What do the labels on your car’s windows mean?

If you look closely at the windows of your car you will notice some type of markings and text and on it. What do they mean exactly?

Well, this isn’t really important information, but since you’ve reached here, we’ll answer this question for you.

Car brand and glass manufacturer stamp

Usually located on the bottom corner of your window, one of the most obvious things in the cluster of text and shapes is the car’s brand. Depending on the car brand, this is sometimes present and sometimes not.

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Next is the logo of the glass manufacturer. For this, you’ve got “Saint Gobain” based in France, “Pilkington” based in UK, AGC and Nippon from Japan, Schott from Germany, and Xinyi Glass from China.

Although you may not find your car’s brand logo on the window label, the automotive glass manufacturer’s brand name is sure to be present.

Standards

And then there’s the safety standards label, with “E” denoting European standards, “AS” denoting American standards, JIS denoting Japanese standards, and CCC denoting Chinese safety standards.

There’s usually more than one regional standard label on your car’s window.

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Oh, and in case you were wondering, DOT stands for Department of transportation., so a marking with DOT-563 means the glass conforms with the American DOT-563 standards.

For the European standard, the standards differ with E1 representing German standards, E2 representing French standards, E3 representing Italian standards, and so on.

The numbers to the right of the "E" logo (e.g., 43R-000055) are a continuation of the standard's designation.

Even non-European countries have an "E" designation with Malaysia represented by E52 and Thailand represented by E53. It's a long list that you can look up.

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Type of glass

The type of glass is also shown on the window markings, with “I” for strengthened windshield, “II” for standard multi-layered windshield, “III” for multi-layered windshield with special treatment, and “IV” for plastic glass.

There’s also “V” for other (not windshield) glass with light transmission coefficient low than 70 %.

Some windows have "T" or "TP" to represent tempered glass and "L" to represent laminated glass, while some just have "Laminated" or "Tempered" spelled out explicitly.

Things like "Lamisafe", on the other hand, are brand specific products. "Lamisafe" for example, is a product of Asahi Glass Co. (AGC).

What about date of manufacture?

Well, this one’s a little bit tricky with different manufacturers having different ways of presenting this

Take for example this marking on a glass marking from FuYao Glass Industry. The number “9” denotes the year 2009 while the one dot after it denotes (“1” + 6) month of manufacturing. So, basically July 2009.

If the dots are located before the number, the sum of the dots equals the month of manufacture. So, if it’s 4 dots before the number “15”, basically it means April 2015.

In a different example shown by this window marking by XinYi Glass, the number “9” on the first row denotes the year 2009.

The second row of numbers add up to 11 (1+2+8) representing November, and the third row of numbers add up to represent the day of the month. In this case, 10+2+1+4=17. So, the glass was manufactured on 17 November 2009. 

Conclusion

So, that’s basically what the labels on your car’s windows mean. Now you can tell some basic information like the brand, type of glass, and sate of manufacture, just by deciphering these labels. Have fun figuring out when your windows were made!