Disclosure: I work for a car company, not on this.
If you want to be prepared for automotive incidents:
1. Check your mood and intoxication level before and while driving. Mood is more important than everything besides drugs and alcohol.
2. Left turns (or across traffic as applicable) are dangerous. Take extra care while turning left (or across traffic).
3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
4. If your car has pushbutton electronic door openers, PRACTICE opening the door without battery power.
One of my pet peeves about screen UIs is that they're worse than they need to be for night use. Modern dark themes are blue-heavy, which negatively impacts both pupil response and bleaching more than colors of the same luminance with more green and red.
>3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
On that note, if anyone with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, et al. would like to revisit the way their apps handle ride assignment - specifically, the way platforms generally refuse to assign orders when the car is stationary, but then inundate contractors with notifications that must be responded to immediately when the car is in motion - it'd be much appreciated.
I bought a fire extinguisher recently but I’ve never used one. I have a faint idea of how it works and what kind of result I’d get based on what I’ve seen on TV. But if a serious fire ever breaks out I don’t even know if I’d even remember to grab and use it.
The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate. Manufacturers can stick with tempered glass if they beef up the side curtain airbags enough to prevent ejection, which is exactly what happens on a lot of base models and rear windows to keep BOM costs down. The list of brands using laminated glass is accurate, but it applies mostly to their premium trims or front rows only.
There is also the issue of fleet turnover. With the average age of US vehicles pushing 13 years, the install base is still overwhelmingly tempered glass. Writing off the tool entirely because new luxury cars have moved on ignores the reality of what people are actually driving. You are statistically much more likely to be trapped in a 2012 Civic than a 2025 S-Class.
The smartest thing to do would be to check your car’s windows for any indication (the AAA report, page 19, cited in the article has examples) of whether they’re laminated or tempered. AFAICT, whether my new-ish Subaru Ascent’s windows are laminated depends on location (front or rear) and installation differs between the Ascent trims. Best to check for your specific car and where you’re likeliest to be sitting.
> The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate.
Nope. The article states the following just after the table:
> It's true that not all automakers have switched over to laminated glass for the side windows; the FMVSS 226 law stipulates that you can get around it if you install elaborate side airbags that also prevent ejection.
As the grandparent points out, although the article says that, the actual regulation does not. The regulation says you have to prevent side ejections, it doesn’t say how. You can read it yourself:
> Ejection mitigation countermeasure means a device or devices, except seat belts, integrated into the vehicle that reduce the likelihood of occupant ejection through a side window opening, and that requires no action by the occupant for activation.
Lamination and side airbags seem to be the way it’s usually done today, but nothing prevents a better way.
None of these glass breakers are any good at what they're supposed to do anyways, I'd wager all of their websites delinate that they are for tempered glass only. What you want is porcelain or ceramic.
Unfortunately, afaik, porclean/cermaic glass breakers are illegal in most states. They are "Burglary Tools".
Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
A ceramic glass breaker isn't going to be any better than the metal tools on laminated glass, breaking the glass is only half the battle, you've still got to get through the intact glass pane held in place by the plastic laminate.
>Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
But then you've got to keep a tool to break the spark plug to give you a sharp ceramic shard to get through the glass.
That old spark plug thing was from when cars had tempered side windows, wasn't it? I don't see how those would be particularly effective at dealing with lamination.
I fail to see how any of your suggestions are going to do any better on laminated glass. Breaking the glass isn’t the problem here, it’s the lamination.
Laminated glass does not prevent routine stone chip events – if a tiny fragment of the stone becomes wedged in the outer ply or at the laminate interface at a tension point and, coupled with the temperature difference (inside the cabin vs ambient), cabin pressure and body flex that often place higher tensile stress lower on the windscreen, the crack can start propagating very quickly.
That was my experience earlier in the year: I was driving alongside a large fuel tanker on a city road when a tiny stone chip, probably thrown up from under the tanker’s tyres, struck the front windscreen. It took about an 1 ½ hour for the initially invisible crack to spread into an irreparable 30 cm one – effectively right in front of my eyes – and the windscreen had to be replaced. Lesson learned: do not drive anywhere near large trucks or fuel tankers or maintain a larger distance.
But the laminated glass will prevent the structural collapse of the windshield and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards. It is also more likely that the windshield will withstand an impact from a large stone, leaving a localised and static crack that can be repaired with resin.
Similar experience with a 2010 Honda Odyssey, drove it for 10 years and never saw a crack even though I'm sure it took a beating.
