Posts Tagged ‘broken window’

Mystery of the broken car window

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Since it generated some interest on Twitter, and since I find it pretty mysterious overall, I thought I'd post some more info on the broken car window that greeted me this morning.  First, some preliminary details:

  1. The car was parked down around the corner, because parking is at a premium on my street.
  2. I hadn't driven it in a week.
  3. I didn't actually notice the broken window until I was already driving and (presumably) a piece of glass falling made enough noise that I turned around to see it.

This is the (slightly later) view that greeted me at that point:  Interior view of broken window

A couple thoughts immediately struck:

  1. WTF
  2. Should I pull over, or keep driving?
    1. Eh, keep driving, what's stopping going to do for me?
    2. To clarify, I didn't take the picture until later, when I did stop.
  3. Shouldn't that window be the most structurally sound of all non-windshield windows?

Further visual analysis of the image tells us:  well, nothing really.  The window broke inward rather than outward.  That non-window stuff you see is just trash (a cap for some sort of bottled water or something).
Here, let's post another image for no particular reason.

Here you can see the enticing view from the outside.  If this was broken by a potential thief, he didn't want my squeegee.  Actually, he didn't want anything.  Didn't take my stereo or... well, I guess the stereo and squeegee are pretty much it.

This leads to the conclusion that whatever happened was an accident.  I was parked next to a ditch, so the passenger side of my car wasn't really accessible to pedestrians or vehicles.  I didn't see any thing inside of my car that might have broke the window (I was thinking may fireworks, or some other celebratory projectiles from the fourth of July hit the really low probability shot).

The only other option seems to be the old "temperature change window explosion" thing.  This has some merit, as it got up to near 90 yesterday, and had only been in the 60s last time I drove it, so all my windows were sealed.  However, I would imagine the window would explode outward if that was the case.  On the other hand, I'd think this would be the hardest window to break on the car (with the exception of the reinforced windshield), due to the small surface area giving it more stability.   I'm leaving this filed as a mystery for now, unless someone out there has a good theory.  Now to get some estimates on repairs.

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