I live in a cold area and neglected to drive my 2012 Malibu for a couple of weeks, so the battery died. I was able to jump it with no issues, but now the windshield wipers don’t work. I hear a whirring sound when I move the lever to turn them on, but nothing happens. At first, I thought some mechanism inside the car may have been frozen, which seemed to be the case with the windows. They didn’t work at first and just gave a little pulse when I hit the button, but they started working after I drove the car around with the heat on for a while. This didn’t seem to work for the wipers though. They are also not frozen to the windshield, as I can easily move them around with my hand. Any thoughts on what might be going on here?
This seems to me that the wipers were frozen to the windshield when you hit the wipers initially, which could have broken the mechanism. The whirring you’re hearing is very likely the wiper motor running while not connected to anything because of the broken mechanism mentioned previously.
If you can move them by hand, then you probably broke something in the mechanism when you turned them on. That happens a lot. You’ll see a lot of people leave the wipers flipped up when there’s going to be snow or freezing rain. Every person you see doing that is doing it because they had to replace a wiper motor assembly or wiper arm transmission that they broke.