Chao, the billionaire former CEO of dry bulk shipping giant Foremost Group, tragically died at the age of 50 on Feb. 10 after accidentally backing her car into the pond making a three-point turn.
After digging through the rule the NHTSA adopted, there's nothing in there that mandates side glazed windows. The rule covers ejection mitigation. The summary hits the major point:
The agency anticipates that manufacturers will meet the standard by modifying
existing side impact air bag curtains, and possibly supplementing them with advanced
glazing. The curtains will be made larger so that they cover more of the window
opening, made more robust to remain inflated longer, and made to deploy in both side
impacts and in rollovers. In addition, after deployment the curtains will be tethered near
the base of the vehicle’s pillars or otherwise designed to keep the impactor within the
boundaries established by the performance test. This final rule adopts a phase-in of the
new requirements, starting September 1, 2013.
There's a lot of discussion in there. The document is over 300 pages. Some of it covers how the side windows can be down or could become deformed from a roll-over. For testing procedures the windows have to be pre-cracked or removed.
The Federal Registrar calls out side glazed windows in 49 CFR 571.226:
S1. Purpose and Scope. This standard establishes requirements for ejection mitigation systems to reduce the likelihood of complete and partial ejections of vehicle occupants through side windows during rollovers or side impact events.
and in 49 CFR 571.226 S4.2.1.1:
S4.2.1.1 No vehicle shall use movable glazing as the sole means of meeting the displacement limit of S4.2.1.
I anticipate that mid to higher end vehicles will have side glazed windows. While lower end vehicles will not.
If I remember the MythBusters episode your only other options are to roll down the windows immediately and then start to exit or wait for the car to completely submerge and hope the electronics that control your windows and doors haven't failed.
My car’s headrests have a glass breaker tip at the bottom of the metal bars that you use to raise/lower them. I imagine this is standard in many modern-ish cars.
Makes me think of the supposed bullet-proof cyber truck glass... Odds are much more likely you'll be trying to escape your car than be under a hail of gunfire lol.
Is laminated glass why my rented chevy bolt has so many pits? Car’s only got 7k miles on it, but when I drive toward the sun it’s like driving into a glitter storm.
I punched a window and broke it back in the day, but that was a junk car from the 80s we were destroying. And I was outside of it with all the room in the world.
Trying to do it while seated inside would have been impossible, and underwater all that pressure against the other side spread out equally makes it really umpossible. It's basically a giant cushion that absorbs and distributes the force. If you do break it, all that water pressure is going to push it straight in your face, and chances are you're just going to let the water in, but not create a whole big enough to climb thru. Certainly not u til your car is full of water and pressure equalizes.
If you're worried about this enough to carry a glass breaker, take a page from the Kia boys and make sure it's ceramic. Even steel with a point is going to be difficult. But ceramic will shatter it with almost no effort. Gotta keep on bipping