why do cars have glass windshields as opposed to fiber glass or some other see through material?

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I got a crack in my windshield about a month ago and all I can think about is how technologically advanced some parts of cars are and with that being said I can’t imagine glass is the safest/ only thing we can use for our windshield.

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Plastics tend to have lower hardness than Glass and scratch much easier than Glass. Glass also has less problems with hazing due to UV. If you’ve ever seen an old headlight that looks “foggy”, that’s because of UV light.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Fiberglass is not transparent. As it stands, glass remains one of the strongest transparent materials we have available. Pretty much anything else you could put there that’s transparent would scratch far too easily and be impossible to see through within a matter of weeks, not to mention damage from UV exposure.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because we want people to be able to see very well. There isn’t any fiberglass out there that’s really clear; some of it is translucent, but that’s not really good enough. Plastics are generally too easy to scratch; a few hundred miles of road grit and they’d be too fuzzy to see through. It’s actually remarkably safe; very few injuries are caused by the windshield itself. And speaking as a volunteer firefighter, you don’t want it to be unbreakably strong; that’s one of the best ways to get you out of the car if we need to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Modern windshield (like 20 years and newer) glass is part of the structural integrity of the vehicle…plexiglass sure as fuck wouldn’t do.

Also, it’s 2 or more layers of tempered glass which when broken shatters in a million pieces instead of huge shards.

Yet can still be seen through.