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