[mauvehaus]

Having watched a burly firefighter take three good swings with an axe to bust out a window (to get to the hood release of an unattended car fire), I am extremely skeptical of this claim.

Somebody on YouTube tested those emergency hammers and concluded they're basically useless. If you really want to break a tempered glass car window (I.e., any of them but the windshield), their recommendation was an automatic center punch.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

You’re supposed to do it like this: https://youtu.be/tZTa8Nh0VlE

[senortumnus]

This reminds me of the spark plug ceramic demos. Little ceramic tip on a spark plug (isolated from the rest of the plug) make an effective car window smashing projectile. No idea if it would work from inside the car / if you could get enough speed on it sitting right next to the window!

https://www.reddit.com/r/mythbusters/comments/130js6/breakin...

[ayemiller]

Technically it's not the tip of a spark plug, but a shard of the ceramic insulator when shattered- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_rocks

[brokenmachine]

So they crush a spark plug to get the "rocks"? How?

[jes]

Right. As a firefighter, I carried a spring-loaded center-punch in the pocket of my bunker coat. No muss, no fuss. Just put the tip on a side window and press until it fires.

[kingcharles]

Watch this... this made me realize how tough car windows really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L91_K-s4pMM

[mlindner]

He's hitting the base of the window with a blunt object. You don't want a blunt object.

[djmips]

Windshield even more so.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

I believe your windshield is an integral part of your car's rollover protection

[mywittyname]

The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards have a lot to say on the strength, composition, and properties of glass in passenger vehicles. In addition to being very difficult to break, it must also be resistant to shattering and remain in place while experiencing some pretty extreme forces.

Automotive glass is not even glass really, it's more of a composite made up of layers of various transparent materials all designed to counter balance the weaknesses of the other layers. And windshields are bonded into the body of the vehicle with a very strong plastic adhesive.

[jstarfish]

I'll admit not keeping up with the standards, but back around ~2003 it was pretty common for arrestees in police cars to escape custody by kicking the rear window out from inside the car. It's held on by glue or something and pops right off the frame in one solid piece.

Cruisers now tend to have cages to prevent this.

(This is not a solution if the car is underwater.)

[boppo1]

are these specs public somewhere? Sounds cool.

[plattenbau]

Sadly, no. Unlike some better fields, the auto industry is incredibly tight-lipped about safety and crash structures. If these in-formal standards were to get out... and if the public were to know how well the industry has cornered the regulators, creating pseudo-standards that technically conform to the safety protocols but functionally make zero difference to consumer/passenger safety... there'd be riots.

[fdjsafdsjl]

Depends if you are trying to break the window from the inside or the outside. It's very difficult from the outside, and much easier from the inside (I cracked my windscreen and needed a replacement, because I was carrying a long piece of wood and it moved a little and contacted the windscreen).

[mauvehaus]

Two things:

1) Are you me? I've done exactly this because I knew that my car fit a 10' board. Turns out when you're buying rough lumber 10' sometimes means 10' 2".

2) The windshield is laminated glass instead of tempered. It'll crack much more easily, but it'll (more or less) stay in one piece in the frame instead of shattering out into a million tiny bits.

[mlindner]

> Having watched a burly firefighter take three good swings with an axe to bust out a window (to get to the hood release of an unattended car fire), I am extremely skeptical of this claim.

Wrong window. You're talking about the windshield which is a completely different type of glass than other windows.

[mauvehaus]

He was trying to break the side window. Tempered glass is super tough, until you damage the outer layer. Presumably the pick end of his fire axe wasn't sharp or hard enough to scratch that outer layer without a hell of a swing behind it.

[boppo1]

I have heard keeping a shattered sparkplug inyour car can help. Something about them auto-shatters glass.

[Aloha]

I've carried a hatchet in my car for years for this reason.

[nyolfen]

breaking the windshield is the cheapest option to replace