Purchasing my HHR, I knew I would have to deal with some fisrt year issues, but nowhere was I informed that such cheap materials would be used, especially for the windshield.

 

jx3....

I think you may have misunderstood the intent of my post......you need to read that paragraph, again, to get the idea.

I was not infurring that he or anyone KNEW the HHR had "cheap" glass. I was just saying he did buy it and it does have the cheap glass and GM didn't pay $100 more for a different window from a different supplier ( although I think, the quality is questionable, and GM MIGHT do something in future models).

It is just one, of many, simple explanations of the thought processes employed when GM looks at materials or improvements. They look at the total $$$ for a particular vehicle.

To make it easy.....many people have suggested GM needs to produce the HHR with a V8 ...yeah, right. ........for the seven people that will buy it, they would never get their development costs returned. It's really outside the spectrum of intent and the marketing segment of the vehicle.

 

Snoopy.... great insights!!

The sad part is that the likelyhood of GM changing suppliers for glass is unlikely, since most of the problems will be an insurance issue, not a warranty cost by GM. If it costs them $$$, then and only then will they look into the issue.

That said, at 7,800 mi. I just had mine replaced a few hours ago because of a small stone hit that created ~ 1 ft. long crack. The new one is the tinted PPG one that others have mentioned. Hopefully it will hold up better.

 

JoeR...

And your insurance point is probably right on the mark....

 

I wonder if the insurance co's look at statistics on this? For instance, if they noticed that the HHR's incur a higher than normal windshield loss, that would prompt a call to GM saying WTF??

 

And it might prompt a higher rate for insurance on the HHR IMO.

 

Please note that the Car Talk guys said *ALL* modern cars use the cheaper glass. I've seen it on everything, from my HHR, to my Saab, to my friend's $40K Benz, to $100K BMW's. The only cars I haven't seen it on are the Rolls Royce Phantom, and Maybach.

The one telltale sign of automotive cheap glass is, under certain, shaded light, you see a thick, fuzzy, chain-link fence pattern embedded in the glass. This is caused by the tempering process. It's perfectly fine and doesn't otherwise affect windshield performance, but decent auto glass doesn't have this pattern.

 

And you usually have some optical distortion. Certain places in my windshield make things look distorted, but thankfully not any part I regulary look through while driving.

But you are right, I think, on the "all cars" thing. I had the same issues with a number of my cars including my Jeeps, mustang, and one or two of my chrylser products. The last car, my Mazda, was not nearly as bad, but it did have the chainlink pattern you speak of.

 

We noticed something over the weekend when it was raining that looked really odd to us.

When the windshield was wet, we had areas where the water was sitting horizontal across the windshield. I took a closer look and I can see what looks like an 8 inch scratch on the exterior of the glass. There are a couple of smaller ones as well. I also noticed a similar scratch on one of the windows on one of the rear doors.

Only thing I can think of is that my ice scraper actually damaged the glass, but since it's plastic it can't cut glass. This is the same scraper I used on my Malibu without any problems at all.

Anyone else encounter this?

 

Windshield World in our area will not replace the HHR glass with another from the same company. They told me the glass was cheap and that they recommend PPG, which makes a better quality windshield. Also, the PPG replacement comes with a nice tint strip across the top, which the stock glass (at least in the '06 models) did not have.