Ford's latest green idea is child's play. It's a way to fill your washer fluid bottle on the run, and it comes from an 11 and nine-year-old brother and sister from Germany.
Siblings Daniel and Lara Krohn were on a family trip last summer when their father ran out of washer fluid during and after a major rainstorm. Dad wanted to clean the front glass, but the empty bottle just smeared the glass. That's where the kids came up with the idea to let mother nature refill the washer bottle.
“It was a downpour. There was water everywhere – except in the windscreen wiper reservoir. My sister and I thought this was really funny and then the answer suddenly seemed obvious. Simply reuse the rainwater,” said 11-year-old Daniel, from Jülich, in Germany.
The two worked on their idea to capture rainwater from the windshield and entered it in a local science competition.
"We couldn’t believe that no-one had thought of it before," said 9-year-old Lara. "To try it out, we took apart our toy fire engine and fixed the pump to a model car inside an aquarium. Then we added a filtering system to ensure the water was clean. It just worked really well." They won first prize in the competition.
Ford engineers head about the idea and built it into a Ford S-Max MPV. They used rubber tubes at the base of the windshield to collect and run the water to the washer fluid reservoir.
"Daniel and Lara’s idea has been staring drivers in the face for decades – and it has taken one moment of ingenuity to bring it to life. In less than five minutes of rainfall the washer reservoir is completely full," said Theo Geuecke, supervisor, Body Exterior Hardware, Ford of Europe.
Ford expects water use in vehicles to rise due to the need to keep safety and autonomous driving sensors clean. This is a way to help their water go further. Ford said that European drivers use around 20 litres of washer fluid per year. With 291 million cars on the road there, this system could save six billion litres a year.
It's not Ford's first effort to capture water on the move, they have also shown the prototype for On-the-Go-H2O that gives the driver drinkable water from the car.
