I’m very fortunate to have interesting and kind people living next door to me. I haven’t always had that; my old neighbors in Los Angeles used to yell at my wife and me if we were being, um, intimate in our own bedroom, and the neighbor on the other side of us wanted to pick fights over trash can placement. My current neighbors are, especially by comparison, saints. They also are Tesla Model Y owners, and today their Model Y – which has been quite trouble-free up until now, they assure me, and I believe them – had a really confusing failure that indirectly caused the driver’s side window to shatter, because of what I think is a really terrible bit of design. I’ll explain.
So, when they tried to use the car today, they found the driver’s side door would not open. They went to the other side, which did open, and got in, and found that there were a number of warnings and alerts on the display.
The warnings seemed to suggest some issue with the 12V battery, which caused a whole cascade of issues. But the bigger issue came as a consequence of the car’s strange power situation; some aspects of the car seemed to have power, some didn’t. Wanting to investigate more, my neighbor wanted to get into the driver’s seat, so she would have access to all the controls, etc. It makes sense, I’d want that, too.
So, she tried to open the door from the outside, and had no luck. She remembered there was an emergency door release, so she pulled that reaching over from the passenger’s side to get the door open, and was rewarded with a sickening crack as the driver’s side window cracked. Alarmed, she closed the door, which just made the cracks even bigger, effectively shattering the window, though for now it’s still holding together. But it’s very boned:
At this point she called me to come take a look. I brought a battery analyzer/charger to see how the 12V battery was doing, and it checked out okay, just with 50% charge. Not great, but not dead-dead. The bigger issues seemed to be that, for some reason, the doors on the driver’s side of the car had no power, the tailgate only had partial power (latch seemed to work, but the power struts to lift/close it were dead) and the lights were strange. The DRL on the left worked, but not the right, and the turn indicators worked only on the right up front and the left rear.
Looking on the internet, the power issue could be one of the body controllers, which seem to be named VCLeft, VCRight, VCFront, etc. That’s definitely annoying, but if that is what’s going on, that’s a module that can be swapped out and fixed. The bigger and more maddening issue here is the shattered window.
What I find absurd is that opening a door – even in an “emergency” context – could cause so much damage to the car. What happened is pretty clear, once you see it: for a Tesla Model Y’s doors to safely open, the window must drop down about an inch to clear the weatherstripping and molding on the body. If it doesn’t, the window gets caught, gets torqued, and shatters, just like what happened to my neighbor.
Now, this is something of a known problem. In fact, Tesla had a sort-of fix for this, where they made sure that when the emergency door release was activated, the window would drop down, just like if the normal latch had been used. That’s great for preventing people from accidentally using the emergency release in normal circumstances (which seems to happen a fair amount, from chatter on the forums, and the fact that people sell these stickers) but if the car has no power, or, like in my neighbor’s situation, partial power, then it doesn’t matter, since that window can’t go down without power.
Even Tesla’s own Model Y owner’s manual says to use the emergency release in situations where there is no power, but no mention is made of the fact that it’s very likely the window will shatter if you use it:
I suppose if you open the door really slowly and carefully, you can maybe get by without cracking the window, but this is specifically for emergencies, when slowly and carefully just isn’t really on the menu. Also, the way my neighbor opened the car wasn’t exactly panicked; it was just normal door-opening effort. If that window doesn’t drop down, it’s going to break.
Tesla suggests that in the case of getting out of a Model Y with no power, you use the rear seat doors instead, which don’t need to drop their windows. So, that means Tesla wants you to climb over the seats into the back, then go through this simple procedure to open the doors:
See! It’s a simple three-step process that just asks you to remove the mat from the inside of the rear door pocket. Easy!
Power issues aside, this is absolutely maddening, I think. Is there any good reason that the doors should work like this? I get that frameless doors are cool, but they’re not that cool, especially not cool enough to justify broken window glass. And other cars with frameless doors somehow manage to avoid this problem. Here’s some people talking about just this issue – where the window normally drops a bit to open the door, but for some reason, can’t – on a Volkswagen Arteon forum, and the Arteon’s frameless door design manages to avoid shattering the window:
“You are still able to open the door even without power. The glass will just bend past the seal. For closing the door without power you just have to tuck it underneath the seal. This is what might happen if you forget to add a silicone lubricant at the bottom of the window after a car wash in the winter. My experience is from living in Norway with it.”
