There has been another child’s death from being forgotten in their parent’s locked car all day, this time in Virginia. I realize that this is clearly and fully the parent’s fault when something like this happens, but can we think of a safety device parents could have installed that would prevent it happening again? Maybe something like the seatbelt weight under a passenger seat but under the back seats. Then a chime goes off if the car door is opened or the keys are removed from the ignition or even prevent the car from locking if there’s still a weight on the back seat. My Hyundai won’t let me lock the door as I’m getting out if the keys are in the ignition. Would you as a parent absorb the cost of the safety device? Can you think of/dream up another kind of device that might work?
What do you do if there’s a heavy box or something in the backseat? The problem isn’t the car, it’s stupid parents.
I wholeheartedly agree that it’s the parents’ fault, no doubt about it. But just like so many other things that are idiot-proofed in our consumer-oriented daily life, is there something that can be conceived of to prompt an overtired or harried or just plain oblivious parent to check on their child before they lock the doors of their vehicle? As for the boxes, I say put them on the floor or in the trunk/hatch area.
I want to be clear that I don’t feel the automakers have any responsibility to have such devices in their vehicles or make them available. I’m just trying to start a brainstorm.
I heard of a woman a while back who was trying to market something like this. I think her version was a weighted sensor in the child seat that somehow set off a bell when you took the keys out of the ignition. Unless you’re storing boxes in the child seat, you wouldn’t get a false positive. There are apparently a few patents out there for this kind of thing (1, 2, 3). It looks like some of them are just alarms that go off if the rear seat belt is buckled, rather than being tripped by weight. I would think that would work too.
It seems like a fairly inexpensive device, so why not start putting it in cars? For the weight-sensing kind, I’m not sure how it would hook up with the car’s bells and whistles, but I would think that the kind that trip when the seat belt is buckled would be simple for automakers to put in. Why don’t they? Dunno. Maybe they figure that device won’t sell enough cars to justify the addition? I mean, really, GM and Ford are already building cars that people can’t wait to buy. Why add more features?
So we continue to inflate the cost of every car in order to accommodate the two dozen retarded parents out there? This is the same type of backwards logic that made Volvo piss away time and energy on the “intruder heartbeat monitor” in their cars. Talk about wasteful.
Of course any solution you come up with is going to be pointless because the parent that will forget a child in a car is the same parent that will not use or purchase such a device.
Some car company is advertising a “heartbeat sensor” in their car to warn of a possible attacker in the car before you enter.
It’s probably hugely expensive but it if could be made cheaply enough, you could tie that to a timer. If there’s a heartbeat inside and the car is off for 30 minutes, set off the car alarm.
Might be a problem for teenagers out on lover’s lane, though…
ETA: Omniscient hit on the same idea. I’ll echo his thought that it’s unnecessary, though. The trouble with idiot-proofing stuff is that somebody is always building a better idiot. The car company would open themselves up to liability the first time the thing failed or got misused, too.
Some cursory Googling shows that there are approximately 25-50 deaths (nobody seems to be able to pin down an exact number, but that’s your ballpark) per year from this sort of thing. So you are talking about automakers going to what will likely be considerable effort and expense to fix a problem that affects an incredibly minute fraction of the population.
Besides which, of the potentially 50 kids per year that such devices could save, I’d wager that the majority will have parents that either didn’t bother to get the device, or didn’t bother to enable it, or somehow managed to disable it, or simply ignored it.
Do possible attackers really hang out in cars outside of ULs? how do they even get in without breaking glass? Do they carry bra underwires around with them?
Like an IUD?
Thank you for those links, the descriptions were interesting. I didn’t like number one since it can be turned off. And once turned off it’s too easy to forget to turn it back on and there goes the main reason for having it in the first place.
I wouldn’t expect a device like these to become standard anyore so than the nets in trunks to keep your grocery bags from spilling everywhere.
I had thought something like this. However, take it a step further: require new infant/toddler carseats to be incorporated with it (or be incorporated by a certain date by law) that sets the/an alarm off after the keys have been removed from the ignition.
Why seats? That way your hot and heavy Beaver Cleaver and Cindy Brady can do their thing on Lover’s Lane in the back of the car, but nine months later, their hellspawn (in a car seat) will be protected.
Sure, it’s an increase on an already-expensive product, but you’re directing/targeting the safety product at the requirement (and not the customer) kinda like airbags–you can’t not buy 'em anymore, but you’re glad when you have 'em.
Tripler
Incorporate the technology, I say!
The answer: nothing. What do you think they should do?
That said, some 13-year-old Canadian kid is developing a sensor to warn owners when the car is too hot for pets. If it’s good enough for pets, it’s good enough for children.
Seems like you could use a CO2 sensor for this purpose, and tie it in to the theft alarm.
Not that this is related to the OP but, believe it or not, my father got back in his car after going into a convenience store when he was a senior in high school. A man rose up with a large knife from the back seat and told him to start driving. The reason sounds bizarre because the guy was crazy but it was a case of mistaken identity. The man wanted to execute my father and the man’s fiancee together because he thought they were having an affair. They drove around all night trying to find his fiancee and orchestrate the double execution. It didn’t work well and my father ended up beating the crap out of the guy while being forced to make a phone call at a phone booth about 6am because he figured he had nothing left to do.
The man was sentenced in life in prison without parole for that and a whole host of other violent felonies and is probably still in prison. This took place in the late 1960’s but I thought I would share. I am not sure how any sensors would have prevented that however.
KneadToKnow for the win. 
:eek:
Holy fucking shit, that is one hell of a story!!!
I recently saw a hint about how not to make your kid dead in a car: make a habit of putting your purse or briefcase on the floor of the backseat behind the driver’s seat. When you get out of the car, you have to open the back door to get your stuff. Hey, look, a baby!
The problem with that technique is that my mom could somehow reach the entire back seat with one arm while she was in the driver’s seat, so there’s no way she’d have had to open the back door to grab her purse.
I’m with KneadToKnow.
I’m going to get blasted, but what is proposed is not a safety device, its a lets protect stupid people that don’t care about anything, so that they can breed more stupid people that don’t care about anything device.
And then when someone manages to defeat the device and still kill their child they will not only be not guilty :rolleyes: they will be millionaires because somebody didn’t stop them from killing their child.
The consequence and responsibility free lifestyle.
As for the weight thing on the seat, some airbag systems already use sensors in the seat to detect if if is safe for an airbag to deploy based on position and weight. So the sensors are already there.
As to the thread title.
What can automakers do to stop the deaths??
Don’t sell cars to idiots!!!
Wouldn’t work in the OP’s case - the child was adopted.