Visibility & Visual Comfort

Good visibility conditions are key to driving safety, and visual comfort (for example, light reflections and glare) is part of visibility. Bright sunlight causes glare, rain smears the windscreen, condensation clouds the view, and ice build-up blocks out almost everything. Today's vehicle glazing technologies can deal with all of these.

Antireflective Glass

Reflections on the inside of the windscreen can be disturbing to the visual comfort and concentration of the driver. This is compounded by current design trends that lean towards lighter dashboards that are more strongly reflected in the windscreen. Anti-reflective glass, which is treated with a special coating, can reduce these reflections by up to 40% at a reflective angle of 60 degrees, and also helps reduce glare.

Hydrophobic Glass

Hydrophobic glass is coated with a polymeric layer that repels water, causing rain or other water to run off the glass without leaving droplets and also greatly improving the effectiveness of windshield wipers in completely clearing water from the windscreen. This leads to significant increases in visibility under wet conditions.

Heatable Glass

In heatable glass, invisible wires or an invisible metallic coating -- in each case embedded into the interlayer of the laminated windscreen -- respond to an electrical charge by raising the temperature of the glass, in cold weather speeding the removal of any condensation or ice and then of course preventing any further condensation or ice build-up.