Sunroofs Are Growing in Size and Popularity. Rules Haven’t Kept Up.

Sunroofs Are Growing in Size and Popularity. Rules Haven’t Kept Up.
And Ford — which in Ms. Hankins’s lawsuit warned that laminated glass sunroofs could be dangerous — now uses it in
some of its sunroofs “depending on engineering requirements,” a company spokeswoman, Elizabeth Weigandt, said.
The lawyers said Ford had known for decades that laminated glass — which uses a layer of plastic
film between two layers of glass — was safer, but used less-expensive tempered glass.
Today, more than a dozen years after Ms. Hankins’s crash, there are still no government regulations meant to prevent the hundreds of sunroof ejections
that happen every year — even as more buyers are ticking the box for the sunroof option and more carmakers are stretching the size of the glass overhead with larger, panoramic sunroofs.
“It put me in a wheelchair,” she said, adding, “It scarred my face really badly.”
In the suit against Ford, Ms. Hankins’s lawyers argued
that the automaker should have used laminated safety glass, the kind used in windshields, and more securely anchored the panel.
Some automakers have already taken steps to make sunroofs safer by using laminated safety glass,
while gadgets now in the works could help limit sunroof ejections during rollovers.
The carmaker, Ford, won the case after it pointed out
that no government regulations required a sunroof — even a closed one — to keep someone inside a vehicle in a crash.