Elsewhere at fordforum.com there are messages posted about this, but for some reason not here. Yesterday I was "booby-trapped" by exploding rear liftgate glass on my 2010 Escape rental car from Dollar. There are a number of reported instances of exploding glass on the internet. The general experience is that the user is blamed, even though it seems to have something to due with temperature stresses on the glass / use of defogger, etc. In my case, the presumable cause was that the rear liftgate glass was unlatched when I opened and then closed the liftgate. On the impact of closing, the glass exploded. (The car was "cold" (parked overnight) / 60 degree ambient air temperature, fair / clear weather. etc.; nothing touched the glass as the gate was closed; so many of the potential contributing factors described by others did not apply in my case.) I have been opening and closing car windows and doors for most of my 53 years, and have never damaged a vehicle by doing so. I suspect there is a combination of factors that can make these windows into mini-bombs waiting to go off: the force comes from compressed gas inside the rods that support the glass when its open. With little mechanical leverage (shallow angle), these must support a surprisingly heavy wiper motor assembly that is attached to the glass (you only can tell how heavy it really is after the glass explodes and it is dangling in front of you). I suspect that some of the panes must have defects or weaknesses in them, since this does not happen to everyone. Still, the very fact that it happened to me under these circumstances tells me that either a serious design or material defect was present in my rental vehicle.