What Was The First Production Car With A Curved Windscreen?
One of the key design elements of modern windscreens also makes car glass insurance more important than you might think.
The huge, curved, exceptionally tough pieces of tempered, laminated safety glass are an essential part of keeping drivers and passengers, partly by providing a clear and wide range of visibility and partly by providing some structural rigidity during an impact or accident.
The consequence of the advanced technology used to make and apply safety windscreens is cost and given that there are legal consequences to driving with a damaged windscreen, getting insurance to cover the cost is essential.
Curved windscreens have been a common car fixture since at least the 1950s, but are actually older than you might think, although their wide adoption might have been hampered by the first car they were fitted to.
Guilt By Association
The Chrysler Airflow CW was the first production car to be fitted with a custom windscreen, but it was not the first car to feature curved glass at all.
The Rumpler Tropfenwagen from 1921 was the first car designed with aerodynamics in mind, which included extensive use of curved windows and bodywork designed to cut through the wind and make the car safer.
However, despite featuring prominently in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the car sold less than 100 units and never reached full production.
The Airflow was a far more dedicated project, one that was decades ahead of its time in terms of several major design elements, including the curved windscreen found on its top-of-the-range CW Airflow Custom Imperial model in 1934.
Most other models had a v-shaped windscreen consisting of two sheets of safety glass. Whilst this was not as innovative or safe it was still somewhat unusual at the time.
It was also a unibody, focused on weight distribution in a way that no other production car had done up until that point and as a result was not only safer in terms of visibility and aerodynamics but also featured better handling.
It was not the first car designed with safety in mind, but was notably more robust and safe to ride in than many of its contemporaries, not that this was a particularly high bar to scale.
However, the Airflow was an abject sales disaster and was one of the worst major launch disasters in automotive history up until that point.
There were a lot of reasons for this; faulty manufacturing caused by difficulties creating the Airflow’s waterfall bodywork led to significant defects, something pounced on by rival
carmakers such as General Motors.
It was released during the height of the Great Depression, which reduced the ability for customers to take risks on unusual and expensive cars.
Finally, there was a lot of criticism of the looks of the car at the time. Whilst not dissimilar to cars that would come about a few decades later, the Airflow was mocked as an “anonymous lump” and it was even considered unsafe.
This latter claim was later disproved by a memorable safety video where the car was driven over a 34m cliff whilst only suffering superficial damage, but the real damage had already been done.
This had a knock-on effect on car design for years, where curved windscreens were largely shunned for another decade, only reemerging more prominently after the Second World War.