On my way back home with my new
MCS this Monday morning, I woke up in Clayton, New Mexico, with a few inches of snow on the ground and a heavy snow coming down.
I also have the cold weather pack, which includes the heated mirros and washer jets.
While the heated mirrors worked great, I had a bit of a problem in the wiper area. I was driving along the highway (two-lane with no divider) in a few inches of slush, and every now and then a truck or other large vehichle would come along the other lane and give the MINI quite a dousing in slush.
Almost always that was fine, but on one pass in particular a snowplow coming the other way threw a HUGE wave over me. After that point I had some fairly substantial amount of icy slush trapped in my washer blade, and the top half of my wipers really didn't do anything for me except smear more slush across my windshield. If I stopped the wipers in fact things got a bit better as the liquid was forced off the windscreen by the wind. Eventually I stopped and removed the trapped slush blob, and all was well after that.
From this experience I personally think the heated washer jets are more to keep the nozzles clear so the fluid will reach your windshield (a problem I had with my previous car) than a stream of magma that will melt everything before it. I tried giving my iced up wipers a long and healthly dose of liquid, all to no avail - it took manual intervention.
What I was thinking would be great option after that, was heated wiper blade holders!! Now that would be a great innovation.