While dropping over to a neighbours last night, the neighbours who are kind enough to insure me on their car so o can borrow it occasionally.

On arriving we found the rear passenger side window shattered, it had had a black baby shade on the inside and the angle of the sun meant it had been directly hit for the last hour or so, and less directly for most of the afternoon.

Could this have caused the window to shatter, or would it more likely be an impact from something? We could find anything that had passed through the window, nothing had been moved or taken (or left, no new CDs). It’s also pretty quiet where we are, this isn’t something we often see and it was just gone 6pm.

Bumpity bump

I doubt it. Glass doesn’t shatter from heat. Get it really really hot…like several hundred of degrees hot, then chuck a bucket of ice cold water over it then it might shatter, but glass in cars is safety glass so probably wouldn’t even then. I think someone has put it through either by accident or deliberately. Also the shade will be made of synthetic plastic mesh so will melt if it got hot.

Mate of mine had the rear window of his car smashed once when the car was on the drive. Nice neighbourhood too. Never happened again. Might have been an accident somehow and nobody owned up, or youths being brats, who knows. But nothing to do with the sun.
Having said that our bathroom window has developed a huge corner to corner crack all of a sudden. Window has been in for 15 years. Bit of a mystery too. Again I suspect someone has broken it but either not realised or owned up.

It’s a well known phenomenon. Tempered (toughened) glass sometimes just randomly shatters.

Google it.

Glass doesn’t shatter from heat. Get it really really hot…like several hundred of degrees hot, then chuck a bucket of ice cold water over it then it might shatter, but glass in cars is safety glass so probably wouldn’t even then.

Toughened or tempered glass can be vulnerable to shattering. The heat from the sun can be enough to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_glass_breakage

We were driving along on a sunny day and went into a hail/snow shower. The rear windscreen just imploded.

Just one of these things.

Mates 205 shattered as he drove along

Wasn’t even sunny.

wobbliscott
Full Member
I doubt it. Glass doesn’t shatter from heat.

Glass can randomly shatter; probably due to some kind of micro-fault in the glass at the time of manufacture.
There was actually a phone-in on Radio 2 a couple of weeks ago (no idea why – must have been a slow news day) about some woman’s glass shower screen just ‘exploding’ one day.
There were loads of people calling in saying that they’d had the same thing happen to them.

A double-glazed window in our neighbours conservatory shattered in a similar way years ago & the window was adjacent to our dividing fence, so it would have been very difficult for anything to have struck it.

Thinking about it, a couple of years ago while my parents were visiting us we came back from a walk & noticed that one of the rear windows of their car had ‘been smashed’.
The car had been parked over the road in a small church car park. It was close to the pavement, but I have lived here for 10 years and never seen any vandalism, even though the car park is in constant use with cars being regularly parked in the same position.
We assumed that someone had broken it for a nosey inside, but there was no evidence of that & there was nothing of worth in the car – unless you want a 20 year old London A-Z.
I wonder whether that had ‘just shattered’ rather than ‘been smashed’?

A couple of times we’ve had a car window shatter. We thought a stone from a passing car had done it.

A few years back I had a Hyundai i40 with a ‘moon roof,’ essentially glass from windscreen to rear. Part of that, a black glass strip maybe six inches wide, spontaneously exploded directly above my head one evening. I thought someone had dropped a paving slab off a bridge, such was the bang. Sure as hell focuses the mind when you’re doing 70mph up the M66, I can tell you.

Had a Duralex glass shatter in my hand, one in the dishwasher which ruined it and a large shower screen which just exploded in to a million pieces which we were picking out of our feet for months. All tempered.

Happened to my rear window a couple of months back. Posted about it on here and received a fair few responses from people with exploding car windows, roof lights, tables etc.

well thereto go. Today’s lesson. Never would have thought it would be so common. Something to think about next time you’re on a glass floor on a skyscraper observation deck!

skyscraper observation deck

Slightly related – the Walkie Talkie building in London was melting cars due to the convex shape and mirrored glass. At certain times of the day it was just enough to focus the light onto cars parked on the road outside and caused the metal to buckle.

Cost millions to remediate…

Remember that – also shattering glass on the Gherkin, but that was due to the structure vertically sagging due to its curved sides and imparting stresses onto the glass.

Glass bridge in China shatters, leaving tourist trapped partway across

Was anybody doing their garden with a strimmer? The boss was out doing his a few weeks ago when he said the neighbour popped over to say “sorry but you just broke my car window”. I think it picked up a stone and shattered it.

Was anybody doing their garden with a strimmer?

A possibility, I have been in a house when that happened before, whole patio sliding door shattered. Luckily they knocked the house down a while later and the landlord didn’t seem to notice it gone!

Dripping ice water into hot Pyrex jug

We know you broke your neighbour’s car window, but now you have an alibi.. “it was the sun honest mate!” 😛