This is how I’ve seen most frameless doors work, where they just press the glass against a rubber weatherstripping seal and sometimes have a flexible seal in front of the glass, too. But never a rigid bezel that can get in the way and, you know, break the damn window. The only other car I could find evidence of a similar problem was the McLaren MP4-12C. The owner’s manual for that car even has a sort of warning about this:
That’s a McLaren, though, not a best-selling mass-market EV. Still sucks, of course.
Really, the whole powered latch for a door is a bit ridiculous as it is; opening car doors was a pretty solved problem, even without power assists. It’s just not needed. Did anyone want these?
The fact that my neighbors had a problem with their car, and through no fault of their own ended up with an entirely unrelated and expensive other problem just because of what is really a deeply stupid design just feels maddening. It’s such an unforced error, and if there’s a good reason it’s like this, I can’t figure out what it would be. I know there are other cars that lower their windows a bit when opening/closing the doors, but I’ve not heard of any that will actually shatter their own windows when the battery is dead.
Why was this ever considered okay? After seeing how easily this happens firsthand, I’m sort of appalled. Having the power issues is enough of a pain; the power issues leading to a whole window being shattered just feels like being kicked when you’re down. Who needs that?
Hopefully, this will all be fixed; I’ll try and report back on what the fixes are and how expensive, and, ideally, what Tesla service has to say about breaking windows to open doors.
Yet another reason new cars suck especially Tesla junk/EV trash
“Features” that are just so damn stupid, make no sense, are pointless, cause more problems, make things unnecessarily complicated, are expensive to fix and pushing things backwards.
IF IT’S NOT BROKE, DON’T FIX IT!!!
(The hilarious irony is that they tried to “fix” stuff w/ these dumb “features” then it caused something else to break! Like in this instance)
“Really, the whole powered latch for a door is a bit ridiculous as it is; opening car doors was a pretty solved problem, even without power assists. It’s just not needed. Did anyone want these?”
Exactly…and to anyone who wants all junk like this: you are the biggest dummy in the world, and that ever lived! Get a life since you don’t have one
Bottom line here is that electric doors are not a great idea. If you need an emergency way to open a primary door something doesn’t make sense.
But I have a weird perspective on automobile design as well as life.
And I don’t think the Muskrat even gives a shit about it at all.
It definitely feels like you could add 12¢ of cables and pulleys to mechanically lower the window a few mm when the emergency release latch was pulled. Just wire a cable from its actuating lever to the window track and yank the window down.
Why am I not surprised by this, BC its Tesla. Why people buy these I do not understand.
I’m in the process of buying one. Why? It does the core car stuff like “drive” really, really well. The powertrain is also years ahead of anyone else’s available in the US. And the amount of space inside the body panels is better than a Honda Fit. It’s like the Millennium Falcon of cars. Got it where it counts yet there’s always something broken.
Tesla as a company is a disorganized mess. One hand is definitely not talking to the other. My ordering process has been far from smooth.
Sounds like it would be better to buy a crashed Tesla and swap the drivetrain into another platform. If the ordering process was a headache I’d just walk away, regardless of my emotional investment. Life is too short for those hassles.
I giggled at the contrast between the things you think life is and isn’t too short for 🙂
I’m not emotionally invested. It’s a car, and a common one at that. This is a “capability upgrade” purchase, not a “need transportation now” purchase. So their being a hot mess with the ordering is a source of comedy at the moment. At this point I’ve paid more for less entertainment before. I do kind of feel bad for the overwhelmed people I’m dealing with since they’re definitely stressed. Then again, Tesla made some IMO poor choices that are circling back to roost and causing this process to be the hot mess it is.
I have a feeling the frameless doors are just a cost cutting feature for tesla because they didn’t want to spend a few bucks on the steel to go around the frame. Seems about right for them
I have never seen a company that has so much contempt for their customers, who eagerly bend over for the abuse. The “whippings will continue until morale improves” school of customer service.
That makes me laugh, I would be so over the moon pissed. Tesla really does just throw some junk out there. It does highlight the problem with 12volt batteries. It is just not robust enough for modern vehicles. 48volt architecture is really needed. It leaves a lot of extra headroom to run all of the power hungry components in today’s cars.
It’s really quite amazing that these dunces managed to screw up frameless windows.
