I wonder why is this not part of the standard safety tests. It can be done before a crash test, for instance.

happyopossum 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What exactly are you proposing gets tested? The windows are supposed to be hard to break so people don’t fly out of them…

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_aavaa_ 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hard enough to not fly out accidentally but weak enough that people can break them on purpose so they're not trapped inside.

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Johnny555 12 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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stavros 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	_aavaa_ 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This isn’t about punching, it’s about using one of those handheld devices with a pointed metal tip.

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AngryData 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most tempered glass does it just fine and has for decades.

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torstenvl 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's what seat belts are for. Making unbreakable glass is morally repugnant.

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dpark 12 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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torstenvl 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Not relevant. Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.

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walletdrainer 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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pixl97 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wait till someone tells this guy about the trolley problem.

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dpark 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

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tekla 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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torstenvl 9 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	vkou 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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.
	▲	dpark 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And in that time how many deaths were attributed to laminate glass?

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Ekaros 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	stavros 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.