Then we got a 2022 Passport and I swear every single trip has a new crack or chip. I was surprisingly fortunate to be talked into the windshield warranty as the sales guy has been through this exact thing and replacing these windshields with assistive tech is expensive. That warranty has already paid for itself and more including once full windshield replacement.
The table from the report shows that the tools do crack the window but don't break it. Which is probably the main difference between old glass and the newer layered glass? If you crack an outer layer it is no longer usable, but you can't escape through it.
Usually the glass companies force you to pay it. For “safety”. It’s just a “you have a nice car so we’re gonna charge you more” fee.
I’ll probably be doing my own windshield on my Tesla to avoid this. Safelight has decent prices but whacks you with a huge fee for pressing “calibrate” in the service menu, which is user accessible.
Not sure about the "car falls into the lake" scenario, but I know some women who carry these for fear of a crazed Uber driver who might lock them in the car.
You are assuming a crazed uber driver is smart and knowledgeable enough to do that, but 90% of people driving ubers to start with are doing so because they don't have those kind of skills or knowledge.
I've used one (in training). Works great, nice clean cuts, but still a little slow. Quicker to just use an axe which, if you're a firefighter, you have handy. (Carefully chop around the perimeter of the windshield or side window. Use gentle blows to minimize dispersion of broken glass within the cabin.)
> "The fantasy being peddled by the toolmakers is: You will crash, remain conscious, find that your car has burst into flame or is slowly sinking in water, find that you cannot undo your seatbelt, yet are still able to reach for this specialty tool, slice through your seatbelt, then smash the window open and climb free to safety."
Uh huh... Now consider this scenario; you lose control and crash into a tree. You are out and your car catches fire. Who gets to the scene first? Firefighters, or probably just whichever randos happened to be right there when it happened? Probably the later. Probably for the best if one of them is able to break your window and pull you out.
I think there's an impossibly thin line between making glass that's easy to break through on purpose, but hard for a high speed head to break through in an accident.
I'm fairly sure that the two lines are way past each other, on the wrong side. The force with which you'll be flung against the glass is much higher than what you can punch.
This law is intended to protect belted occupants as well. The target here is rollover crashes where belted occupants may still be jostled partially free from the belt and be partially ejected.
> Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.
Then it logically follows that either the only defensible approach is to not have any safety solutions, or that there simply isn’t a defensible approach.
The tradeoffs are unavoidable, a seatbelt or airbag might very well kill someone despite saving countless lives. Even tech like lane departure warnings will almost inevitably distract and kill someone.
This is literally the logic anti-seatbelt folks use. “I don’t wear a seatbelt because if I’m in a crash, the seatbelt could end up trapping me in a fire.”
Safety design very often involves trade offs. The chances you get partially ejected and killed during a rollover are meaningfully higher than the chances you die because you can’t break the glass to get out. Do you even keep a glass breaker in your car or do you imagine after surviving a wreck that’s trapped you inside your car that you will have the strength to just punch through a glass window?
I'm going to guess that you don't work on safety engineering. All safety designs have tradeoffs. Airbags can kill you but we still use them because the probable benefits outweigh the risks.
Airbags do not kill people. There were fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths of the course of two decades, and the vast majority of those deaths were caused by not wearing a seatbelt.
The problem isn't that doors don't unlock, it's that you can't open the door against the massive water pressure, or against the door crumpling in itself and ruining the mechanism.
As others mentioned, it is an achievement from Half Life episode 2. Player has to carry a garden gnome to the end of the game. Which is not too bad, minus the extensive driving sections (sometimes under fire) where the gnome is bouncing around the vehicle.
It is a fun feather in your cap, but definitely not suitable for a first run through of the game.
The problem isnot cracking the glass. The problem is breaking it apart enough to get through. Your reference joke is not quite appropriate to this context.
Why should they exit a car over a speeding ticket? A speeding ticket is not a jail sentence and does not warrant an arrest. In fact unless a driver is actively trying to harm somebody or has an active arrest warrant there is no reason whatsoever for them to leave their car or allow cops to remove people from cars.
In some states, it is the law that officers can order you to step out of the vehicle during any valid traffic stop, regardless if it is criminal or civil.
In some states it is the law that if you are from out of state and get a speeding ticket, you either have to pay the officer in cash while you are stopped or they can take you to jail until money is posted or it is your court date.
This happened to a friend of mine from Wisconsin, visiting me in Michigan about ten years ago. I was shocked to learn this was actual Mochigan law, and could hardly believe it even after verifying it. He felt very “lucky” to have had several hundred dollars in cash to simply hand over to the officer. Michigan only just rescinded those laws in 2019: https://landline.media/michigan-laws-end-roadside-cash-payme...
