A Canadian family was having dinner when a dead bird fell from the sky and hit the roof of their Tesla. Despite being designed to withstand the weight of an elephant, as Tesla brags, the bird caused it to break, filling the cabin with glass bits and dust. The weird incident left the internet scratching their heads.
Tesla boasted that its cars were the safest in the world, with the glass roof panels able to withstand the weight of an elephant. This may be true, as crash-worthiness tests have already shown it. We’ve seen several incidents in real life when a Tesla’s glass roof could support a falling tree, keeping the occupants safe. In some cases, the doors opened as designed, allowing the people to exit the car without a problem.
Still, it can easily break when a relatively small object falls on a glass roof. Anyone who had their phone display replaced after a fall knows that glass, no matter how hard, is easy to crack when hit by a hard object. The best and most notorious example is the Tesla Cybertruck’s broken window during the 2019 unveiling after Tesla’s chief designer Franz von Holzhausen hit it with a steel ball. That caused an uproar, even though the glass performed as designed. It didn’t let the ball go through, which was its purpose, although it broke because that’s what glass does when hit.
Another incredible story involving Tesla glass came over the weekend from Canada. Augustine Fan and his family were having dinner in Richmond (British Columbia, Canada) on Friday night when they got notified by the Tesla app that the car’s alarm was triggered. When he went out to check what was happening, he found a dead bird on the hood, and the glass roof shattered. The pictures he shared with Global News show that the sunroof was utterly destroyed by the falling bird.
Immediately, Tesla critics on social media started to mock the company’s claims about the sturdiness of their glass roofs. Still, there’s nothing you can do in such a case. If the roof was all-metal, it would’ve been just as ruined as the glass roof. The difference is that the glass sunroof can be easily replaced even though not cheap. Repairing a metal roof is much more complicated. It could involve cutting the old top and welding a new one before treating the metal and repainting the whole thing.
Augustine told Global News that the parking lot where the incident happened was directly under the flight path toward Vancouver Airport. His best guess was that the bird hit a plane and then fell from the sky on the roof of his car.
The worst part about this incident is, besides the roof replacement costs, that the smashed roof spread a lot of fine glass particles in the cabin. Augustine spent hours vacuuming the interior of his Tesla, and he still couldn’t get rid of all the glass scattered inside.