Back in 2003 I asked why cars didn’t integrate data from existing sensors and warn owners about kids left in the back seat (see Lack of wireless Internet killing children). Today’s New York Times carries “Forgetting a Child in a Back Seat Can Kill. Cars May Soon Warn You”:
At least 41 children have died of heatstroke this year after being left in the back seat of a parked vehicle. Since 1990, when the annual number of vehicular heatstroke victims was first recorded, more than 800 children have died in hot parked cars.
But congressional lawmakers are now weighing whether to require new cars to include a device for detecting children in the back seat and warning the driver of their presence after the car has been turned off. The requirements were attached to a House bill, passed last month, that is meant to speed the development of self-driving vehicles. The Senate version of the bill, which cleared a committee vote this month, includes an amendment with the warning requirement.
It looks as though my 2003 post overlooked a super simple way to do this:
General Motors and Nissan have introduced technologies that remind the driver that a child is in the back seat by analyzing door sequencing. If the rear door is opened before the car is started but not after it is turned off, a warning sounds.
This will be annoying for dog owners, though, in moderate temperatures. The dog enjoys riding around in the back seat, but isn’t welcome in the Kwik-E-Mart. So there will be a lot of spurious warnings.
My 2003 post also overlooked the utility of an additional sensor:
Some companies that sell equipment to the auto industry have developed warning devices. One such system, the VitaSense, uses low-power radio to sense movement and breathing. The technology, developed in Luxembourg by IEE, a manufacturer of automotive sensors, can reportedly detect even a sleeping infant in a rear-facing child seat. If a child is detected after the vehicle has been turned off, it alerts the driver by several means, including flashing lights, beeps, and messages sent to cellphones and computers.
(maybe this is why Luxembourg is so much richer, per capita, than the U.S.?)
For proponents of markets, it is kind of sad that this has taken so long. Why wouldn’t Toyota have added this (at least the trivial door sequence monitor) to the Camry in order to distinguish its product from the Honda Accord? Unless consumers are indifferent to whether their children survive, how to explain this apparent failure of the market?
Readers: how come hundreds of children had to die between my 2003 post and today? There is sort of a competitive market in automobiles (enough competition that GM needed almost $100 billion in tax dollars to survive!).
Related:
>Unless consumers are indifferent to
>whether their children survive, how to
>explain this apparent failure of the market?
Most people figure they won’t leave their infant/toddler unattended in a hot car, and to five or six zeros they are correct. The resulting weak consumer demand relative to other features means the market won’t drive the issue to engineering’s attention.
The problem as a public safety intervention is that all vehicles need the device but only a small fraction of vehicles carry passengers which will benefit. If the device costs $10 per vehicle then the cost per life saved is about five million dollars which is high for an auto safety issue. Of course, because the fatalities are children a years of potential life lost analysis would prove more favorable.
Thought Musk had the right idea in just having the car continuously run its air conditioner. Sensing human life is still a bit of magic.
“This will be annoying for dog owners…”
Good lord, I hope the dog lovers don’t see this. You’ll be hounded (pardon the pun) to death by people that think that leaving a dog in a car for 5 minutes should be cause for ejection from polite society/incarceration/beatings.
Hybrids and electric cars can run the air conditioner for quite a while while parked, so that could potentially give some relief. You’d think this $40 sensor could tell you whether or not something is alive inside the car with some reliability. https://www.adafruit.com/product/3538
superMike: I wrote about the rolling kennel in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2003/06/20/carkennel/
“Readers: how come hundreds of children had to die between my 2003 post and today?”
Natural selection?
But seriously, this didn’t happen until we were told to put the kids in the back seat.
Maybe eventually the robots will save us from ourselves.
>But seriously, this didn’t happen until we
>were told to put the kids in the back seat.
But seriously, airbags and car seats have saved a lot more than 800 lives over the last 30 years.
