This vegetable keeps ice off your windscreen

Frozen windscreen? Just how cool are all these winter coping tips?

If you’re tired of having to scrape your icy windscreen each morning before setting off, then according to Swiss motoring association, TCS, just cut a potato in half and rub it over your windscreen. Then in your morning rush to get going you won’t have to go through the whole ice-scraping rigmarole. And, there’s an environmental bonus too – no need spray harmful chemicals about.

Great. But it takes time to prepare the potatoes you’ll need and it takes an age to actually smear the starch over the car windows – you have to re-slice the potato every 10 seconds and you’ll probably end up getting messy juice all over your coat when you do it. And what about driving around with potato residue dribbled over your otherwise gleaming paintwork?

And it’s probably no cheaper by the time you’ve bought a kilo of spuds for a week of happy pre-emptive de-icing. Of course it will also be just your luck to persevere with this eco-solution only to discover the next morning that it did not freeze overnight.