The 3 Best Ice Scrapers and Snow Brushes of 2025
Top pick
Efficient at clearing ice and sweeping snow, with a 5-foot reach for clearing high roofs and wide hoods, this scraper is best for trucks and SUVs.
The Hopkins SubZero 80037 has the features of an ideal ice scraper: a strong and effective blade, prominent ice-crushing teeth, a sturdy handle with padded grips that locks securely, easy-to-use (and difficult-to-misuse) buttons, and the best brush-broom-plow head we’ve ever tested. It’s plenty big enough to use on trucks and SUVs, yet it collapses small enough to fit in any car.
The 80037’s blade is broad and extremely sturdy. It cleared a windshield of thick, clear ice faster than any other scraper in our tests. The ice-crushing teeth are tall and sharp, and they run from one edge of the 4-inch-wide blade to the other, making it easy to get them into position against the windshield for the broadest possible ice-crushing stroke.
The handle is made of strong aluminum tubing and thick, comfortable neoprene grips that don’t slip in gloved hands. When extended, the handle sections click into place on their own with a confidence-inspiring thunk. Lesser scrapers have looser connections, slippery handles, and sections that don’t lock automatically.
The 80037’s buttons—one to unlock the handle for extension, and a joined pair to adjust the broom head—are standouts. The handle button is a wide, low-profile paddle that’s protected by a bumper. It’s easy to operate with gloved fingers, but unlike designs with an exposed button, it doesn’t unlock accidentally while scraping or sweeping. The broom buttons, one on each side of the broom’s axle, must be pressed simultaneously to adjust the broom’s angle, which is easy to do when you want to but impossible to do by accident.
The combination broom-and-plow head is the best of any we tested, with stiff but non-scratching nylon bristles on one edge, a rubber squeegee on the other that’s rigid enough to push snow off body panels but flexible enough to fit the curves of windows, and a 10-inch-wide extruded-aluminum plow that moves a lot of snow with each pass and stands up to years of work. The bristles sweep snow and ice out of nooks and crannies where other brushes (and foam plows) can’t reach. The head locks into seven positions to optimize the plow angle; competitors’ brooms aren’t as versatile.
Our original 80037 has worked efficiently through 10 New York winters (including a storm that brought 28 inches of snow), and it has proven impressively durable. Despite being stored in a car parked outdoors for that entire time, exposed to summer heat as well as bitter cold, it didn’t show any degradation of the plastic bits or the foam padding on the handle. In fact, it’s recently been passed on to another Wirecutter writer, who likes her own 80037 so much that she wanted a second one—to replace the “crappier” scraper she’s been keeping in the older of her cars.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The 80037’s scraper performs poorly on thin, hard ice or frost, like most scrapers we’ve tried. And though the whole tool collapses to a little over 3 feet, it can’t be fully disassembled, so it takes up significant room in any vehicle.
