Reverse driving accounts for just 1% of all driving time, yet it’s responsible for roughly 25% of all accidents. A dirty backup camera in winter, mud season, or on dusty country roads is not a hypothetical inconvenience but a genuine safety liability, one that most drivers have resigned themselves to either living with or solving by stepping out of the car every time. Mike Klein, a Vermont-based tinkerer with a characteristically no-nonsense approach to annoying problems, got fed up enough to build a solution in his garage. What started as a Ziploc-bag-and-zip-tie prototype strapped to his license plate has turned into the Lens Lizard, a compact, self-contained, remote-controlled backup camera washer that just hit Kickstarter and has absolutely run away with its funding goal.
The concept is beautifully blunt. Lens Lizard mounts behind your license plate, sandwiched discreetly between the plate and the bumper using your car’s existing screw holes. No drilling, no wiring, no running tubing through door gaps or under trim panels. The whole install takes under five minutes with a standard screwdriver, and once it’s on, it’s invisible. The unit itself houses a fluid reservoir, a battery pack, and a high-pressure nozzle that you aim at your camera once during setup and then never have to touch again. When your backup camera gets caked in snow/ice or road salt on a grey January morning, or buried under a slush splatter from the truck overtaking you on a Vermont highway, you press a wireless remote button from inside the car and a jet of washer fluid blasts the lens clean. Sort of like a lizard or a chameleon striking its prey with a sharp, swift flick of its tongue. Except this time, it’s a concentrated jet of soapy water. Maybe a Pokémon reference would work better but I don’t want Nintendo’s lawyers sending me a cease and desist.
Designer: Mike Klein
Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $149.99 ($50.99 off) Hurry! Only 5 days left.
The engineering philosophy here is aggressively practical. Klein explicitly designed the Lens Lizard for Vermont winters, which means sub-zero temperatures, aggressive road salting, heavy snow, and the kind of freeze-thaw cycling that destroys lesser materials. The housing is sealed and built from automotive-grade materials, and the battery and fluid reservoir are sized to last four-plus months between refills and recharges, meaning you top everything up roughly once per season.
Maintenance is a non-event: open the latch, refill with washer fluid, charge via USB-C, close it back up. Klein’s origin story is worth noting too, because it gives the product a satisfying internal logic. He tried hydrophobic lens covers (they peeled), ceramic coatings (they did essentially nothing), and eventually decided to just build a scaled-down windshield washer system for his license plate. The first prototype was, by his own admission, ridiculous. But it worked, and that was enough to tell him the idea had legs.
Lens Lizard works with any vehicle where the backup camera sits above the license plate, which covers 99% of cars on the road, pickup trucks very much included. The product ships with assorted license plate screws to handle different fastener sizes, and the adjustable nozzle lets you dial in the spray angle for your specific camera position during initial setup. After that, the unit lives its entire life tucked behind the plate, completely out of sight. The wireless remote is puck-shaped and lives wherever you keep it in the cabin, a glove box, a cupholder, the center console.
The Lens Lizard starts at just $99 for the entire kit as an early bird discount off its $149 price tag. A dual bundle costs $189 if you’ve got two cars, and all bundles include the Lens Lizard unit, a wireless remote, a battery pack, and an assortment of screws to help you install the gizmo on your car. Given its specific design (and that every nation has a different license plate), the Lens Lizard only ships to the US and Canada for now, although I’m sure a more universal version is in the works. Production is slated to begin in April 2026, with shipping to backers planned for May. For drivers in cold-weather states, high-dust regions, or anywhere that sees serious road grime, it’s a hard value proposition to argue with. Certain premium vehicles have had integrated camera washers for years, quietly tucked into the bumper plumbing. Klein has simply figured out how to give everyone else the same result for under a hundred bucks, no dealer visit required.
Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $149.99 ($50.99 off) Hurry! Only 5 days left.
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