Bendy windscreen ‘too expensive’

Press, 14 May 1981, Page 23

Bendy windscreen ‘too expensive’

By

John Langley,

.of

the “Daily Telegraph’’

A bolting horse landing on the windscreen is not exactly a routine motoring hazard, even in the remoter reaches of the Colswolds. A colleague survived this frightening experience recently. It was a dark night and a black horse. Warning flashes from the headlamps of oncoming cars alerted the driver to slow down before the impact but made it more difficult for him to see what was wrong.

However, what impressed him most after the initial shock was the behaviour of the windscreen. It buckled but did not break under the weight of the animal. "It was fantastic,” said the driver, in a series of quotes that could have come straight out of a commercial. "I never want to drive a car without that sort of windscreen. It would be worth £2O ($5O) extra of anyone’s money to have one of those.”

The car was a Rover 2000 and the windscreen a Triplex Ten-Twenty, which was fitted as standard and helped the Rover SDI to win the Don Safety Award four years ago. It has also received the AA gold medal, a Design Council award and the Mcßobert Medal for the technology behind its development. But if my colleague wants a new car fitted with the Ten-Twenty safety screen he will have to move fast —

production of the screen ceased last summer, the specialised plant making it is in “mothballs” and stocks are almost exhausted. The new cars that had it fitted as standard are now reverting to ordinary laminated glass. Despite the new screen's technical advantages, only a handful of car manufacturers adopted it. BL was the only volume manufacturer, fitting Ten-Twenty in the award-winning new Rover, the Princess and the nowdiscontinued Triumph Dolomite. Rolls-Royce chose it for their top Camargue model and Volvo used it in their 262 coupe.

Hardly the sort of volume that could justify continuation of a specially-built £ll million plant and a development cost of some £9 million ($22 million) since the project started some eight years ago. Attempts to interest Continental manufacturers failed — they and other British companies baulked at the extra cost of the screen at a time when the industry was heading for recession. Prices vary according to the size of the order but it was estimated that the new

screen would add an extra 10 to 20 per cent to the cost compared with a conventional laminated screen —

perhaps $11) to $2O on a typical car. This is obviously, regarded as being too high a price to pay for advantages that are not apparent in the showroom and only matter in an accident.

All laminated screens consist of a "sandwich" of glass with a sheet of clear plastic in between as the “filling.” The unique property of the Ten-Twenty is that the inside sheet of glass, closest to the driver, is of toughened glass, which crumbles and is kinder to the face in an impact, while the tough outer skin retains the traditional advantages of the extra strength of laminated glass. An incidental advantage, as my colleague can testify, is that the screen is more flexible in an impact.

“It is an advanced product that we believe offers a major safety advantage and obviously we were seeking a premium for it — we had spent a lot of money bringing it into existence,” said a Triplex official.