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Corning Brings Gorilla Glass To The Automotive Industry (digitaltrends.com)
At CES 2017, Corning has unveiled a concept car covered in Gorilla Glass. The car is augmented with the same Gorilla Glass that has protected smartphones for years, making the vehicle significantly more durable than a car wearing normal glass. Digital Trends reports: Corning's concept features hybrid Gorilla Glass on the windshield, sunroof, rear window, side windows, and the dashboard, which adds up to noticeable weight savings all around. Corning says Gorilla Glass is 30 percent lighter than the soda lime glass featured on most production vehicles, which not only improves fuel economy, it moves the center of gravity lower in the car to improve handling. In addition to the physical advantages, Gorilla Glass is also clearer than normal glass, which allows for more vibrant head-up displays, connected surfaces, and entire dashboards that function as touchscreens. That's not all though, because on the rear window, Corning slipped an electronically controlled opacity film between the layers of glass. With the push of a button, the window went from crystal clear to a dark tint. That'll surely come in hand if you feel the sudden need for privacy. "By bringing Corning Gorilla Glass to the automotive industry, Corning is delivering lighter, tougher, and more optically advantaged solutions, enabling improved fuel efficiency, and a safer, more enhanced user experience for both drivers and passengers," said Marty Curran, executive vice president at Corning. "Corning's leading position in mobile device cover glass has provided an excellent launch pad for glass solutions enabling smartphone like connectivity in cars. We are excited to be demonstrating all of these new technologies and opportunities in a custom-built connected car, shown for the first time at CES."
Seriously, though, car windscreens are highly regulated in the US for safety reasons. Nearly all alternatives to the present windscreen glasses are banned in the US from what I understand (they certainly ban polycarbonate). Maybe Dow-Corning can get them to change this a bit to allow testing of some good alternatives.
The existing windscreens are a "sandwich" of glass and a soft plastic that keeps the glass in place when it shatters. A gorilla glass alternative would be replacing the glass layers but not the entire thing.
Also when polycarbonate breaks it can have sharp edges so 100% polycarbonate in a windscreen is almost as bad an idea as 100% glass.
Your front windshield is already tempered. This provides much more resistance to chipping and breaking than the glass formulation. Basically, the glass is cooled in a way that the exterior is always in compression (glass is really, really strong in compression). This means when a rock hits your windshield, the force it imparts has to first overcome the glass' innate compression, before it can start to create tensile stresses and have a chance to chip or shatter the glass.
Smarter Every Day has a pretty good explanation of how tempering strengthens the glass. In the case of Price Rupert's drops, there's a weak point in the tail, but the exterior is strong enough to shatter lead bullets. For a plate windshield glass, the weak points are all internal and it's most vulnerable to impacts inwards from the edges.
It turns out that putting out a press release like this is considerably cheaper than buying ads.
Or do you mean the cost of the glass?