I can’t imagine that this would be the case. I drive a van and haven’t owned a car in 20 years.
Have they put some kind of lock so that people can be locked inside?
Every car may parents ever owned could be easily opened from inside with the door handle latch. The last car I owned and the van I have now is the same way. I’m not sure how old I was when I learned to open a door with a doorknob or car latch. Maybe 3? Kids are pretty clever at that sort of thing.
Wouldn’t it be a safety hazard to have car doors that can’t open from the inside (without a key or remote)? I can imagine running out to the car to get something I left on the dash and the door closes. Oh crap, my key is in the house. That just can’t be real can it?
Some back seats have “child safety locks” so pulling on the door handle will not open the door. This feature is settable usually by a button at the driver’s seat. But certainly in the cars I’ve been in recently both front seat doors open when you pull the handle.
The vehicle in that news story appears to be a Ford F-150 extended cab. The rear doors have child safety locks which, when engaged, prevent the doors from being opened from the inside. However, the front doors will open when you pull on the door handle. You don’t even need to unlock the doors first; pulling the handle unlocks the doors automatically on most Fords, including this one.
It’s likely that the little girl tried pulling on the handle of the rear doors, found they wouldn’t open, and just assumed the same was true of the front doors. It’s also possible she wasn’t thinking straight. I’ve seen children as old as 4 get locked inside a car and get flustered when an adult tells them which button to push and they can’t understand the directions.
To answer your question, YES there are some cars which can be locked down in such a way that the doors cannot be opened from the inside, but they are mostly German cars like BMWs. I’ve never seen an American car with that feature.
There are also cars where the childrens’ lock is set by a tiny lever in the door itself rather than a button. In any case, a child wouldn’t be able to open them. And I’ve been in cars where the passenger’s door also had that kind of lock (separate from the central lock function), leading to many cries to the driver of “we’re your coworkers not your kids, let us out you %&&%%& or you’re doing all the work by yourself!” Reaching the appropriate button from the passenger seat was doable to all but the stockiest of us, but required some weird gymnastics.
The kid probably didn’t know about the front doors.
go figure. The baby boomers (the biggest collection of children in a generation ever) survived childhood with normal car locks. Now we lock kids in. OK. now I know.
thankfully we had an older car when we raised our two girls. They were never locked in and couldn’t get out. Ever. It wouldn’t have been something we would have done anyway.
thank you for informing me. I need to get out more. My van still uses a normal door key and ignition key. I don’t even have a remote to unlock them. No built in car alarm. Van’s have older tech. even my 2000 Econoline.
There was another thread very recently about car doors that have a deadbolt-like lock that engages automatically in certain circumstances, and can only be unlocked with the key – cannot be unlocked or opened from either inside or outside other than with the key. There were apparently some cases of children getting locked inside a car due to this kind of lock, and getting boiled alive.
Stay tuned, maybe I can scrounge up a link to that thread . . .
(ETA: aceplace57, weren’t you a participant in that thread?)
ETA: Okay, here’s what I found – it’s not such a recent thread after all. From August 2008:
Re: Those cars with deadbolt locks that can lock you inside: I swear I saw it discussed here on this board just recently, because I had never heard of this before. But it certainly wasn’t that thread I linked just above. But I can’t find a newer one. Anybody else remember it? Fairly recent.
Some of those baby boomers fell out of moving cars and died. Sorry, but this is a very silly argument. Those of us who survived, survived. Those who died, didn’t. I assume you are reminiscing about the days when we just had lap belts, if we had any seatbelts at all?
I’d like to see a cite about front doors that cannot be unlocked from the inside. Please cite a specific model as I believe this to be BS due to safety concerns.
You must be talking about this. BMW will get sued big time for this one because it is obviously a bad idea to just place a disclaimer in the owners manual.
Yeah, that’s the story. Thanks. I can’t find the thread. It wasn’t a thread specifically about this instance and may have been buried in another thread about kids left in cars to die. I still can’t seem to find the thread though.
My 2000 BMW 323i had that feature - when you lock from outside with the key / key fob (?) the doors are locked and cannot be opened without the key (fob). The theory was that thieves could not simply break a window, then open the doors from the inside to remove contents; they would have to crawl through the window. Yes, if someone remained inside, then they were effectively sealed in unless they broke a window.
Haven’t checked if this is the case with newer BMW’s. Europe has different attitudes to locking, since they are more prone to burglary and sneak thievery, rather than armed robbery. The trunk, also, did not have an inside release button and the back seat release levers were inside the trunk. As a result, you could not get into the trunk by getting into the locked car, and IIRC the valet key specifically did not open the trunk.
I see my newer 2008 BMW does have a trunk release button in the cabin, I haven’t tested under what circumstances it operates.
I’d heard rumors about cars locking people in from inside. It sounded too much like the old refrigerators that suffocated kids. I had wondered if the locking car tales were true. Apparently they are. I’m thankful BMW is too expensive for me to ever buy.
I agree, but apparently there are some that are that way.
The thread was about “Stupid errors that crop up repeatedly in TV shows and movies”, and I mentioned this as being one of those stupid things, but at least one person said that it was true for their car:
Since then, I have tried our Chevy Colorado, and you can open the doors from the inside when the fob locked them. That does set off the factory alarm, though.
I seem to recall that my wife’s 2002 Audi A3 had the same deadbolt feature and the same trunk access restrictions.
I guess those Germans assume that anyone who can afford their cars has the brains not to lock people inside.
They were obviously not familiar with American though processes.
That just can’t be real can it?
My van still uses a normal door key and ignition key. I don’t even have a remote to unlock them. No built in car alarm. Van’s have older tech. even my 2000 Econoline.