sounds to me like somebody shot at you.

 

Someone should take this entire thread out behind the barn and shoot it.

 

Hey Z - ever find out why your glass exploded?

 

Zmoney:


Was the driver side window open when the passenger side window exploded?

Some 20 years ago, a strayed bullet hit my passenger window and passed in front of my face and out of the opened driver side window. The fragments from the exploding window were similarly distributed to yours.

 

I have seen this happen before when people are up to no good on the roads. People have no respect. I HAVE personally seen a frozen bottle of Jello tossed into the front windshield and explode (from an overpass). I stopped to help the person out.

 

Sidelites, backlites and sunroofs are made of heat treated (=tempered) glass (there is a new trend for laminated glass for acoustical/security reason, but it is heavier and does not make sense in a Porsche).

The heat treatment means that a strong tension in induced in the glass. You heat the glass close to its melting point and then cool it down very rapidly: the interior and exterior surfaces shrink more rapidly than the center, leaving a permanent stress in the glass. This heat treatment has 2 benefits: the glass is a lot more resistant (at least 5 times) than 'annealed glass' (like you have in your windows), and, when it breaks, it releases the stress and it shatters into very small pieces that will not hurt and cut the passengers.

Automotive glass is produced according to extremely stringent manufacturing tolerances and the quality of the heat treatment is permanently monitored. The only reason that could lead to a spontaneous breakage would relate to an inclusion in the glass, which is extremely rare, and would happen when the glass is getting very warm under the sun for instance. In 99.9% of the cases heat treated glass would break, despite its much higher resistance, because of an impact. As annoying as it may be, Porsche is almost certainly right to say that they are not responsible.