The Porsche Boxster is like this, or at least the first year is. You can’t open the doors or the trunk where the battery lives without power. The solution is to plug a thing into the cigarette lighter to boost the battery. But you can’t open the doors without dropping the windows and you can’t drop the windows without power. I forget what the eventual solution is. I think it involves splicing into the wiring with another battery.
I have memories of my father having to do this on one of our old 7 series or maybe an S class in a similar situation. Pop the trunk, remove the cover from the dome light, and charge through there until there was enough power to actually get into the car.
The boxter has a manual hood release behind a headlight, but you have to pull the plastic liner out of the inner fender to get to it which cracks the liner. Guess how I know…
Now I remember. My sister’s boxster now has a bit of wire connected to the release that passes through a hole in the liner. I think there is also now a thing that looks like a trailer tail light hookup for a trickle charger that can bootstrap the entry process. Belt and suspenders you know.
Now, if only we could figure out who Manuel is.
I have an ’08 Pontiac G6 GT convertible, and it has frameless windows that drop when you open the doors. When my battery died, they still opened just fine. They wouldn’t raise back up until I’d replaced the battery, and they had to be indexed once I had.
But no breakage!
The reason the window needs to drop like it does is for wind noise. The glass rises slightly when the door closes so that the glass fully seats into the window seal. It makes a huge difference especially since there is no engine noise to mask the wind noise. The Model Y is also not nearly the first to have this feature. IIRC, the first car to use this idea was the 1960 Lincoln Continental convertible, but only on the rear windows. They were vacuum operated and when there was no engine vacuum, you couldn’t open the doors. It showed up again on the 1990 BMW 8 series. I don’t know what cars have it today, but I do know my 2015 Mustang has it. I don’t know what happens when there is no power, but I’ve never heard of issues so is probably isn’t a problem. Sounds like Tesla just made the glass dig into the seal a bit too much.
Just ask any diesel Mercedes owner about the interaction of the doors and the vacuum system or turning the car off and the vacuum system.
Since there is no electrical ignition system, turning the ignition off, won’t stop the engine since the fuel injection is pure the mechanical removing all electricity won’t stop the engine so they have this groovy little thing it’s powered by vacuum to stop the engine. Oh, but diesels have no engine vacuum so they have Vacuum pump mostly for the brakes and the central locking system, but also to shut the engine off. Fortunately, the people at Mercedes are pretty smart so the turn your engine off function fails before the brake system fails which I appreciate but It can make for some pretty amusing valet parking when you come back three hours later and the engine is still running.
That sounds… amazing and ridiculous all at once.
Unrelated, but it reminds me of nitro drag cars, where the spark plugs are completely consumed by the 1/8th mile and the engine is dieseling on the compression and the heat in the heads, and the only way to stop the thing is to cut the fuel.
Cutting the fuel is how all old diesels stop. The mechanical injection pumps have a solenoid valve which is open when 12V is applied and closes with no power. Of all the diesels I’ve ever owned (german, french, italian) they were all electric, my gramps had a Merc and I don’t remember that one, maybe it was vacuum-operated, like Hugh above^^ said.
One time my Citroen wouldn’t start because the cut-off solenoid died (applying 12V to it wouldn’t make it ‘click’, so I knew it was dead). All I had to do was unscrew it (all I had was an adjustable wrench, but it was on top of the pump, you’d see it by just opening the hood), remove the plunger, put it back and start it up. When I wanted to stop the engine I’d put it in gear and dump the clutch.
The thing that was cool about the old Mercedes diesels was that in theory they could be operated with no electrical system whatsoever. One time just for fun we tried bump starting a 220 D. Or maybe because the battery would not take a charge and none of the cars available had the amps to jump start it. All the farmer engineer antics blend together after 40 years.
Tip to YouTube content creators: it’s a pretty hysterical process and would probably get lots of views. Oh, make sure it’s a reasonably warm day and you have a hundred yards at least of clean pavement. Oh, and a manual transmission Mercedes. Maybe a quarter mile on a cold day? Hell, on a cold day you could make something epic.
Clever design like this is why Elon deserves $56 billion dollars!
That rear door procedure ought to be actually illegal. That is insane. It should have failed safety tests, it should have failed accessibility tests, it should never have gone into production as it is. Absolutely galling.
