While driving back from a car show today I noticed something I had never seen before. It was raining and I enjoy watching how water comes off the moving vehicles. Most cars and trucks just blow the water off into the big turbulent burble behind themselves. A VW New Beetle passed me on the Interstate and I noticed that the water was coming off the lower rear corners in two nice, twisty vortices. Mini-tornadoes, if you will, like at the end of an airplane wing in flight. Watch for it next time you have to drive in the rain

Very cool! It almost made up for my having to drive The Green Monster 55 miles in the rain.

you're so lucky you have a car nice enough to show...

as for the beetle, it sounds like something interesting to look out for.. too bad it doesn't rain much around here.

Whats neat to watch is the rain on the back of MR2's (Like mine)
It just kind of swirls around on the back of the car instead of behind the car. Very interesting

Man.... thinking about rain... I really hope non of my cars experience hail.

with the back window of my truck open, all the rain comes inside.

my car is horrible with roadspray, it all gets sucked to the back and makes the back hatch/window area nasty

hatchbacks and minivans have a really bad problem with that. Ever notice how dirty the back of them are?

i need some sort of rear spoiler thing like those OEM ones that came on some legacy wagons, the channel which directs air down the back of the rear gate helps keep some of that crap off

I got so lucky 4 years ago when we had a huge hail storm here. My then-new 2000 Honda Odyssey, my '97 Dodge Ram and the roofs on my house and garage got the hell beat out of them. The Honda went to the body shop for paintless dent removal. The Ram wasn't bad or nice enough to worry about and both roofs had to be replaced. The Green Monster was sitting under my aluminum carport as I has a POS boat taking up space in the garage then. The carport had plastic skylight panels in it which got broken. All the aluminum panels in the carport were dented. It looked like someone went ape-shit with a ballpeen hammer. The Green Monster had a thick car cover over it and was sitting under the carport and was unhurt by the plum-to-baseball size hail. That was the weekend we brought my son home from the hospital when he was born.

wow that is lucky, if that had been my car and it had not been protected, teh second i saw the damage i'd probably cry

I wonder what it looks like coming off of a high downforce supercar?

I've seen a high-downforce homebuilt tearing around a wet Auto-X course. The water gets shot upwards rather violently in a big arc. It's pretty neat.

Also, I have a hatch, though it's not the standard short-hatch shape, and the rear window doesn't even get a drop on it if the car is moving forward more than 25 mph or so.

-Jesse

The water coming off the VW was swirling counter-clockwise from the right side and clockwise from the left side, basically from outside to inside, in pretty much a straight horizontal vortex trailing from the lower corner. I wish I had some video of it.

Yeah, my hatches ass doesn't get dirty at all.