs or sunrise/set in one’s eyes.
Remember the car company Saturn? They had a commercial about this…people yelling at the driver, “Hey, numb nuts, your lights are on!!!l” [might not be a direct quote from the commercial] and the tagline was something along the lines of “thanks for noticing “.
When I started working in the actuarial world, about 40 years ago, a new actuarial student wanted to save money on his car, so he was looking for a car without a heater. No A/C was a given, but he wanted to see if he could save more without a heater.
I dislike this feature greatly. In theory it sounds great - save the environment or gas or whatever, but my car has a separate battery for this, and I’ve already had to replace the battery even though the car is only a few years old. Research online confirmed that the battery isn’t strong enough to handle starting the car repeatedly. So I turn this feature off pretty much every time I get in the car. Luckily it’s just a button.
