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We all want to be sure that we are driving in a safe vehicle. We consider our vehicle’s most obvious safety features, such as seatbelts, airbags, tire pressure, and tire tread. We all strive to ensure that these items are kept up to standard, both to prevent accidents from occurring, as well as to protect us to the full extent in the event of an accident.However, one of the most overlooked, yet one of the most important safety features of your car, truck, or van is the one that is literally right in front of your eyes. Your vehicle’s windshield plays a vital role in the prevention of injury or death in the event of a collision and/or rollover. In fact, most automotive safety experts rank the windshield as the third most important safety component in your vehicle - directly behind seatbelts and airbags.These safety features found in and on your vehicle, including the windshield, are all part of a safety network, commonly referred to as the vehicle’s Safety Restraint System, or SRS. All the individual components of the Safety Restraint System are dependent on each other, so if there is a compromise in just one aspect of the SRS, it will likely lead to a complete failure of the rest of the system.It is well known that seatbelts and airbags are dependent upon one another in order to provide full support in the event of an accident. Additionally, most of your vehicle’s safety features are also dependent upon the windshield. For example, the windshield provides support for your vehicle’s airbags (the passenger airbag in particular). Without this support, the airbag would be incapable of being fully deployed and any protection the airbag was meant to provide would be compromised.Alternatively, the windshield plays a major role in the structural integrity of your vehicles passenger compartment, especially in the event of a rollover. If the windshield is unstable, it may very well fail in the event of a rollover accident, causing the passenger compartment to fall in on itself, putting the vehicle’s occupants at extreme risk of injury or death.Another prime example of how your vehicle’s windshield protects you during an accident is found in the way the windshield is manufactured. Every auto windshield is made of two sheets of glass, with a thin layer of polyvinyl butyrate in between. In the event of a collision, the glass may break; however, the thin layer of adhesive plastic in the middle will keep together. This serves a dual purpose. First, the adhesive will prevent the majority of the glass from shattering and causing cuts and scratches to the occupants.Secondly, it allows the windshield to provide somewhat of a cushion to the passengers, should they strike the windshield. The polyvinyl butyrate is a flexible, reducing the amount of force exerted to the occupants upon impact with the windshield. This is why windshields are constructed from glass the way that they are, rather than being constructed from plastic. Plastic does not provide the same amount of flexibility and cushion during an accident.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 7:13 am and is filed under Driving Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.