The fact that you're trying to optimize for "police serving speeding tickets to insane sovcits" over "getting flung out of the car in an accident and being crushed by the car" makes me glad you don't design cars.
Disclosure: I work for a car company, not on this.
If you want to be prepared for automotive incidents:
1. Check your mood and intoxication level before and while driving. Mood is more important than everything besides drugs and alcohol.
2. Left turns (or across traffic as applicable) are dangerous. Take extra care while turning left (or across traffic).
3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
4. If your car has pushbutton electronic door openers, PRACTICE opening the door without battery power.
One of my pet peeves about screen UIs is that they're worse than they need to be for night use. Modern dark themes are blue-heavy, which negatively impacts both pupil response and bleaching more than colors of the same luminance with more green and red.
>3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
On that note, if anyone with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, et al. would like to revisit the way their apps handle ride assignment - specifically, the way platforms generally refuse to assign orders when the car is stationary, but then inundate contractors with notifications that must be responded to immediately when the car is in motion - it'd be much appreciated.
if you coudlld just remove the screens except for nav/media thatd be great
I bought a fire extinguisher recently but I’ve never used one. I have a faint idea of how it works and what kind of result I’d get based on what I’ve seen on TV. But if a serious fire ever breaks out I don’t even know if I’d even remember to grab and use it.
The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate. Manufacturers can stick with tempered glass if they beef up the side curtain airbags enough to prevent ejection, which is exactly what happens on a lot of base models and rear windows to keep BOM costs down. The list of brands using laminated glass is accurate, but it applies mostly to their premium trims or front rows only.
There is also the issue of fleet turnover. With the average age of US vehicles pushing 13 years, the install base is still overwhelmingly tempered glass. Writing off the tool entirely because new luxury cars have moved on ignores the reality of what people are actually driving. You are statistically much more likely to be trapped in a 2012 Civic than a 2025 S-Class.
It did cover that. And half the tools couldn’t break the tempered glass either.
The smartest thing to do would be to check your car’s windows for any indication (the AAA report, page 19, cited in the article has examples) of whether they’re laminated or tempered. AFAICT, whether my new-ish Subaru Ascent’s windows are laminated depends on location (front or rear) and installation differs between the Ascent trims. Best to check for your specific car and where you’re likeliest to be sitting.
> The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate.
Nope. The article states the following just after the table:
> It's true that not all automakers have switched over to laminated glass for the side windows; the FMVSS 226 law stipulates that you can get around it if you install elaborate side airbags that also prevent ejection.
As the grandparent points out, although the article says that, the actual regulation does not. The regulation says you have to prevent side ejections, it doesn’t say how. You can read it yourself:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.226
> Ejection mitigation countermeasure means a device or devices, except seat belts, integrated into the vehicle that reduce the likelihood of occupant ejection through a side window opening, and that requires no action by the occupant for activation.
Lamination and side airbags seem to be the way it’s usually done today, but nothing prevents a better way.
None of these glass breakers are any good at what they're supposed to do anyways, I'd wager all of their websites delinate that they are for tempered glass only. What you want is porcelain or ceramic.
Unfortunately, afaik, porclean/cermaic glass breakers are illegal in most states. They are "Burglary Tools".
Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
A ceramic glass breaker isn't going to be any better than the metal tools on laminated glass, breaking the glass is only half the battle, you've still got to get through the intact glass pane held in place by the plastic laminate.
>Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
But then you've got to keep a tool to break the spark plug to give you a sharp ceramic shard to get through the glass.
Exactly. It’s the plastic middle layer that screws you.
That old spark plug thing was from when cars had tempered side windows, wasn't it? I don't see how those would be particularly effective at dealing with lamination.
I fail to see how any of your suggestions are going to do any better on laminated glass. Breaking the glass isn’t the problem here, it’s the lamination.
Broken spark plugs are also known as "ninja rocks," for what it's worth. Also considered illegal burglary tools in some states.
Would a spark plug work on laminated glass?
Or when in something with windows like a Cybertruck maybe a 45
Whats weird is that I know of at least 8 “modern cars” 2018+ that all have had cracked windshields.
3 of them are mine, my 2002 car has taken huge rocks like a champ…
Its big glass im telling you, esp because the recalibration stuff for Assistive Steering is like 7-800 bucks.
Laminated glass does not prevent routine stone chip events – if a tiny fragment of the stone becomes wedged in the outer ply or at the laminate interface at a tension point and, coupled with the temperature difference (inside the cabin vs ambient), cabin pressure and body flex that often place higher tensile stress lower on the windscreen, the crack can start propagating very quickly.
