Originally Posted By: Susan
Re: laminated side windows

This is totally outside my experience...

Laminated glass is two sheets of tempered glass with a flexible sheet of plastic between them, right? So, if you were in a situation (not necessarily under water)where you needed to break your way out of it (side window) and had a spring-loaded punch, couldn't you break the glass, then kick it to beat it up more, and sort of force-fold it out of the way so you could get past it?

Sue

I think most laminated glass is at least three layers of glass.

For what it is worth, I haven't broken any laminated side glass, but I have broken some laminated windshields (scrap yard vehicles). It takes me about a dozen hits with a tire iron to make a fist-sized opening. I would think it would take many repeated blows to create cracks horizontally across piece of laminated glass so that it could fold and be pushed out (if it is possible at all). Not to mention the shards being VERY sharp.

I definitely would not count on being able to do it in a few seconds.

Here's a huge (16MB+) .pdf study on laminated and "glazing" glass: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/PDF/nrd-11/glazingreport.pdf

Basically it says that it helps keep people not wearing seat belts from being thrown from cars, but increases head injuries compared to tempered safety glass and really isn't worth consideration with technology like side curtain airbags.