Double-glazed side windows, also referred to as dual-pane windows, have been premium automakers’ go-to solutions for making luxury cars’ cabins quieter for years - it is basically the same technique used for the windshield, where you have two panes of tempered glass with some vinyl in between.
And since automakers use it so frequently nowadays (it’s even used on some non-premium cars too, at least in Europe, like the mid-2000s Citroen C5 and its Peugeot 407 cousin), it must make a noticeable difference, right? This therefore should be the case for the Tesla Model Y (that now has the dual-laminated glass for the front side windows).
The Model Y gained double-glazed side windows with its first big update, but just how much of a difference does it really make? Well, that’s exactly what EveryAmp / The Artists fka LivingTesla set out to discover, by comparing Model Ys with single-pane and double-glazed side glass. He tested the two vehicles in three different scenarios, in order to best gauge the differences: rough road at 50 mph, smooth road at 50 mph and then a 70 mph highway test.
What’s especially cool about this video are the graphs that give a nice visual indication of the difference between the two vehicles. Furthermore, as the video’s host points out, he opted against using a decibel meter, and just went with a twin-mic recording device, and then calculated the difference that way.
This has to be one of the more scientific videos and its result does conclusively show the use of double glass certainly makes a difference. And once you see the very detailed explanations presented within, you will probably see the idea of measuring interior noise levels in cars with decibel meters differently.
The very latest on the Tesla Model Y
