This is something minor that has a major impact on immersion, and something I don't see enough people talking about. Likely because time trials have no weather, and it's rare to see in clubs and even career as well. And most people in general probably don't care, but it's a feature that could probably tweaked and improved by the devs without a lot of time and effort.
Heavy snow eventually touches the glass and starts making it wet, but you need to drive for like over 6 minutes on a longer snowy stage to see it even begin to touch the windshield, and even then the wipers really aren't necessary. For like a month after launch I thought snow just had zero impact on windshield at all and was completely missing until I drove a very long stage in it. It does work, it's just totally broken with how it takes so long to do anything. It still makes me laugh how during the start of the stage in snowfall as the camera pans around the exterior of the car, the whole car and windshield on the outside is soaking wet and covered in droplets, but as soon as you switch to the inside it's perfectly clean and clear and remains that way for the entirety of short and even some medium length stages.
It's extremely lacking compared to the Dirt Rally games, even the first Dirt Rally in 2015 had snowflakes hitting the glass and obscuring visibility, in here there's nothing for a long while, and after driving long enough through heavy snow for it to have some effect, it's just small droplets like light rain, there's no real difference there. I know from living in a cold winter climate that snow can turn to droplets quickly if it's not very cold outside and/or the interior of the car is very warm and radiating heat, but it's still not the same as rain like it is in this game. And as mentioned, even Dirt Rally 8 years ago did a lot more with this stuff there.
Rain also has a very minimal impact on visibility and needs to be cranked up more so that the wipers are actually useful. The worst of this is during stages where weather is dynamic and can start raining halfway through. I timed one of those from when the rain started to when maybe the wipers could be useful and it was about 4 minutes (!), but even then it still wasn't fully necessary. For the first 2 minutes while it was visibly pouring rain, the windshield was perfectly clear like it is in during snowfall, zero droplets on the glass at all. Something is way out of wack with how all these effects are coded. It eventually does something, just takes a while to do so. Still not nearly as busted as the snow is when that's active from the start.
