Just need to vent...

The car washes both close from December to February. I'm not sure if spraying water would work. Maybe if it were hot enough. When the car washes are open at the begining and end of winter I've sprayed onto the car and it just freezes into a sheet of ice, perhaps melting a little on the area it's directly spraying, but overall just creates more ice.

With lakes here getting up to a couple feet of ice any reservoir outside will freeze solid.

 

Customers swap things around constantly and put things in vacant spots. My Wallie people offer no explanation and I move on. Has happened to me many times, “that’s not the one on sale sir”

 

Yea - ya gotta only spray inside the wheel wells. And if you use a portable warm water reservoir, you can't leave it outside if there's still water in it. It's the same reason we don't fill our dog's outside water bowls.

We have a couple indoor type car wash conveyors that use warm water that gets all the salt and frost off the bottom of our cars. The one we use offers an unlimited use monthly plan. In winter - we drive through there at least once a week.
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Thanks for the tips. But I don't see there being a good solution here. The amount of water needed would be tremendous, and then where would we do it? In the driveway? I'm already battling mounds of snow and ice out there. Even if there were a conveyor belt type car wash here, I don't see that even scratching the surface as to getting the ice off. When I have inches of solid ice packed all around my tires at all-day-long, sub-zero temps the only thing that will get rid of that is picking it off with a hammer and chisel.

Simply put, the fabric wheel wells are just a terrible car design for bitter cold, snowy climates. I wished I had noticed them before buying the Avalon, as I probably wouldn't have gotten it. I definitely will never buy another car with fabric wheel wells ever again.

 

I believe vastly more people drive in conditions closer to +36 than -36 °F, but either don't understand the fogging issues associated with recirculation, or don't think about it until visibility is significantly impaired. I witness this frequently when riding with others, sometimes doing the switching myself if within reach.

 

DO they make aftermarket wheel well liners for the Avalon in your year range that are not .....fabricated?

My truck is a near-base model and thus came without liners for the rear.
Small price to pay being able to buy a $35,000 truck instead of the $50,000 model I figure, but interestingly enough my CFO was bugged enough about it to warrant a search on my part. $100 for vinyl.

Aftermarket truck pieces-parts are more plentiful than Avalon parts by far but I DID see one listing for a 2010.....$49.

 

I found some aftermarket liners for the front, but it's the rear ones that are some sort of felt type of cloth or fabric, and I don't see any for those. Maybe I should look harder.

Thanks, but no thanks. My car budget is still $10,000 max. And at 40 mpg I'm spending enough already for fuel. I don't need no gas-guzzling, oversized, overpriced, get-my-groceries-wet truck just to get rid of cloth wheel well liners.