Why are a vehicles windshield and rear window laminated glass while the side windows are tempered glass?
Question by Captain Feathersword: Why are a vehicles windshield and rear window laminated glass while the side windows are tempered glass?
And how did the automotive companies decide on laminated for front and rear and tempered glass for the sides.
Best answer:
Answer by Jeff
so when you get debris hitting the front windshield you dont normally get your head ripped off because the laminated glass will stop is usally. not bullet proof but if a brick hit the front windshield most of the time it will not penetrate the lamented glass.
tempered glass on side allows rescuers to break the glass and get people out of the car to save lives without cutting them like a broken glass with sharp shardes would do.
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The automobile companies did not decide on laminated glass for the front. The government mandated it.
The reason why laminated glass is used for the front is so that passengers cannot fly out the car through the front when they hit the glass because the car crashes.
The automobile companies decided on tempered glass for the side windows because tempered glass cost less money.
Windshields are now made of laminated glass because of its greater strength. Laminated glass has two layers of glass bonded together with an inside layer of plastic, usually PVB (polyvinyl butyral). This layer of plastic bonding keeps the laminated glass from shattering to pieces in a collision.
Today, it’s essentially unheard of for someone to be thrown through the windshield in a collision, because laminated glass keeps that from happening. The glass cracks, but it doesn’t shatter and fall, or let a body through it.
Tempered glass, in contrast, is a single sheet of glass that has been heat-treated. When tempered glass windows are impacted in a vehicle collision, they shatter, with two devastating results:
the flying shards of shattered glass can lacerate and severely injure or kill occupants of the vehicle, and
shattered or broken-out windows open up sites of exit from the vehicle, through which an occupant can be thrown. Being ejected from a vehicle in a collision greatly increases the chances of injury or fatality.
My rear window shattered into a million pieces when a tree branch fell on it. 2001 Pontiac. Not laminated.