Bwah? Aren’t ordinary child-proof locks and stuff enough? Per this story.
So, why would you want a car that unauthorized people couldn’t open from the inside? Seems like overkill if all you want is to keep your toddlers from falling out of the car while you’re driving. All I can think of is if you’re planning on being in a Bourne sequel or a Stephen King movie, and you’re going to need to lock a bad guy or an Evil Clown in the car. Handy plot device, but in real life? Whaffor?
I guess the idea is to keep would be thieves from being able to escape, but the potential for accidents like what happened in the linked story would make me very wary about wanting a car that I myself might get trapped in (and I totally would because I’m an idiot).
"What happened when the [ . . . . . . ] locked his keys in the car?
It took him two hours to get his family out with a coat hanger."
Looks like this joke is obsolete.
The only reason I can think of was that it might have been a former police car but that seems unlikely.
All I can figure is that the car is a police vehicle that was being used as a family car for some reason. That’s the only way this story makes even the slightest bit of sense.
Many high line European cars have a system that deadlocks the door locks when the car is locked with the remote. This means that you cannot open the car from the inside. The button is physically prevented from moving by an electric solenoid. The dead lock does not come into play when the car is locked from the inside. What this does it prevents someone from breaking the window, unlocking the door and climbing in.
I had a friend that had this system on his BMW. A thief broke the small fixed window in the rear door but he was unable to unlock the car due to the deadlock system. As a result, my buddy still had his radio when we got back to the car.
In addition many cars have anti-smash glass which is constructed like a windshield. Two pieces of glass with a piece of plastic in between. This is designed to prevent a thief from throwing a brick though the window to grab something off of the seat.
Needless to say, nothing is fool proof, fools are to ingenious.
Every time a company comes up with something that they think is idiot proof, the world invents a better idiot.
Sometimes I think stupidity is the strongest force in the universe.
BTW I doubt the kid suffocated, more likely he died of heat stroke.
IMHO the car company is not at fault here. Whoever had the remote and locked someone in the car is the person responsible.
Huh. They’ve raised the bar for paranoia since the last time I looked.
http://www.firstdefense.com/html/Armored_Ford_Excursion.htm
Many-many widgets, then…
But I’m still not getting it. You come out from your board meeting, you see there’s an intruder in the front seat of your armored SUV, and you…lock him in? So he can wait while the cops come? But…you’re in an area where presumably you don’t have a lot of faith in the local cops coming, or else you wouldn’t be driving an explosion-proof fully armored SUV, yes? So, you lock him in until…what? The both of you get tired of waiting?
And if he’s a suicide bomber, that just gives him more time to finish installing it under the dashboard.
And if he’s just some mook out to steal your stereo–how’d he get in, in the first place?
So the assumption must be that this widget is to stop terrorists who have already broken into your car from, what, escaping from the Guadeloupe police department? Like the Guadeloupe PD is a serious threat to terrorists worldwide…
Still not getting it.
P.S. I don’t see anything that prevents a potato up the tailpipe.
My friend’s car does this. I didn’t believe him, until he locked me inside and I couldn’t get out (he let me out, of course, once I cried “uncle”) Of course, I didn’t believe him because it struck me as completely absurd that car companies would implement something so dangerous. I can see how you might think something like this up, but that it made it into production models strikes me as a serious lapse of judgment. It’d be like if walk-in freezer companies decided to remove the release handle from the inside of their units.
I kept looking around for a trunk release or something in his car, but I couldn’t find one. He said that there is one in there, although he wasn’t sure where it was. Obviously, if I hadn’t been worried about his car, I could have kicked the front windshield out, so I doubt that this is any good as a real restraint system against adults who know that. I’d think that a 13-year-old kid would be strong enough to do this, but he’d have to know that you can kick out windshields.
This is yet another case where security theater has real and major negatives. This system won’t do much against serious criminals; it’ll only be really good at trapping little kids.
I think the car company shares a lot of responsibility. Given that almost every other car in existence can’t trap people inside, it wasn’t unreasonable of the parents to think that they were keeping their kid safe by locking the doors, and that he could just get out and come inside whenever he woke up.
For those of you thinking this is a new thing, my 1989 BMW had a similar feature. You could turn the key in the driver’s side door an extra notch and deadbolt all the doors.
Only the key on the outside could open the doors. Someone inside would not be able to get out without breaking a window.
The difference is no one steals radios out of walk in freezers. This type of system presents zero danger if used correctly. You don’t set the fucking security system if someone is inside the car. How hard is it to understand this?
As I mentioned it saved my buddy from having his car stolen or his radio taken. No security theater, but a real world example of where this kept the car secure. Seems like a good idea to me. But then again I am not an idiot.
It is a fairly well known fact that heat inside a parked car can kill. Yet every year, we hear about some parent that cooks their kid/cat/dog inside a parked car. Are the car companies also responsible for these deaths? using your logic, I guess so. This is all part of the It’s not my fault, you can’t blame me mentality. The parents fucked up, big time. They are responsible. Not the car company.
