With spring now here, the risks to drivers on the road are less than in winter. Better light conditions, the absence of fog, no more black ice and a reduced chance of severe storms that can rain debris down on a car all mean accidents and damage are less likely to happen.

However, none of that guarantees you won’t need to get a windscreen replaced or repaired. There is always the risk of a collision, vandalism or an unusual incident such as debris coming loose from one vehicle that hits the car behind it.

The last of these scenarios happened recently in New York and was captured in dashcam footage. 

In the incident, a wooden board being carried by a pickup truck came loose and flew out of the back, hitting and smashing the windscreen of the car behind. The incident, which happened in high winds on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, led to the local authorities banning pickups from seven bridges in the area during windy weather, the BBC reports.

Thankfully for the driver, he escaped without serious harm in what could have been a fatal accident and posted the footage on his X account. However, the incident was a reminder that sometimes unexpected incidents leading to windscreen damage can occur.

On other occasions, breakages can happen when nobody is in the car, often due to vandalism.

However, the most extraordinary instance of windscreen damage happened in Stratford-on-Avon a couple of months back, when the culprit was not debris from a passing car, a vandal or a falling branch in a storm, but a meteorite.

The extraterrestrial culprit hit the car owned by Paul Butler, with his son Nathan discovering the small black rock nearby was magnetic, a sign that it was of an unearthly origin.

After the car was taken to a nearby garage for repairs, Mr Butler said: “We found out it was about a billion-to-one chance of a meteorite hitting the car in our driveway, so we’ve started buying lottery tickets.”