The luxury of not having to stand in the cold reaching over the windshield scraping is worth so so so much. Add to that not having to sit in a cold car, waiting for it to warm up, is also worth a lot.
If something is broken to the point that the car can't heat up, yet it's cold that there is thick ice on the windshield I would think twice about driving. Even if you could remove the ice.
No one said anything about anything being broken, just about the ability to remotely heat up the car before starting to drive. Having a heating and having a remote controlled heating that works with the car switched off are two separate things.
Sry, what I meant to say was "No one spoke about the complete heating being broken. Heating is a basic requirement in a car imo. Remote-controllable, engine-off heating is not."
Across decades, I've heard of many cardiac events from shoveling the driveway, but absolutely zero from scraping ice off a car windshield. This correlates to the vast difference in effort required by each action — scooping, lifting and moving tons of snow, vs scraping at a few ounces of ice (which is even easier if you let the car run a few minutes with the windshield defrost on).
Now, if we had car (not trucks setup for plowing) that could automatically clear the driveway, that would be a must-have feature in areas with winter climates...