No matter how carefully you drive, sooner or later there may be some glass breakage on your certified Toyota. Whether a side window or the windshield is broken when you aren’t in the vehicle, or you are involved in an accident, glass breaks and it can be quite dangerous. This is why most cars use “safety glass” for the windows. This special material is definitely not your standard glass. So, just what is safety glass, anyhow?

The safety glass in your certified Toyota is manufactured to be less dangerous in the event of breakage. Instead of shattering into jagged blades, it instead breaks into smaller nugget sized pieces. These pieces of glass are still quite sharp and can do some damage, but they are smaller and thicker, and are less likely to cause serious harm to your body. We need glass in the windows to see as we drive through St Louis MO, but safety glass makes the windows less dangerous if they shatter.

In order to give glass greater strength and to make it shatter in a less dangerous fashion, there are a few options. Sheets of glass can be laminated together, giving the window more strength. When glass cracks, it tends to crack along a fracture line. If the two pieces of glass are fracturing differently, they each strengthen the other piece as it cracks. A thin layer of plastic is often placed in between the two pieces of glass, giving it extra strength. Safety glass can also be heat treated to strengthen it. This can help keep the glass in your certified Toyota from breaking into blades, instead allowing it to shatter into smaller, less dangerous pieces.

We hope that you never have to find out just how the glass in your certified Toyota will crack, but safety is critical to the design of our vehicles. Safety glass is another way of keeping our customers safe as they commute from Kirkland to O’Fallon and beyond.