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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why is this not part of the standard safety tests. It can be done before a crash test, for instance.

What exactly are you proposing gets tested? The windows are supposed to be hard to break so people don’t fly out of them…

Hard enough to not fly out accidentally but weak enough that people can break them on purpose so they're not trapped inside.

I think there's an impossibly thin line between making glass that's easy to break through on purpose, but hard for a high speed head to break through in an accident.

I'm fairly sure that the two lines are way past each other, on the wrong side. The force with which you'll be flung against the glass is much higher than what you can punch.

This isn’t about punching, it’s about using one of those handheld devices with a pointed metal tip.

Most tempered glass does it just fine and has for decades.

It's worse than impossibly thin. It's a massive gray area of acceptable solutions where no matter where in the area you choose some bike shedding jerk will be able to construe it as though you chose wrong.

We have airbags, what if there was a low cost manual way to trigger a window break, potentially even without vehicle power?

That's what seat belts are for. Making unbreakable glass is morally repugnant.

This law is intended to protect belted occupants as well. The target here is rollover crashes where belted occupants may still be jostled partially free from the belt and be partially ejected.

Not relevant. Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.

This is literally the logic anti-seatbelt folks use. “I don’t wear a seatbelt because if I’m in a crash, the seatbelt could end up trapping me in a fire.”

Safety design very often involves trade offs. The chances you get partially ejected and killed during a rollover are meaningfully higher than the chances you die because you can’t break the glass to get out. Do you even keep a glass breaker in your car or do you imagine after surviving a wreck that’s trapped you inside your car that you will have the strength to just punch through a glass window?

> Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.

Then it logically follows that either the only defensible approach is to not have any safety solutions, or that there simply isn’t a defensible approach.

The tradeoffs are unavoidable, a seatbelt or airbag might very well kill someone despite saving countless lives. Even tech like lane departure warnings will almost inevitably distract and kill someone.

I'm going to guess that you don't work on safety engineering. All safety designs have tradeoffs. Airbags can kill you but we still use them because the probable benefits outweigh the risks.

Airbags do not kill people. There were fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths of the course of two decades, and the vast majority of those deaths were caused by not wearing a seatbelt.

And in that time how many deaths were attributed to laminate glass?

> Airbags do not kill people.

> fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths

So, they do kill people.

They kill people at a low enough rate that make them both worth installing, and mandating, compared to the alternatives.

Frontal airbags, generally speaking, make people who would've died survive and make people who would've walked away with nothing look like they went a few rounds with a professional boxer. It's a flattening effect.

Wait till someone tells this guy about the trolley problem.

Exiting through a window is probably not a common case. Or even entering from outside to retrieve a person.

I think likely much better would be to mandate solution that forces doors to fully unlock in case of a crash or large water ingress.

The problem isn't that doors don't unlock, it's that you can't open the door against the massive water pressure, or against the door crumpling in itself and ruining the mechanism.

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