Smart car glass roof

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Thu 4 Dec 2003 12:46
Smart car glass roof - OldPeculiar
I saw an article on Watchdog the other day about some Smart cars having their glass roof shatter all over the place. As I had considered getting one at one point I found this quite disturbing - Can you imagine having glass shattering all over the cabin if you had a baby on the passenger seat?
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Thu 4 Dec 2003 12:52
Smart car glass roof - AR-CoolC
Considering the Smart is a very popular car, we replace VERY few glass roofs on them.
From what I've seen on this appears that they have broken whilst parked up, one of the car mags (autoExpress I think) had one as a long term test car and this happened.
If you are thinking of buying one and have concerns then have one of the glass tinting firms film the inside of the glass, this way if it does break then there will be no glass falling into the car.
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Thu 4 Dec 2003 13:32
Smart car glass roof - daveyjp
We are on our second smart car. I know plenty of people with them and have never met anyone who has had this happen - read a few stories on the various smart owners club websites, but it is still a very rare event - less than 0.01% of vehicles have been affected. This is similar to the rear window breaking due to shorting of the RHW element, which Watchdog also covered.

There is a solution specify a plastic roof, or do like we did and buy a cabrio!!
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Thu 4 Dec 2003 14:54
Smart car glass roof - OldPeculiar
I guess I got sucked into "flashy story" thing. But if you can't trust the Beeb to put across a story fairly then who can you trust? (HJ of course!:)

I don't quite understand though why Smart didn't use laminated glass on their roofs. Is there someone who can enlighten me?
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Thu 4 Dec 2003 15:07
Smart car glass roof - AR-CoolC
I would imagine the reason would be to save weight, toughened glass weigh's less that laminated, but on a piece of glass that size the weight difference would not really be noticable against the weight of the complete car.
The way I see it is that if they save half a Kilo here and half a Kilo there then over the complete car they may save a pretty large amount. A car that weigh's in at only a few hundred Kg, 20 or 30 kilo's makes a real difference. On the same line the BMW Mini has a very thin inner laminate on their windscreens.

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