[edh649]

Mechanical simplicity and standardisation.

The windscreen wiper is very likely to be outsourced to a 3rd party company, and they can reduce costs by having a repeatable design. In terms of a blade going on a straight line, it’s much easier to rotate a wiper blade from a motor than translate that into a linear movement.

It’s worth nothing that other systems exist (https://www.a1-windscreens.co.uk/news/windscreen-wiper-movem...), but much less common.

[kenhwang]

I actually don't think they're outsourced and they're typically designed in-house. I remember the reason being the windshield wipers are almost always engineered last after almost everything else in the engine compartment. So the wiper engineers are typically given very oddly shaped small spaces that they have to fit the wiper system into, and those differ between cars so it can't just be generically outsourced.

Here's a Hyundai engineer talking about wipers: https://www.digitalengineering247.com/article/the-back-and-f...