The worst part is the little disclaimer saying that not all Model Ys even have a manual release for the rear doors. So Tesla’s recommended method for a power failure is to crawl into the back seat and use manual releases that your car might not even have! Fucking brilliant.
It’s like one of those fire extinguishers stuck behind a “break glass in emergency” cover, except the glass is opaque, and there’s only a 50/50 chance there’s actually an extinguisher inside.
Move fast and break things!
My ’96 Dodge Neon had frameless windows and no power anything and I could open and close them fine. In fact when I did roll it(black ice/guardrail formed a ramp, slow roll), they didn’t even shatter but I did end up rolling the window down(up?) so I could open the door easier and get out.
So I guess 90s Chrysler engineering > Tesla?
Right now I’m having nightmares of ending up upside down in a crashed Delorean.
Dream bigger, Mercedes 300SL 😀
You know what works perfectly fine with NEVER this issue? Doors on cars for the past 100 years or so (+/- 20 or so years).
This is mostly a matter of, “What if X breaks?” questioning, in which there are thousands of X’s that are critical to the functioning of the car.
Also the “Why is this better than Y which has been around forever?”
I ask the same questions all the time when a streaming service fails to give me functions that my TiVo, which I can no longer use, did it just fine.
Frame-by-frame slow-mo? No more.
Skip all the commercials with one click? No more.
A wonderfully ergonomic remote? No more. Click the wrong button all the time now.
Pardon me while I go yell at a cloud to get off my lawn…
It is very frustrating that the direction of tech right now is “things we already have, but worse.”
See also: Trying to cram ChatGPT into places where it doesn’t belong and wrecking those things in the process.
That seems to be the direction with everything nowadays. Something you used to get now is either an added monthly fee. Want Prime with no ad’s now? Yeah an extra 4 bucks a month. Hey want a phone with WiFi calling? Oh yeah you need the flagship phone but wait my old 200 dollar phone had WiFi calling sorry you need the Samsung/iPhone 10+ max super banana tech package 10g with 100TB void storage that cost 1k. Want a completed video game from a major triple A studio for 60 bucks? What you serious sorry you need the buy the super ultimate season pass or spend godly amounts on”micro” transactions (not really micro when they are $20-100 bucks). Am I over reacting? Maybe a bit but it does seem like stuff you used to be able to get is paywall locked now. Gotta make sure that line keeps going up for the shareholders. Sorry for me yelling at the creepy guy in a bunny custom that is in my bathroom is over now also.
This is timely. I have a Model Y on order. Hopefully the 16v lithium battery in the 2022+ MY’s doesn’t go wonky like this. That would be another good article on why Tesla decided that a standard 12v AGM battery wasn’t good enough and swapped it for a 16v lithium battery.
Just plain junk and so unnecessary because they had to rethink, electrify, and come up with an over-complicated alternative for every piece of universal old tech that has worked with very rare problems (with easy solutions) for decades. Even the Germans aren’t this bad. You want f’n flush door handles? That was solved at least in the ’50s with a simple, push out mechanical handle or there’s Subaru’s XT solution (I’d recommend the elegant 300SL version). No hyperbole, I’d rather have a Yugo.
Yes, why the hell can’t a major automaker just do a regular car but electric. Replace the engine with a motor, replace the gas tank with a battery, remove the transmission, and stop there, everything else stays totally normal (and that extends to styling, not everything needs to look like a rejected prop from an ’80s sci fi movie)
Well for one thing, the range would be miniscule. Gasoline is extremely energy dense. The most dense lithium ion battery is 1.6 KWh/liter while gasoline is 8.8 KWh/liter.
Not literally. An electric car doesn’t require gull wing doors, frameless door glass, electric door handles, glass roofs, screens everywhere, advanced driving aids, etc, they want to add in all this extra crap that has nothing at all to do with the drivetrain
I want a basic EV with everything analogue(except the charger, BMS, and controller electronics given current limitations/compromises in tech, and any and all code should be open source, freely available, and well documented where/how it is used) and where all of the mechanicals are built “bulletproof”. Roll up windows, physical buttons/switches for every function, and overall minimization of tech. Use thick wiring able to be manipulated and worked with by hand and beefy terminal blocks for all electrical system connections, with a physical fuse box in an accessible place for all the low voltage systems. Headlights/signals/running lights all with replaceable bulbs. The battery pack should be accessible without taking the car apart and working on it shouldn’t require any special tools. Keep everything in the car accessible and repairable with basic tools.