As in the case Rick describes, it’s not intended to restrain the crook, but to prevent somebody getting into the car in the first place by smashing the window and reaching in to open the door. They can smash the window, but they can’t open the door, so they can’t get in. From that standpoint, it has some merit, although there are obviously problems. It would be better to have an inside latch in a well understood place that couldn’t be reached through the window. But if it’s a well understood place, the crook is probably ready with some kind of a makeshift extension tool to reach it.
There are lots of systems that are completely safe if used correctly, but that are still inherently dangerous. The test for this sort of thing shouldn’t be whether it’s possible to use it safely; it should be whether it’s easy to use it dangerously. And it seems like this is.
It’s not that it’s hard to understand the concept, it’s that it’s so easy to overlook it. People have been locking their cars with little radio-code fobs for, what 10, 15 years, now? So it’s easy to get into a pattern of doing that. What if you didn’t know that this “feature” was present in your car? Sure, we should all read the owners manuals all the way through and pay attention to every notice, but we don’t. In my opinion, the danger of locking someone inside by taking what, for countless other car models, is a totally innocuous action overwhelms the benefit of making it harder to steal stereos.
A middle ground for this kind of thing would be if you had to explicitly take some action to enable the behavior, which would not be on by default. This would at least make it more likely that someone had read the user manual and knew what they were enabling, although it would not remove all risk. Or, if the system is really meant not to restrain someone, but to prevent someone from opening the car doors, then they could make the windows roll down from the inside. But maybe I’m misunderstanding how this feature is supposed to keep criminals out. If they can smash a window in, can’t they just climb through the window?
Go out, roll down the side window on your car, and try to crawl in through it. You might be able to, but it’s enough of a PITA that your average criminal isn’t going to bother. THEN, imagine doing with it shards of glass from the smashed out window sticking out of the door, and littering the car interior. I’ve had a window smashed recently - it makes one unholy hell of a mess. And the little cubes the safety glass breaks into still have sharp enough edges to cut you up.
(They didn’t enter the car, and the cop somebody else had called by the time I returned to my car noticed some plastic pellets on the ground. Kids screwing around with a pellet gun, probably.)
Something I’m not understanding from the story: it says he was trapped in the car for “more than 12 hours.” It also says he was discovered “when his parents awoke at 10 AM the next morning.” So, that means he was trapped from, say, 9 PM, through the night, until 10 the following morning? How does a car get hot enough to kill a person in that time? This time of year the sun rises at around 7 AM, so that’s only about 3 hours of sun. That seems like it should be quite survivable. It also seems like he should have been able to alert someone to his predicament by using the horn.
But failing that, I can see some rational reasons to have such a system, but it also seems mighty dangerous. At the least, they ought to include some sort of backup safety measure in cars that are equipped with dead lock systems like this. An emergency unlock, obviously, would defeat the whole purpose, but what about, say, a big and obvious red button somewhere inside the car for a trapped person to push that will signal the key fob when it’s pressed? The owner could then return to the car and see what’s up.
The horn might not work if the ignition isn’t on. Also, the fob would have to be significantly bigger (twice as big?) to have a receiver on it, and the transmitter in the car would have to be pretty powerful for it to work reasonably well.
Like Rick said, how many beings die every year because they’re trapped in a hot car? Since this is the first case I’ve ever heard of where the trapped person or thing was cognizant enough to try to get out, I’d bet that the first case is much more likely. The solution seems like it’d be the same for both cases, yet since it’s not really feasible to keep adults from locking small children and pets in the car, I don’t see how the special case of locking teens and adults in the car requires its own special interlock.
It’s a tragedy, there’s no doubt that, and nobody wants to blame the victim, but I have to wonder why the kid didn’t honk the horn like mad for those twelve hours. I imagine that he did, considering he went so far as to slash through the upholstery trying to get out. So, what happened?
I would completely agree if the parents owned the car. However, since they are from Paris and the incident happened on a Caribbean island, I suspect it was a rental. That still wouldn’t make the manufacturer responsible, but it might make the rental company responsible.When I rent a car, the features are not explained to me. They hand me the keys and tell me where the car is parked. The parents may not have known the car had this feature or how it worked. It may not even have required pushing a button on the remote to engage it- when I take the key out of the ignition and open and close a door, my car automatically locks and sets the alarm
This is not the same thing as a parent leaving a baby or toddler in a parked car. That child shouldn’t be left alone anywhere. While it does seem odd for the parents to have left a 13 year old sleeping in the car and go to sleep themselves, it would have been just as dangerous for one of his parents to have been left in the car.
Psst. Look in the glove box for the owner’s manual. 
I have done it more than once with a rental car.
The horn on a lot of cars doesn’t work if the ignition isn’t on.
So have I - but generally, owner’s manuals tell you about every possible option the manufacturer offers. It won’t tell you which options that particular car has, nor will it have any information about anything not installed by the manufacturer - for example , my owner’s manual didn’t mention that my alarm system would automatically lock the doors and set the alarm, because my alarm system wasn’t installed by the manufacturer. It did explain how to operate the power seats- which I don’t have.