mconel

Yesterday my neighbor got into her 2005 BMW M3, shut her door and the driver's side window completely shattered when the door closed. It sounded like an explosion.
Are these windows defective? I've never heard of anything like this ever happening.

Raylo

That is how tempered glass breaks. It basically just explodes into myriad small chunks. The glass has to be supported just so by the lift mechanism rails and must not contact anything hard on the window or door frame that might create a stress point. If it does get stressed in any way, even in a small point of contact, it explodes. Windshields are laminated with a layer of flexible plastic to keep the chunks from flying aboiut in case of breakage but I don't believe side glass is.

So my guess is that the window itself wasn't defective but perhaps it got misaligned so as to hit the frame or create a stress point where it sits in the lift mechanism rail.

qldit

Good Morning mconel, yes tempered glass has some amazing properties and does have a tendency to do odd things, a classic example were some French made glass drinking tumblers that were classed as "unbreakable", you could virtually use them to drive a nail into a piece of wood, but if you held the glass by the rim and dropped a headache tablet into it would simply "explode"!

They were withdrawn for sales.

It is likely as Raylo suggests that something explainable occurred during the event, this could even be as simple as a scratch with a diamond ring or a previous mark being inert until the vibration of the activity triggered the event.

It is quite amazing when you first experience this kind of thing.

Cheers, qldit.

oldmn

Door Glass is temper and part of that temper is stress if some thing happened to relieve that stress then Bang. A small chip, scratch, defect in the glass combined with the impact and pressure of closing he door could cause this. I have seen several rear Hatch glass's explode in this manner.