The wipers on this van did thier own thing when it was cold out. Here it northern Ablerta it gets cold in the winter (between -20C and -40C) and it's in this range it would occur.

While sometimes they'd wipe between 2 and 10 times, when I only told them to go once, the worst time was when I started it one cold morning (roughly the date I selected for this post). When I started the van to warm it up they just went off by themselves. The horrible part of this was that the rubber blades were frozen to the windshield so they ripped off and the wipers proceeded to scratch up my windshield since there was no rubber.

After a second or two of panic I shut the van off. Scratches now in place, I went out and raised the wiper arms so they stuck out in mid air and restarted the van in turn restarting the wipers. They rotated out in mid air for about five minutes before they stopped.

I must say though that this weird wiper thing was the only major complaint I had about that van. Worked great otherwise. Lasted until 270,000 Kms and was still going good but was written off in an accident. :(