The damned thing would last forever. Which is what is really needed if environmental sustainability is the actual goal.
Things are built to last a reasonable amount of time given the speed tech is advancing, on the whole. They last (on average) until they’re obsolete. When you look at the developments between early Nissan Leaves and now, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a car built 10-15 years ago with another 30 years of life; it’d have cost much more up front, with very, very little benefit.
That disposable attitude is why we’re in the environmental mess we are in and, yet, with all the consumption of new crap we don’t need that we are told to buy to drive the economy, it doesn’t even seem that people are happier for it, though that leads off on quite a long rant for another place. Anything old is technically outdated, but what real gains are there besides marketing wank? Safety, sure, though I think that should have been frozen over 10 years ago as we now pay far more for minimal gains that are largely there to work around problems we created in making them “safer”, namely size, weight, isolation that encourages drivers to zone out and gives them a false sense of security, and lack of outward visibility. IMO, we reached peak meaningful safety somewhere around 2012 and the rest is either too much cost for marginal potential gains or potentially gone backwards in terms of software intervention. Emissions, definitely, but at some point, the disposability and lack of resiliency that makes long term use cost prohibitive and requires an early vehicle retirement cancels out those gains. And this is while billionaire parasites are celebrated for sending rockets into space, each launch of which is the equivalent of millions of annual automobile emissions instead of having their heads on a block. The rest? Power that can’t be fully utilized except by the 0.1% of drivers on a racetrack, make it boring or frustrating to drive at normal speeds, and all but requires computers to half drive the car, anyway; overcomplication of simple, longstanding features for no good reason along with the addition of what’s effectively bloatware that delivers no real benefit to the operator, but does make things less reliable, more expensive to repair, and opens the door up to becoming unrepairable as this junk is integrated with necessary parts, affecting operation when the software is no longer supported and is too complicated, short-lived, and proprietary to likely have future aftermarket replacement availability; and all these features make some of them too expensive to repair in the event of common minor impacts, raising all our insurance on top of everything else.
Old cars are going for more money than they seem to ever have and, while some of that is down to fairly recent older cars’ longevity, the expense of new cars to replace them motivating people to hold onto them longer, and that something even 25 years old doesn’t necessarily feel “outdated” because they still do their jobs well and the new features that are absent aren’t much of anything to be missed, I would bet a big part of it is even older cars raising the fleet average age because they offer appealing features that new cars with their newest tech junk virtually nobody asked for do not, like engagement with the driver, which is the kind of thing that made people car enthusiasts in the first place and cars a cultural phenomenon so that even most non enthusiasts have cars they love. I don’t know anyone who is passionate about appliances, which cars are becoming (though, I’m sure they exist, they are in no way a large group nor do they inspire), perhaps a decent ride that isn’t “Nurburgring tuned” stupidity, repairability by an average DIYer, real interior space in a reasonable footprint, body styles and colors of actual variety, lighter weight that translates into a more playful and responsive feel electric fakery can’t match, simplicity of operation, character, perhaps a (overly romantic) connection to the past, and I’m probably missing some.
I have a 1912 Iver Johnson racing bike. It’s “outdated”, but it does the same job, if slower than a (disposable plastic and electronic shifting) race bike and with worse steering and brakes, but it rides more comfortably thanks largely to relaxed geometry, and has a hell of a lot of charm. It also worked for a time (Great Depression? WW2 fuel rationing?) as a utility bike as there are marks on the seat stays from an old fashioned rear rack. Obviously, a bicycle is a far less complicated machine, but the point is the same: “outdated” is largely marketing propaganda people have bought into and I think many are starting to see it for what it is. Yikes, I could go on for quite a while here, but I’ll quit instead.
“Anything old is technically outdated, but what real gains are there besides marketing wank?”
Well, in the context of electric cars that we’re talking about, especially in the context of the early Nissan Leaf that DaveDave specifically mentioned, meaningful performance. The real gains are in very useful, real-world, performance improvements. David even wrote an article recently about how the early Leaf is objectively a terrible car, and we have come a long way since then.
