The winter cold snap has lasted a remarkably long time, which means that some people have been caught out with a frozen windscreen during particularly chilly mornings.

The best way to fix this is to use the car’s defrost setting to help melt the ice, but there are a lot of makeshift solutions that are far less effective and can be potentially dangerous.

Boiling a kettle and pouring that onto the windscreen is a quick way to crack it and force you to contact a windscreen replacement service, but an alternative solution is just as bad and potentially illegal.

According to the Bucks Free Press, one motorist attempted to drive with just eye holes made into the windscreen and was cautioned by the police as a result.

The Highway Code states that windscreens and windows must be kept free from obstruction, which a couple of vision holes simply do not do.

Besides this, cutting holes in a windscreen is potentially hazardous, as most of the tools used to drill into windscreens generate a lot of vibrations which can reverberate and intensify cracks.

Professionals use specialist drills as part of a technique to add repair material to a windscreen to fix it, but this is not something that can readily be attempted at home.

Many windscreens have sensors, meshes and technology built within the glass which helps with climate control, windscreen wiper usage and other important components. The holes in the windscreen can affect this.

As well as this, debris can make its way through the holes to potentially cause injury.

Finally, the superstition that cutting holes in the windscreen has been thoroughly disproved in motorsport on multiple occasions. A tactic in the early years of rallycross was to cut holes in the windscreen to provide sight holes during wet and muddy races, but one driver who tried it immediately crashed out of the race.