Windshield Wipers not working

Well, it's either electrical or mechanical. Turn them on and poke around to see if you hear the motor doing anything. If you hear it, it's probably a broken linkage. If not, start with the fuses and work from there. If you are under warranty a trip to the dealer might be in order.

 

This may sound stupid and obvious, but see if they are stuck on something (snow, ice, leaves) and cannot move.

 

God Bless RainX

 

the chance of 2 wiper motors breaking at the same time is one in a billion, but there is probably 1 fuse that regulates both, anyone know which fuse box controls the wipers?

 

The OP states that the back wiper is still operational, so we are talking about one wiper motor failure, not two.

Tom

 

I'm told by several auto techs that the number one thing they
get coming in after a mess of icy stuff is ... burnt-out wiper
motors. People just don't think to crack the blades loose from
whatever they're buried in before trying to turn the wipers on.
.
_H*

 

before all else check fuses.

 

Had the same problem on my 2008 Prius few weeks back. If I park the car in the garage, the wipers come back, after 30 minutes driving, they froze again. I end up tearing down the motor and gearbox. There was some rust on the motor bearing, which I cleaned, and the grease in the gearbox was almost solid (not sure if it is as thick on new cars), but I flushed it and replace it with gear grease. Since then, no more problem, and there's been lot of freezing days !

 

I put my front wipers back on and they move but it seems like they are trying to move down further toward the hood they can physically go and they don’t move up. I removed them to take the inverter out and put them back in the same place they were sitting before I removed them. So they move down about an 1/2inch till they hit each other and the hood section and then loosen up at the interval that would be normal during operation. I turned the switch off one immediately. Has anyone ever had this happen to them? The rear wiper is working fine.

 

Take both wiper arms off. Turn the ignition on then turn wipers on, then off. When the mechanism stops, that's the "park" position. Now refit the wiper arms at the bottom of their stroke near the base of the windshield.

Make sure to torque the nuts to spec. If they aren't tight enough, the arms can shift on the pivots and cause your problem (or you didn't put them back correctly- it's happened to me, a couple times). Recheck function.

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For this step, I don't know if Gen 2 has them, but Gen 3 windshields have dots where you can line up the ends of the wiper blades for the parked position.

I'm always very careful putting wiper arms back on. The splines on the shafts and in the arms are very, very fine. That's good, because it gives you a lot of choices of position when installing the arms. It's bad because it's very easy to mash the splines down flat if you ever move the arm around the shaft while it's not fully tightened down.

So I make sure to remove the nuts, then lift the arms straight off. And when putting them back on, I hold the joint carefully straight (against the spring), find the windshield dot to line up the parked position, set the arm straight down onto the shaft in that position, then tighten the nut down to spec without moving the arm.

The repair manual also directs the use of a brass-bristle brush to clean up the shaft and arm splines before reinstalling.