Dave’s point was that, in quickly developing technologies, obsolescence is a real thing, that really matters. Your 1912 bicycle is not technologically obsolete in the way that a 14-year-old Nissan Leaf is: a new bicycle does not go 3x as far with 10x the lifespan and 4x the horsepower. Because by 1912 bicycles were not a rapidly developing technology.
That’s more EV specific, but I agree in the context of its drive system. The problem there isn’t that this relatively new tech has and will advance (up to a point where gains aren’t terribly meaningful to most users like with any mature technology), it’s that the machine isn’t made to be adaptable to those changes. Many people can and do fit a more modern drivetrain or chassis components into an old car in their garage, but structural batteries and proprietary integrated control systems of an EV (a vehicle with a far simpler mechanical drivetrain)? The larger problem is all the technology that is perfected that is being rethought purely
for hubristo force obsolescence by making it uneconomically repairable all the sooner (or at all as failures of simple old mechanical tech, like door handles, may never approach that state provided the rest of the machine is in decent enough condition while something like a failed BCU causing frustrating, myriad, and cascade issues is an expensive replacement, perhaps even unavailable in the—possibly near—future, will put the machine into the end of life stage even if it’s in otherwise good order as well as potentially causing a safety issue where there shouldn’t be one . . . in an era where everyone’s a wuss obsessed with safety over peace and enjoying the moment).The other point about the 1912 bike is that it still takes many commonly available parts, some only recently largely superseded (aside from the narrower 90mm front hub, though the fork is 1″ standard, so I could theoretically replace the whole thing with something new—even an early mountain bike suspension fork—and the 1″ pitch “skip tooth” chain which was pretty much phased out industry wide in the ’50s).
There’s a thread on VWVortex/The Car Lounge forum highlighting an article stating some of these points. No One Wants a New Car Now, Here’s Why.
https://www.vwvortex.com/threads/dan-neil-no-one-wants-a-new-car-now-here%E2%80%99s-why.9555719/#replies
I mean people do still want a new car if sales say anything, but yeah, I can see where they’d rather have simpler interfaces, less expensive upfront costs or repairs, etc.
“Yes, why the hell can’t a major automaker just do a regular car but electric.”
Ford Lightning.
Chevy Bolt.
Oh. Wait.
A Tesla-swapped Yugo would be amazing.
Angela Chao’s family probably wishes her window would’ve shattered.
Ouch.
That sounds perfectly on brand for Tesla, gee whizzery up front and poorly thought out engineering behind. As far as I can see there is no reason for powered door latches, and Tesla appears to have made only perfunctory arrangements for manual opening.
Then again these are the people who brought you touchscreen gearshift
Spared no expense
The windows on my old M235i used to freeze shut regularly every winter when you would get the rain/sleet/snow deadly combo. I could still get into the car without risk of breaking the window, I would just start it and close the door as far as I could and let it thaw a bit so the window could lower.
If I had a Model Y it seems I wouldn’t have been able to even do that.
Happens here every winter to any of our cars left outside in rain sleet snow. A 2.99 ice scraper fixes the problem right away.
Not sure if this would have worked in her situation, but my Friend’s Mazda 5 had a similar thing, but the hazard lights would not turn off. I assumed a body controller had gotten itself in a confused state, so suggested disconnecting the battery for a minute. Success.
“Have you tried rebooting it?” is also a practical solution for vehicles, since they have so many computers now. I believe you could do this with the 12V on a Tesla, or tr the reboot which I think is holding the 2 scroll wheels down for 30 seconds or something.
Once that’s done you could then instruct her to sell it a buy a vehicle not engineered by drunk pickles.
Tesla remains a company with solid underlying technology, but bafflingly stupid decisions when it comes to surface-level details, like there’s two rival factions within the company working at cross purposes
I’d say it’s more like a company that knows very well how to build a complicated piece of electrical equipment, but little institutional knowledge on how to build a passenger vehicle.
Kinda similar to a powerful suite of software with a crap UI.
Well, you have Starman and the engineers who follow his cult of personality, and then you have the normal engineers who just want to build a nice car and get paid to do so.
Reminds of Michael Bolton from Office Space.
Probably put a decimal point in the wrong place.
Or some other mundane detail.
Half-assed, half-baked “solutions” in search of a problem are pretty much Tesla’s M.O. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Sucks for your neighbors, I hope the window replacement isn’t too pricey.
you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs… for cars. everyone knows that.