That was my experience earlier in the year: I was driving alongside a large fuel tanker on a city road when a tiny stone chip, probably thrown up from under the tanker’s tyres, struck the front windscreen. It took about an 1 ½ hour for the initially invisible crack to spread into an irreparable 30 cm one – effectively right in front of my eyes – and the windscreen had to be replaced. Lesson learned: do not drive anywhere near large trucks or fuel tankers or maintain a larger distance.
But the laminated glass will prevent the structural collapse of the windshield and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards. It is also more likely that the windshield will withstand an impact from a large stone, leaving a localised and static crack that can be repaired with resin.
Similar experience with a 2010 Honda Odyssey, drove it for 10 years and never saw a crack even though I'm sure it took a beating.
Then we got a 2022 Passport and I swear every single trip has a new crack or chip. I was surprisingly fortunate to be talked into the windshield warranty as the sales guy has been through this exact thing and replacing these windshields with assistive tech is expensive. That warranty has already paid for itself and more including once full windshield replacement.
The table from the report shows that the tools do crack the window but don't break it. Which is probably the main difference between old glass and the newer layered glass? If you crack an outer layer it is no longer usable, but you can't escape through it.
> the recalibration stuff for Assistive Steering is like 7-800 bucks
Yeesh at that point I'd just be buying a Comma.
Usually the glass companies force you to pay it. For “safety”. It’s just a “you have a nice car so we’re gonna charge you more” fee.
I’ll probably be doing my own windshield on my Tesla to avoid this. Safelight has decent prices but whacks you with a huge fee for pressing “calibrate” in the service menu, which is user accessible.
Can I still remove the headrest and use it to break glass?
Not sure about the "car falls into the lake" scenario, but I know some women who carry these for fear of a crazed Uber driver who might lock them in the car.
The crazy Uber drivers would replace their windows with plexiglass if that caught on.
You are assuming a crazed uber driver is smart and knowledgeable enough to do that, but 90% of people driving ubers to start with are doing so because they don't have those kind of skills or knowledge.
Well, this is a whole different kind of ignorant.
I think the crazy kidnappers might have another reason for doing it other than lacking skills.
Your threat model is incoherent.
You can just carry the Ripper.
https://www.aoe.net/product/the-ripper-window-glass-cutter/
Expensive, and pretty bulky to carry around along with an impact driver. There are less expensive, more compact hand-operated tools, e.g.:
https://www.lifelinerescuetools.com/products/lifeline-escape...
https://www.ajaxrescuetools.com/prod-20-1-127-28/extrication...
I've used one (in training). Works great, nice clean cuts, but still a little slow. Quicker to just use an axe which, if you're a firefighter, you have handy. (Carefully chop around the perimeter of the windshield or side window. Use gentle blows to minimize dispersion of broken glass within the cabin.)
Victorinox tried to address this with this tool, not sure how successful https://www.victorinox.com/en-DE/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...
There is a video of this tool being used to cut windshield (laminated) glass. It is not remotely practical:
https://youtu.be/LEHl6_ye9as?si=68rwouxAHWcurZ5O&t=73
Because it's slow to use? The video does show it working fine. For the "someone locked me in the car" use case it seems OK?
404. This one, perhaps?
https://www.victorinox.com/en-DE/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...
404 from US IP address.
Rescue tool?
https://www.victorinox.com/en-US/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...
“It's easy to convince EDC people to buy EDC things. But how do you convince non-EDC folks to buy your product?”
Am I the only one who doesn’t know what EDC is?
I didn't know either, Google of just "EDC" figured it out though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyday_carry
Oh cool. I bought the same model as that image for my girlfriend's kid yesterday
Simple. Just make sure you test your glass breaker on your car side window before you drive off the road or bridge into a deep lake.
> "The fantasy being peddled by the toolmakers is: You will crash, remain conscious, find that your car has burst into flame or is slowly sinking in water, find that you cannot undo your seatbelt, yet are still able to reach for this specialty tool, slice through your seatbelt, then smash the window open and climb free to safety."
Uh huh... Now consider this scenario; you lose control and crash into a tree. You are out and your car catches fire. Who gets to the scene first? Firefighters, or probably just whichever randos happened to be right there when it happened? Probably the later. Probably for the best if one of them is able to break your window and pull you out.
Yes, which is why the article reaches that exact conclusion.
I wonder why is this not part of the standard safety tests. It can be done before a crash test, for instance.
What exactly are you proposing gets tested? The windows are supposed to be hard to break so people don’t fly out of them…
Hard enough to not fly out accidentally but weak enough that people can break them on purpose so they're not trapped inside.
I think there's an impossibly thin line between making glass that's easy to break through on purpose, but hard for a high speed head to break through in an accident.
