3016 Garages

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."
-- Eric Hoffer --

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More stuff I don't understand. All the experts on car care tell you that you should keep your car in a garage, not sitting in the driveway. Why? The usual answer is to prevent fading of the paint by the sun, or other heat and weather damage.

I don't understand this.

Most people drive their cars to work, where it sits in a parking lot all day, in the heat, sun, wind-driven dust, rain, snow, hail. Then they drive home and it sits safely in the garage, at night, in the dark? And we garage it to prevent fading? Seems like a good coat of wax would protect it as well as a garage at night.

Some insurance companies will give you a discount for garaging, but that's understandable because it might lessen vandalism opportunities.

It's kind of like the recommendation to store furs and leathers over the summer in refrigerated storage buildings. "They" say that heat and dry air are bad for fur and leather. So, in the summer, they want you to take your furs out of your cool, air conditioned but still relatively humid home, and pay someone (them) to hold them for you, then in the winter you bring them back into your static-shock-dry heated house.

That makes no sense. Maybe a hundred years ago it did, but not now.

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While I was sitting outside waiting for the rental car at BMW yesterday, a guy pulled in with his car. His sunroof had exploded. He insisted to the service intake manager that although he had been driving when it blew, nothing had hit it. As evidence that it exploded out, not in, you could see that the glass remaining in the frame was bent upward (which those two seemed to put great importance on, but it seemed to me that could have been a consequence of the 55 mph drive to the shop), there was no glass in the car, and the roof and trunk lid had scratches from glass blowing over.

The manager said she'd never seen that before. The man said there were many stories on the internet of it happening to others, some even while the car was sitting alone in the garage. The manager had difficulty believing that it hadn't been hit. She wondered if it might have been the heat causing a pressure buildup.

I didn't say anything. It wasn't my place. But I did notice that no one said anything about whether the sunroof had been open or closed when it blew. That seemed important to me as to whether pressure would have contributed, and which way the glass would have gone even if it had been hit by something. Also, tempered glass has a weakness. When glass is tempered, the process forms an altered layer on both outer sides, "bonded" to the ordinary glass on the inside. If the outside layer is scratched or nicked, even invisibly, if the scratch goes through the tempered layer to the ordinary layer inside, it will create a weakened area that's pulled upon by the tempered layer on the other side of the pane - the tension between the layers is disturbed - and the slightest bump can cause it to shatter.

Not that any of that will have any effect on whether BMW will accept responsibility under the guy's warranty. Even if it did blow spontaneously, it could be argued that it would have been due to a (microscopic dust) scratch or pit, and therefore should be covered by his insurance, not the warranty.
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