That's mostly it. It's also not a safety critical thing.
Discussion
doesn't seem to me like glass so thin that isn't highly engineered is gonna do well on such a thing as a car anyway. the harmonics and vibrations can get pretty hard core at times, and if they screwed up the dimensions of it, for sure there would be standing waves that warp the glass constantly when it's running and then it sits in the sun warming up, then at night cooling down, there's no way that you can engineer it to be stable cheaply, at least, not without making it ugly.
to do it right, you'd need to use quartz, i don't think even the best quality borosilicate is going to take the thermal changes and vibrations for very long.
It's not the glass, it's the sealing. Whatever they are using is not flexible enough to handle the exterme temperature expansion differential between glass and the steel of the vehicle.
Interesting!
that's what i'm saying about the type of glass. different types of glass have different expansion coefficients and the sealants also have various expansion properties, and if you don't use materials that can withstand the temperature differentials, the sealants harden or gape, then you will get breaches in the surface.
also, i think the yellowing is probably not so much the glass as the type of polymer and its interaction with water. many kinds of polymers yellow with age and exposure, and consider the guarantee periods they specify on these things. they probably engineered it really tight to those periods so once it fails, a sufficient percentage of the time they were out of warranty and "does washing hands gesture" not our problem anymore.
this kind of thing is really common, you see it with semiconductor devices as well. as soon as the warranty is out a remarkable number of the devices fail.
Gotcha. Yup. The annoying thing is that I'd expect Toyota to be able to properly engineer this.
toyota hasn't been toyota since the 90s i think.
That's true, but... This is still happening with 3+ generations of the Prius Prime. They should have gotten it nailed down by now.
well, you know the deal with the bullshit right? the energy cost of making that glass and those silicon photovoltaic cells cost more fuel than that vehicle is ever going to burn, in the lifespan of the engine, at least.
it's a gimmick.
i have some plans in my mind to acquire a toyota hiace in the future and it will be a diesel from the late 90s. in my opinion, they lost their way when they started on that prius shit. south bark was right. but smug is not just an attitude, it's a literal huge amount of waste hidden behind those batteries and all the fancy shit like these fucking solar panels. huge amounts of energy.
they are the corpus delicti, that they try to hide.