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Comment by Magi604 | Hacker News Reader

The Tesla Armor Glass demonstration on the actual truck was such a fail. And now the broken glass is on full display to everyone watching.

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It cracked but did not fail. Is that not supposed to be how it works?

No, it's not supposed to crack. In the stream they said they threw wrenches at it in the past and it didn't crack.

The test before showed them dropping softball-sized metal balls onto a horizontal pane of Tesla Armor Glass from 20-25 feet in the air without any damage, so it set the expectation of impervious glass. Maybe if Musk stated that the glass was meant to just crack but not shatter, it would have made sense, but to me the impression I got was that the live demo on the truck was done on the fly without prior prep (Musk did say after the glass cracked that "at least it didn't go through", but not beforehand).

I think the reactions that Musk and Holzhausen had tell the story. They were not expecting that to happen at all.

Also, as noted in another story[0], the horizontal plane didn't break at least in part because it wasn't fixed rigidly in place, and thus was able to distort.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/news/31158/tesla-cybertrucks-armore...

Looks like how bulletproof glass looks after impact...

Maybe they were supposed to use the first ball that was smaller?

Certainly came as a surprise to Elon.

I notice they let the panel glass bounce in the drop test, which isn't similar to a window installation.

Did they not test this?

Failed twice consecutively. Aren’t the side glasses meant to be breakable by regulation for escaping situations when the door is jammed?

Two crazy theories: They'd been testing on the front and rear windows and someone thought it would scan better on stage to do the side.

Or if they've been testing on this exact car and repeated strikes delaminated the mylar layers enough for it to fail.

I think the explanation is much simpler, the guy threw it faster than it was falling in the earlier test. After ~8m (more than the 20-25 feet someone else estimated) the ball is only going ~45 km/h or ~28 mph which is pretty slow actually.

Yeah I was thinking about this. Would such a flub to forget only the windscreen was the new glass though.

Can't believe they didn't test the vehicle prior to demo. Very amateur

Heads are going to roll. This is going to be hard to recover even if the truck is amazing.

Though, honestly, I’d still buy one.

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