When driving through rain, are more raindrops hitting the windshield than if your are stopped?

Question

When driviing through rain, regardless of how hard it is raining, are more drops hitting your windshield than if you are idling, or is it that they are just hitting harder, making it seem like there are more?

Answer 1

I would have to go with the first answer, because if you are going fast, you are only hitting mostly the drops in front and just above you. If you are not moving, you are being hit by only the drops above you. Both of which, are a straight line of raindrops hitting you, so it wouldn't matter if you were moving or not.

Also I would think there would be less raindrops hitting you because of the aerodynamic surface of the windshield. The raindrops ride up over it, like when a bug nearly smacks the windshield, but it just barley lifts up over the windshield, because of the windshield's aerodynamic shape.

Answer 2

Your car is moving and collecting more rain drops. Here is an easy way to visualize this. Say you are standing in a field and butterflies are flying past you and you have a net and trying to catch them. Will you catch more butterflies if you just hold the net still and let the butterflies fly in to it or if you move the net through the air? Same thing with your windshield and rain drops. If your 1 foot wide windshield moves through the rain drops at say 10 feet a second and it take a rain drop 1/2 a second to travel from the top of the windshield to the bottom, then you will have only missed half the rain drops in the 10 foot area but that is still 5 times more than if the windshield did not move.

Answer 3

When the car is stationary the drops fall vertically. when it is moving the velocity of the rain drop is the vector sum of the drop's velocity and the car's velocity.

This will make the drops come at an angle nearer the horizontal.

More drops should hit a moving wind shield, that is the front one. The rear one will have the opposite effect and get less. All in all, the total rain hitting the car mat remain constant whether it moves or not.

Answer 4

I would have to say yes. when you are stopped, you are limited to the rain covering only the area of your vehicle. think of it as if you are traveling at a VERY high velocity, meaning you will hit more rain drops in your path before they have a chance to hit the ground. So, slow this down to a more realistic level and you will hit more drops than if you are at a stop. Just not as many as if you were traveling at 500mph.

Answer 5

Think it is the same. many years ago Yale and Harvard did a similar question. In the rain do you get more wet running or walking the same distance? Think the answer was - same.