As we all know car manufacturers like to add various “improvements” into their cars to make them “different” and that always leads to over-engineering some very simple things to make them more cool. Those over-engineered things might not bother you if your car is new and you don’t have to worry about fixing stuff yourself.
You can say my car is pretty old (from year 2007) but it’s still in a very good condition with a good kit – one of the nice things is Xenon headlights.
It just so happens that time for a technical inspection has come and during inspection the Xenon headlight washer didn’t work properly which was one of the reasons I didn’t pass. For those who don’t know – working headlamp washers are mandatory for every car that has Xenon lights installed. I didn’t know they were not functioning because I never really bothered to check.
When I wrote about over-engineering stuff I was referring to the washers on my car which should be just a simple spray nozzle directed towards the lamp. However someone at Toyota thought that it needs to be more complex as if the car doesn’t have enough moving parts or something so they came up with an idea to have the nozzle hidden inside the front bumper and spring out when you spray washer fluid and then return inside again.
The way this works is with a cylinder which have an arm attached. The cylinder moves from the fluid pressure and that’s when you see it pop out. But this fails completely after some time when the plastic gets brittle and rubber gaskets inside become hardened – then it starts to leak and there’s nothing you can do about it.
My washers didn’t work so I took the car to the repair service to fix them among other things. The service fixed everything but couldn’t repair the washers – they were fubar’ed and needed replacement. But it turns out that this plastic part is not so easy to obtain – no one had used ones and new ones cost absurd amount of money – the service told me each cost 170 euro. FOR WHAT??? Also wait time is two weeks… even used one go around 50-60 euro without a guarantee that they’ll work.
Since they cannot be repaired and I sure as hell won’t pay that much money I decided to “downgrade” them and so I went to a auto-parts dealer and bought universal windshield spray nozzles for 2 euro each.
Installation was very simple – detach the bumper, drill 9mm holes where you want to place the nozzles and fasten them. Disconnect the hoses from old nozzles and connect them to new nozzles (in my case I had to also use a smaller tube), attach the bumper and adjust your nozzles.
I left the original sprayers in their place just to plug a hole.
And this simple thing was enough to pass inspection.
“It either works or it doesn’t” as the inspector said :)
