Gorilla Glass is jumping from phones to cars
LAS VEGAS -- Go ahead, throw a rock at your windshield. It might survive -- if that windshield is made with Gorilla Glass.
The same material protecting the delicate LCD screens on millions of smartphones is now ready for your road trip.
Corning, the company that develops and manufacturers Gorilla Glass, introduced Gorilla Glass for Automotive on Thursday at CES in Las Vegas. It's related to the material used in smartphones, but with added ingredients to protect it against the extreme cold, heat and sun exposure experienced by most cars.
To demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of glass in automotive use, Corning built an electric car and equipped it with a Gorilla Glass windshield, sun roof, rear window, dashboard, touchscreen steering wheel display and a control panel resting between two seats.
Speaking about the potential of glass in a wide range of industries, including automotive, Corning's chief strategy officer Dr. Jeffrey Evenson said, "Glass can be to the next 50 years what silicon components have been for the last 50 years."
Evenson said Gorilla Automotive Glass is thinner, lighter and stronger than traditional automotive glass, allowing Corning to make the windshield significantly thinner than a standard car windshield. In fact, the glass throughout the car is lighter and thinner, which, Corning claims, could make the car more energy efficient.
Corning executives also claimed that Gorilla Glass Automotive is is two times more resistant to sharp stone impact, which means that when that big truck in front of you kicks back a pebble, you may not spider your entire windshield.
Because the entire dash was made of Gorilla Glass, it could also accommodate a video screen in front of the passenger seat. During the demo, a movie played as the rest of the dash focused on driving tasks like speed and navigation.
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Gorilla Glass Automotive also maintains the flexibility found in their smartphone glass, allowing them to cold bend it to surfaces like the control panel and side windows. On the rear and sunroof windows, Corning sandwiched in an opacity layer. They demonstrated how, with the press of the button, they could turn these windows from clear to almost opaque.
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Corning also announced a partnership with glass manufacturer Saint Gobain, and said they are ready to produce Gorilla Glass Automotive windshields for production cars today. No word on how much these next-gen windshields will cost.
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