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341

On 30th December 2022, my partner and I were travelling from our home to Norfolk, Eastern coast of England. We reached the outskirts of Cambridge, just after 1pm, we heard a bang sound like a firework, a gunshot sound in our car. I jolted, because I was driving and luckily there were no other vehicles directly close to us at the time, in front or behind or to the side. Immediately, I thought a window had broken, or we had been hit by another vehicle, or one of the bottles of champagne (pre New Years Eve) had gone off. 

I managed to drive to the car to lay-by a couple of minutes later. We got out of our Tucson Ultimate, in lovely Tealy petrol blue, and we checked the luggage for champagne, we looked at the windows and noticed the draughty air a moment before, I looked at the sun roof and there it was.

We were stunned, because we saw no evidence of debris. No projectile. No missiles. No stones. Nothing at all. The glass was shattered. I had the temerity to grab my iPhone and took several pictures of damage. We were more than half-way to our holiday cottage. Quickly, we decided to continue driving to our hosts, which we know very well. We phoned ahead and immediately informed them. When we got to the cottage, the host helped us with an emergency tarpaulin to throw over the roof of the car. We trapped the tarpaulin with the four doors to stop it shifting. The weather for the next couple of days was rainy!

Earlier in the day, as we were departing from our home, we had some lovely sunshine so we moved the textile underside of the panoramic sunroof back. We could see the weather behind, whilst keeping the glass part closed. When the weather turned grey, we closed it. We can thank our lucky stars, we avoided serious injury had the textile part been open. The sunroof just exploded and we had nothing to do with it.