> ...and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards.

Hasn't it been the case for a long time now that glass in automobiles is coated so that it breaks into small, generally-square fragments, rather than shards?

I've never smashed a window myself, but every couple of months, I see the remains of a window smashing on the sidewalk... it's always a pile of small, generally-square fragments.

My memory tells me that this design was mandated long ago because folks would get shards embedded in them effectively forever. One of my parents related a story that one of the parents up the tree would irregularly have to extract migrating glass shards breaking through the skin of his face that had been embedded during an automobile accident many years prior. But, perhaps that story is bullshit and completely fabricated, IDK.