Early one morning on a recent weekday, Amber Nguyen was driving her 2025 Lexus SUV on a highway to a work meeting when she heard a loud bang. 'I'm not even joking, it sounded like a gunshot,' said Nguyen, 26, who lives in Louisiana. 'The sound is totally different than if a rock just hits your car.' The sunroof in Nguyen's Lexus shattered. Had the sunshade not been closed, she might have been covered in glass.

Thousands of drivers have filed complaints with U.S. auto-safety regulators describing jarring incidents in which their sunroof unexpectedly exploded or shattered, often while they were driving. The number of complaints has soared recently and is set to hit a record in 2026, with nearly 500 reported so far this year. Causes include road debris, hot temperatures, rapid temperature shifts, and manufacturing defects.

The sunroof failure reports target all major automakers, including 17 different manufacturers and more than 200 models over the past three years. Roughly one-in-five complaints lodged in that time involved 2025 or 2026 model year vehicles. Such failures happen roughly once a day. Even so, the issues have rarely resulted in recall campaigns.

Modern, motor-driven sunroofs rose in popularity in the 1980s. Initially a feature relegated to the luxury market, sunroofs are now equipped on more than 50% of vehicles produced for the U.S. market, up from 35% a decade prior. David Smith, a former design manager at General Motors, said sunroofs present an engineering challenge: cutting a hole out of a car's roof while maintaining the vehicle's stability and integrity.