Every summer we hear a number of stories about parents who drove to work and came out at the end of the day to find a forgotten child strapped into the car seat who died from the heat. But you never hear stories about stuff like this happening in the winter, where a parent comes out to find a frozen kid-sickle in the back seat. Why does stuff like this only seem to happen in hot weather?
A quick google search of “kid freezes to death in car” shows that’s not true. I don’t know why the hot car deaths seem more sensationalized, but it definitely does happen and get reported on.
The first two hits are forum threads asking the same question. The next two are a kid dying in a garage and one on a porch.
If it’s a sunny day, it can stay fairly warm in a car, even in freezing weather (due to the original greenhouse effect). A car also provides shelter, so a kid is not exposed to any heat-stealing wind. Also, kids are usually bundled up in the winter, which helps them stay warm.
All this means that a kid left in a car in freezing weather will likely survive for many hours (depending on their age, clothing, outside temperature and whether the car is exposed to the sun or not). A kid left in a hot car in the summer, on the other hand, can die in as little as one hour.
So while either can happen, the hot car is likely more deadly, which is why you hear about it more.
My educated guess? Cars offer insulation from the cold and the greenhouse effect during the days warms up even a cold car in freezing weather. When babies get cold, they can fidget, cry and move in their seats to generate heat. Overheating in a car probably happens much more quickly than freezing to death. So, being left in a cold car would less often be fatal.
Kids in the car during winter are usually “bundled up”. I’m guessing it takes longer to kill a kid in a cold car than in a hot car.
This is probably a good part of it. I’d guess that a lot of kids get discovered rather quickly (daycare calls to check or whatever). In the summer it can still be quick enough to kill the kid but in the winter they are fine.
It’s easier to die of overheat than too little heat. Plus, the nature of a car in hot summer is that it only gets worse with time - hotter and hotter inside. But in winter, if your car is in sunshine, it only gets better and better with time - warmer and warmer inside.
And? You get to 4 of 49 Million results and stop? Okay then: Mother found unconscious with dead baby, bottle of rum in freezing car.
Hot-car deaths often occur when the parents have deviated from the daily routine in some way. Even as to really young kids, I think that may be more likely to happen in the summer months.
“And” linking to google searches is incredibly lame.
Linking to Google searches are really of limited use if you don’t check their relevance. You shouldn’t make people sort through the references themselves; they already know how to do Google searches.
With the added limiting factor that there is no consistency when different dopers click on the same search link.
Google tries to use some of their big data collected on users to come back with search results relevant to what they think that individual user most wants to see. I could get a result that has 4 of the top five results be highly relevant. Someone else clicking the link might have only superficially related stuff on the entire first page of search results.
It’s less likely to kill them, for all the reasons everyone’s given. That’s got to be the main reason
The parent is less likely to be overwarm, which can cause wonky thinking
Like Tom Tildrum says, the parent is less likely to be deviating from a routine
And in winter you might well be having to get your coat from the passenger seat or back seat where you put it if you don’t wear it while driving, meaning that you look back into the car.
Maybe the car getting too hot is seen by some as less dangerous. Anyone who thinks a hot car isn’t dangerous is a buffoon, but to many I think death via heat is less obvious, perhaps, than death via freezing. Maybe obvious isn’t the right word, but I’m having trouble finding one that better fits what I’m trying to say.
A WAG: heat makes people (and children) fall asleep. And when a child is asleep, they’re quiet, and (some) parents will forget they’re in the car. Children are less likely to fall asleep when the car is cold, and thus are noisier.
Again, just a WAG.
I think that generally, in the wintertime you have the greenhouse effect raising the interior of the car temperature and a semi-infinite cooling mass of air drawing the heat away.
Here is a calculator for a car’s interior temperature based on how hot it is. If I plug in 40 degrees F for the outside temperature, the inside temperature only gets to ~85 degrees over a couple of hours. Contrast that to an 80 degree day when the interior temperature can reach 125 degrees in that amount of time.
So, I would expect that in the parts of the nation that experience sub-zero to 40 degree winter temperatures, you are not going to see many of these cases. On the other hand, in places where winter temperatures are 60 to 90 degrees, you probably will.
Cars are warm and toasty places in the winter, whlith the heater on.
I think it’s just that cold takes hours to kill, especially in a dry, well-insulated car. That same insulation is why heat takes less than an hour to have that tragic outcome.
If anything, children left in a sealed car in winter might be likelier to die of suffocation than hypothermia. (Perhaps someone can do the oxygen and carbon dioxide math for us)
Without doing the math, that’s completely ridiculous. Cars aren’t remotely air tight.