I'm fairly sure that the two lines are way past each other, on the wrong side. The force with which you'll be flung against the glass is much higher than what you can punch.
This isn’t about punching, it’s about using one of those handheld devices with a pointed metal tip.
Most tempered glass does it just fine and has for decades.
That's what seat belts are for. Making unbreakable glass is morally repugnant.
This law is intended to protect belted occupants as well. The target here is rollover crashes where belted occupants may still be jostled partially free from the belt and be partially ejected.
Not relevant. Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.
> Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.
Then it logically follows that either the only defensible approach is to not have any safety solutions, or that there simply isn’t a defensible approach.
The tradeoffs are unavoidable, a seatbelt or airbag might very well kill someone despite saving countless lives. Even tech like lane departure warnings will almost inevitably distract and kill someone.
Wait till someone tells this guy about the trolley problem.
This is literally the logic anti-seatbelt folks use. “I don’t wear a seatbelt because if I’m in a crash, the seatbelt could end up trapping me in a fire.”
Safety design very often involves trade offs. The chances you get partially ejected and killed during a rollover are meaningfully higher than the chances you die because you can’t break the glass to get out. Do you even keep a glass breaker in your car or do you imagine after surviving a wreck that’s trapped you inside your car that you will have the strength to just punch through a glass window?
I'm going to guess that you don't work on safety engineering. All safety designs have tradeoffs. Airbags can kill you but we still use them because the probable benefits outweigh the risks.
Airbags do not kill people. There were fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths of the course of two decades, and the vast majority of those deaths were caused by not wearing a seatbelt.
> Airbags do not kill people.
> fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths
So, they do kill people.
They kill people at a low enough rate that make them both worth installing, and mandating, compared to the alternatives.
And in that time how many deaths were attributed to laminate glass?
Exiting through a window is probably not a common case. Or even entering from outside to retrieve a person.
I think likely much better would be to mandate solution that forces doors to fully unlock in case of a crash or large water ingress.
The problem isn't that doors don't unlock, it's that you can't open the door against the massive water pressure, or against the door crumpling in itself and ruining the mechanism.
Have a crowbar handy. It's known to be useful in a variety of situations, including a literal space alien assault.
But also don’t leave it loose in your vehicle. A crowbar hitting your head in a car accident does not sound like a good time.
Better than a gnome rattling around in the car.
True. But I fail to see the relevance.
As others mentioned, it is an achievement from Half Life episode 2. Player has to carry a garden gnome to the end of the game. Which is not too bad, minus the extensive driving sections (sometimes under fire) where the gnome is bouncing around the vehicle.
It is a fun feather in your cap, but definitely not suitable for a first run through of the game.
Ah, thank you. I’ll admit to never having played it.
I assume this is the relevance:
https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/Gnome_Chompski
https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Garden_Gnome
It’s another Half-Life reference
A small charge of C4 works wonders. Just be sure to lay your head over in the passenger seat before detonation.
I carry a small hatchet in the trunk of my car with the spare tire just for this reason.
We're gonna need a source on that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)
So no fast rescue of children and dogs in cars in the summer heat anymore
Useful tech post!
oh just get Franz von Holzhausen to throw a ball bearing at it
The problem isnot cracking the glass. The problem is breaking it apart enough to get through. Your reference joke is not quite appropriate to this context.
[flagged]
What are the police to do when some insane sovcit refuses to exit the car over a speeding ticket? Those windows aren’t going to break themselves.
Why should they exit a car over a speeding ticket? A speeding ticket is not a jail sentence and does not warrant an arrest. In fact unless a driver is actively trying to harm somebody or has an active arrest warrant there is no reason whatsoever for them to leave their car or allow cops to remove people from cars.
In some states, it is the law that officers can order you to step out of the vehicle during any valid traffic stop, regardless if it is criminal or civil.
In some states it is the law that if you are from out of state and get a speeding ticket, you either have to pay the officer in cash while you are stopped or they can take you to jail until money is posted or it is your court date.
This happened to a friend of mine from Wisconsin, visiting me in Michigan about ten years ago. I was shocked to learn this was actual Mochigan law, and could hardly believe it even after verifying it. He felt very “lucky” to have had several hundred dollars in cash to simply hand over to the officer. Michigan only just rescinded those laws in 2019: https://landline.media/michigan-laws-end-roadside-cash-payme...
I can't wait for police badges to double as contactless payment terminals.
The fact that you're trying to optimize for "police serving speeding tickets to insane sovcits" over "getting flung out of the car in an accident and being crushed by the car" makes me glad you don't design cars.