It is remarkable how much of society’s resources are spent dealing with morons — like people who leave their kids in a locked car. A friend is a firefighter in NYC and he says he spends most of his time, not responding to emergencies but responding to calls from morons who, e.g., got locked out of their apartments, morons who passed out drunk with the turkey in the oven, morons who call the fire department because they have a pain in their chest or a headache, etc. As for the morons who call the fire department for a lock out, the firefighters always make sure to knock down their door with a sledge hammer — to teach the moron a lesson not to call the FDNY for a lockout.
“But seriously, airbags and car seats have saved a lot more than 800 lives over the last 30 years.”
I can see side curtain airbags being useful, where seat belts provide limited protection, however, the main steering wheel mounted explosive device might maim Mimi, to save Mr. Bubba Too Cool for Seatbelt.
Maybe leaving a kid/pet in the car will lead to DUI like penalties in the future?
Americans can’t actually afford cars anymore because of all this safety crap in conjunction with the emissions requirements. It’s now illegal to make a cheap, fuel efficient car. It has to be super heavy to pass crash tests, loaded with flimsy and expensive electronic tech like rear cameras and air bags, and have a complicated engine to meet CAFE and still manage to haul the bloated thing around. I’m sure glad they haven’t outlawed motorcycles yet.
Probably because everybody knows that only stupid people leave kids in cars, and why would I need that because It Can’t Happen To Me.
One of the best articles I’ve read convinces me otherwise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html?utm_term=.b34ee7d885a9
Jack: Anyone who claims they’ve never done something moronic IS a moron (I hope I’m paraphrasing Les).
Whatever the solution, it’s not a joke. A first world tragedy is still a tragedy.
philg: I’m not sure there is a market failure, but if there is, can we consider the specific failure to be a variant of “imperfect information”? In this case, the problem isn’t that the information isn’t available but the way that most people process information about low probability events.
the other Donald: Even the first world is full of tragedy. It may just be that these particular tragedies are not of sufficient magnitude to justify market or government driven engineering changes. My quick and dirty calculation suggest this is the case, as does the fact that it appears to be Congress and not the regulatory agency which is initiating government action.
– Why would a company not develop a safety feature that would look nice in their marketing bullet points?
Liability. On to the cost of developing and including the feature, you have to add the cost of dealing with annual lawsuits of the form “You said [safety feature] made it IMPOSSIBLE to leave my kid in the car and now she’s DEAD!”.
To me this sounds like a really annoying feature, too. Every time you have an adult guest in the back and you go to the gas station or they take too long to get out have a false positive warning to silence. I’m sure decent solutions can be engineered, but if the tech goes through some growing pains and we all hear about it you’ll have an uphill battle selling the car to the childless.
Z: It is unlikely that liability would be significant. Even if the device is completely ineffective and you end up paying a million per occurrence that amounts to only $30 million per year. The direct cost of installing a $10 device in all new vehicles is $150 million per year.
However, I agree that false alarms are a huge issue. They impact not just public acceptance but also effectiveness in that a system which produces too many false alarms will eventually be ignored. This highlights the difficulty of predicting the real world effectiveness of a device targeting a very rare occurrence (the calculation in #1 made the optimistic assumption of 100% effectiveness for $10).
Of course, another idea is maybe having the courts award custody to the parent who actually gives a damn about the kid instead of the one who needs the money.
I have prefect solution that will work all the time.
Have an implant in the child / pet and the responsible adult. The implant will send a electric shock [1] to the adult [2] if:
1) The distance between the two exceeds N foots and
2) The laps time is more then T minutes.
[1] The level of the shock can be adjusted, first offense is a mild shock, repeated offences, a killer shock.
[2] If the adult is a moron, the length of the shock would be longer.
Did this trend correspond to the switch to rear child seats?
We rarely drive but when we do our daughter hates the car seat; it seems callous to leave her in the back row staring at the ceiling while mom is busy driving.
The top cause of death once you’re born healthy and before you age much (i.e. 2-30 or so) is motor vehicle crashes. Americans spend a lot of energy on the exact details of the car seat setup (or on infant alarms!), but the elephant in the room is how much we drive and how dangerous it is.
Massachusets should take pioneering public safety steps and prohibit driving ( and flying). This is clearly requires prohibition on owning cars (and aircraft).