Better that than the alternative (ignoring children left in hot cars).
Why hasn’t this problem been fixed with technology, at least for new cars? It shouldn’t be that hard to make some device that senses temperature as well as (by weight, sound, body heat, etc.) whether a child is in the car, and sounds an alarm/opens all windows/turns on AC if the temperature inside gets too high. These seem like very minor engineering challenges that wouldn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars per vehicle.
There is always a smarter idiot that will figure out a way to defeat any safety measure.
Weight? It annoys me that I get a seat belt warning flashing light if I put a book in the passenger seat. A weight sensor would cause a lot of false alarms. Sound? Sounds get into cars. Not reliable. Body heat? It would have to work on temperature differential, and I don’t see how a device could distinguish between body heat and something in the sun or shade. What might work is a motion sensor, if it could be constrained so as to only sense motion within the confines of the vehicle.
It strikes me that any such device will open the carmaker to liability. For example, let’s say the device opens the windows. Someone sees a baby in an open car and thinks, ‘Oh! I think I’ll have baby stew tonight!’ and kidnaps it. Or someone’s property is stolen when the device rolls down the windows even if there is no child or pet in the car. Or it starts the engine and turns on the a/c and someone steals the car. What if it’s a standard transmission?
This Pulitzer Prize-winning story from The Washington Post offers a couple of reasons why it’s not been made mandatory in new cars, or why aftermarket devices aren’t available. A big one is liability, in case the device fails when a child is left in the back seat.
Good idea with a motion sensor – but the other problems do not seem insurmountable to me. It could work with multiple sensors, which only trigger the action with the appropriate combination of factors – this should reduce such false positives.
Maybe this is the explanation – especially with Dewey’s latest link.
I’m curious why you want to make life more difficult for a stupid person. This sort of things happen not because someone is evil, but because they are stupid, and they probably have many more problems stemming from that. It certainly won’t change their behavior, save in her Husband looking for you with a baseball bat.
Yes, that’s what I expected people to say. Ignoring children who are in danger is bad. Assuming children are in danger when they are not is also bad, and I expect that’s also going to happen. See also: people who call the police whenever they see a child playing unattended.
Though that is an excellent piece, there are actually after market solutions. They don’t sell for the reasons noted in the article, no one thinks it can happen to them.
If I had a kid I would have triple redundancy in warning systems because it is damn likely to happen to me as I am so forgetful.
This happened at the NASA facility where I work around a decade ago. Guy devoted himself to coming up with a solution. Turns out they just couldn’t market it. No one would buy it.
Can you give an example of an infant or toddler in a locked car with closed windows and no parent in sight that isn’t dangerous? Unless you meant people are going to start smashing windows because there’s a 15 year old playing on her iPhone in the back seat.
I can see lawsuits.
Fred stops his car, turns off the engine, gets out to pry a piece of gravel from his tire.
He looks up and Bill is smashing his window out with a crowbar.
This is trivially easy – a parent stops for 2 minutes, perhaps to pick up a prescription or something – and rather than go through the 5 to 10 minute evolution of waking/comforting the baby, putting them in the stroller, etc., they leave them in the car for a few minutes.
Before we start inventing temperature-weight-and-motion detectors that will sense if a baby is at risk – you all realize that cars can be operated without seatbelts being fastened, right? Isn’t that a far bigger threat to safety in general?
That. It’s not dangerous to leave a child in a car. It’s commonplace and my parents did it reasonably often. I assume most people’s parents did. On the other hand leaving a small child unattended in a car for too long on a hot day is dangerous and stupid.
And how many stories do you hear about cars that are stolen with an infant in the back? Most are simply ditched (the cars with the kid in it) once the thief realizes there is a kid in the car. Sometimes the kid is dropped by the side of the road and the car is kept.
Sometimes it takes hours to find the child. Yep - well worth saving that 5-10 minutes. :smack:
As annoying as it can be to haul the bambino around, I never, ever left the kidlets in the car. 10 years old, let’s talk. Babies - WTF.
or an ejection seat.
That’s a perfectly reasonable position, but someone asked for a scenario so I provided it.
People become irrational about children, particularly their own.
It’s Texas…so the answer is “a lot”.
Getting the kid out, good. Breaking the windshield dumb.
As has been noted the windshield is a sandwich of two pieces of tempered safety glass laminated to a plastic sheet in between break the glass and the plastic sheet is still there with lots of little pieces of glass stuck on both sides. You then have to get through a very tough flexible plastic sheet to reach the door handle.
Much smarter to break a side window which is not likely to be laminated glass*. Also the inner door handle is right there.
Personally I’d probably break the driver’s window so the idiot parent would have to clean the seat before they could drive home.
*Some high end cars have anti-smash (laminated) side windows but these are fairly rare.