With the early part of January being particularly frosty this year, many commuters have had to deal with the age-old problem of having to defrost their windscreen before travelling.

There are a lot of ways to clear it, from going at it with a plastic scraper, using a de-icer solution and using your car’s demist system to warm it up, but there are also some rather more unorthodox tricks people try.

Some of these, like pouring a kettle of water onto your windscreen, can cause it to suddenly crack, necessitating an urgent replacement. Others, however, are simply rather odd.

One of the weirdest tricks is to chop a potato in half and rub the juices onto your car windscreen, which is meant to help make it easier to defrost your windscreen without the need for a more expensive alternative.

Does it work? Sort of, but not in the “miracle cure” way that many clickbait articles describe it.

It works as a moisture barrier, stopping water from attaching itself to your windscreen and icing over, but this is dependent on you applying the potato the night before.

It is not so much an antifreeze as a protective coating, similar to but not as effective as placing a windscreen blanket over your car’s windscreen.

One problem with this solution that the AA very quickly notes is that even if it works, the potato juice can potentially smear your windscreen and affect your visibility.

Given that the big issue with ice is how it affects your visibility, and the Highway Code makes it expressly clear that you must be able to clearly see out of your windscreen and side windows, smearing them with a film of potato juice could simply cause another problem.

This could be solved by wiping away or rinsing off the residue the next morning, but it should not be seen as a miracle cure to stop freezing windscreens.