Excessive chipping paint/windshield! (Oh...and my A/C still stinks)

He would say to you,
"harden the **** up!
Get over it."
Of course I wouldn't say that.

I have stone chips in my bonnet, I'll have the bonnet re-sprayed every few years, oh well.
Could be worse, I could have to walk out to a Ford every day.

 

Very few of us has these problems, at least to the extent you seem to have!!

Well I did not think the bay area had that many unpaved roads that would throw stones on your car. What kind of filthy roads are you traveling. Sounds like the entire Bay area should assemble and do a gigantic F.O.D. walk and clean up the FOD's!

EVERY car has this problem. The fix is about 5 minutes or so before you get to your destination turn off your A/C and just run air to evaporate the condensate thats in the system. You can also shoot a shot of Lysol, or other mold control agent.

Toyota has no responsibility to clean FOD off the roads you drive. If you tailgate, well that just adds to the problem. The A/C thing also you can cure by yourself.
You buy a Honda, you are going to have the same A/C problem, the same FOD on the road problem. The only difference is you will be on the HondaChat.com asking the same questions.

Don't hold your breath. There is nothing they have to fix here!

No, but you can dream!!

 

I would love to have small chips in the windshield rather than the large crack that is there now. The only "micro chip" the windshield has coincides with the crack...and I'm not convinced that it caused the crack because the supposed "chipping event" was not observed, and the crack happened with no other traffic around.

 

BAYAREAPRIUSDRIVER - take a photo of your car. i would like to see what you're talking about.

i have approx 17,000 miles on my car now, 40% highway/60% city and i do have some chips on the front, but no where near unacceptable limits. yes, when i wash my car and i see new chips, i do cuss, swear and feel bad, but it was the same with my corvette, caddy, every car.

PAT - hey buddy, sharp looking sticker! where do i get one?????

 

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I read an article about 5 years back of this very problem - with any car. The article went on to say that the biggest contributor to paint chips and windshield cracks are, in the following order:
1. Amount of loose debris on the road
2. distance between the car getting the damage and the vehicle in front of him/her
3. Speed of traffic
4. Distance between lanes on a divided highway.

The first point is obvious. The second says if you allow more distance between you and the car in front of you, there is more time for anything kicked up to land back on the ground instead of your car. The third is saying that faster traffic kicks up more debris and slings it in more directions. The fourth is saying that some debris is kicked up by opposing traffic and if the opposing lanes are close enough, that debris will become your problem.

I personally get very few chips and dings. But what is clear here is that such damage is NOT the result of poor manufacturing or design, but rather the enviornment the vehicle is driven in.

 

Ditto.

I live on a gravel road, near lots of other gravel roads, and that means lots of gravel on the blacktop - all over the place, even in town.

I have found, however, that auto glass simply ain't what it used to be, and pits, chips and cracks more easily than it used to. Auto glass on my cars from the 60's and 70's never had a pit, never had a crack, and even after driving for 10 years, didn't look like they'd been through a sand blaster or a Sahara wind storm. Modern auto glass simply doesn't last that long - on any mfgs. vehicles. Cost cutting I presume - that and the inevitable "replace instead of repair" mentality that seems to be de rigeur these days....

 

Interesting point, and reasonable to believe. I'm not a glass expert, but I assume that glass can be manufactured to different degrees of hardness and strength, such as tempered vs. non-tempered. I believe that both layers of glass in a windshield are tempered. I assume that even tempered glass can have varying degrees of hardness.

Any "industry insiders" or automotive glass experts here? -- please lend your technical insight into the possible variation in windshield glass hardness.

 

While I am not a Glass expert, I did have a good nights rest at a Holiday Inn......

Modern auto windshields are 2 layers of premolded glass that have the proper areas painted, blacked out and then a piece of plastic film is placed in between them. That assembly is then put into a heat press and the layers are bonded together. The plastic film becomes transparent and when it comes out of the oven you have a windshield. The glass thickness determines the ability of a windshield to resist impacts, I.E. rocks and other FOD. Glass is heavy, so manufacturers want to reduce weight, thinner glass. I recall windows that I have broken in the past, were thicker than newer varients. Trade offs have been made. Both for the good and bad.

 

That would be true if one was driving in a different environment. Doesn't hold for cases where the only variable that has changed is the car.

It especially doesn't hold when ones other vehicles have had many chips (including star chips) without any cracks, and the new Prius window cracks almost immediately...and in such a way that it took some searching to identify anything that might have been the source chip.

So in my case I can directly compared with my Tundra, which is more susceptible to taking hits closer to perpendicular than the Prius. It has several chips along the window margins (and I remember the hits), but no cracks. The one obvious difference other than being different windows on different models? The OEM glass manufacturer for the Tundra is PPG, while the Prius glass is from Thailand.

It also appears the top Prius glass layer is thinner than the Tundra's. If I could select replacement glass with a greater thickness I would. There might also be some sort of issue with stresses on the frame making the glass more susceptible to cracking. My mechanical engineer father-in-law could not find any chip when he first inspected the crack and suspected it was body stress.

 

Some folks at the FJ Cruiser forum suspect the ease of FJ windshield cracking is due to body/frame flex. I haven't had any issues with my Prius or FJ ... yet

 

This is a sad, sad, fact. Due to efforts of the manufacturers to reduce weight and improve efficiency and gas mileage, auto glass has become very thin. It is still thick enough to provide enough integrity to maintain safety in various crash scenarios, but it is now thin enough that relatively small rock (or pebble) moving at highway speeds (or you moving into it at highway speeds) will almost assuredly create a chip. That chip will eventually lead to a growing crack.

 

- KK6PD, someone should slap you for that! As the venerable Mr. Wayne said, "Well I'm not gonna hit ya...I'm not gonna hit ya...the HELL I'm not!!" *smack*!!

geez, what a rodeo clown....

 

I can't begin to tell you how many times I have worked that line into a conversation!!!

Long live the Duke!!!