Little sizzlers prevention could be mandatory for cars

http://www.wbrz.com/news/child-advocates-urge-backseat-car-alarms

The government now wants to require automakers to put back seat alarms in cars so parents don't forget there's a kid in the back seat. Something else to worry about that will jack up car prices even more.

Bad enough I had to put tamper resistant outlets in my house, now I have to pay for this as well.

It's all about the kids.

Thank God for big-gub'mint nanny-state do-gooders. Whatever would we do without them?

The government wants to, but I hope they don't. Imagine trying to move furniture on the back seat or setting your groceries there and having to deal with the alarm. The only workaround would be disabling it, but a feature to disable it would defeat the purpose of the alarm. Parents could still kill their kids by disabling the alarm and saying they forgot to enable it. You can't stop people from liking their kids. Instead, they should work on educating people and removing the stigma from being childfree. If you stop making it sound like you HAVE to have kids, and you make birth control easily accessible, fewer unwanted pregnancies will occur, and fewer PNAs.

Lock him up or put him down.
Stolen from Shiny.

Any responsible parent who thinks they have a legitimate reason to leave a kid in a car can figure out their own solution without forcing all automobile owners to pay a thousand plus dollars for some stupid backseat alarm.

I have no idea how anyone could forget a kid in the car, they're always making noise and even when asleep they have a distinctive smell.

I'm in favor of preventing lil sizzlers of course...but why build this into the cars and not the car seats? Kids who're old enough to not need a car seat are old enough to know how to get out of the car. And parents have to buy car seats anyway, so pass the cost on to them, not me who never has a kid in my car, let alone a car seat.

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randomcfchick
I'm in favor of preventing lil sizzlers of course...but why build this into the cars and not the car seats? Kids who're old enough to not need a car seat are old enough to know how to get out of the car. And parents have to buy car seats anyway, so pass the cost on to them, not me who never has a kid in my car, let alone a car seat.

This makes more sense. Making a back seat alarm mandatory makes about as much sense as stating 60+ people a year buy kayaks so now everyone must purchase a roof rack with any car.

we seem to be doing this overall 'stupid prevention' right and left. no consequences. can you imagine if the thing becomes demented and 'sounds off' when there is no sex trophy in it? drive ya nutty I'll bet.

two cents ¢¢

CERTIFIED HOSEHEAD!!!

people (especially women) do not give ONE DAMN about what they inflict on children and I defy anyone to prove me wrong

Dysfunctional relationships almost always have a child. The more dysfunctional, the more children.

The selfish wants of adults outweigh the needs of the child.

Some mistakes cannot be fixed, but some mistakes can be 'fixed'.

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one. Leo J. Burke

Adoption agencies have strict criteria (usually). Breeders, whose combined IQ's would barely hit triple digits, have none.

Irresponsible parents are the reason new US–spec vehicles have to have backup cameras. A woman backed her SUV over her one-year-old, and her case in particular became the cause for activists demanding the rule. IIRC, no one ever answered the obvious question about why her child was wandering outside without anyone knowing in the first place, and the "accident" smacked of a PNA. Now activists are pushing for this new rule, again because of the sheer numbers of hot-car PNAs.

I will say I like the backup camera in the Toyota Tacoma.

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khan
I will say I like the backup camera in the Toyota Tacoma.

It is a nice feature! It is currently an option, and there's nothing wrong with keeping it that way. Let those who want to pay for it do so, and the rest of the public that doesn't want it will simply use their rearview mirror.

This won't make anyone safer. It will, however, increase the price cars, in particular the low-end base-model vehicles that low and moderate income purchase to get them from point A to point B.

"Feel Good" mandates and legislation, in almost every case, hurts working class and poor people quite severely.

I would bet anything if they started charging these assholes for murder this shit would stop. Then you wouldn't need to add something to remind pahrunts that "the most important thing in da world" is still in the car. They never forget their purse, phone or anything else in the backseat yet they forget the kid. People who do this are a specific kind of low that I hope everyday gets used as prison currency.

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"It is better not to look like what you are; it is better to look like a bourgeois woman because then all the doors are open for you and then you can just go and make hell." - Marjane Satrapi

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freya

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randomcfchick
I'm in favor of preventing lil sizzlers of course...but why build this into the cars and not the car seats? Kids who're old enough to not need a car seat are old enough to know how to get out of the car. And parents have to buy car seats anyway, so pass the cost on to them, not me who never has a kid in my car, let alone a car seat.

This makes more sense. Making a back seat alarm mandatory makes about as much sense as stating 60+ people a year buy kayaks so now everyone must purchase a roof rack with any car.

This would be mandated after some idiots failed to lash down their kayaks properly on their trucks, cause accidents on the freeway.

Seriously, it's on the makers of baby equipment...and the makers of the babies themselves...to shoulder this cost. I am not paying extra $$ just because someone can't fucking watch out for their poor kid. Put a sensor in the baby seat. Have it communicate with the parent's phone and alert them if they shut the car door while the seat's occupied. Since parents always have their faces buried in their phones, this should be a sure-fire way to stop this shit. That, and stop the cooing and petting when a parent kills their kid via car-inflicted heat stroke. Hold them responsible and stick them in jail. Investigate their household and possibly take away custody of any other kids in it, just as if they'd stabbed or shot their kid.

On a related topic, area where I live recently passed a law absolving of criminal liability any good Samaritan who breaks a car window to help save a dog or child from the heat.

We don't need legislation to help prevent these "accidents" because none of these deaths were an accident.

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"Not every ejaculation deserves a name" - George Carlin

I don't like the idea of possibly being forced to buy a car with this feature in it. Don't need it, don't want it. There will never has and never will be a little kid in my car that is in danger of being forgotten. I've had a hysterectomy, I don't work with children, and my family is small with no possibility of even any little nieces or nephews. Don't put an alarm in my car to detect something that will never be there! Is it going to go off because I put groceries in the backseat? If it is not mandatory in all cars and/or can be disabled, okay but that means that parents can and will forego it altogether or disable it, too, and it won't even prevent the deaths that it's meant to. It just sounds like a cockamamie idea.

I think a lot of parents think they'll never forget The Most Important Thing in the World, so they don't need an alarm and they don't need to pay attention.

I'm with LovetoLurk, I don't think that ANY of the hot car deaths I've heard about are accidental. Every single one I've heard so far sounds like a PNA or PNA attempt. The only deterrent for murder is jail. Forever.

I just want to mention that I know that jail doesn't deter murder from happening, but it sure as FUCK helps. That and sterilization so they can't get knocked up (or knock someone else up) from the Pokey.

Instead of installing alarms that will be nothing but a useless PITA for most drivers, there should be a rebuttable presumption of, at least, second degree murder whenever a child under, say, 6 dies unattended in a hot car. I think breeders do this because it's relatively easy to get away with it.

This is a pointless, useless, and expensive piece of legislation. All it is is just a show to pretend people are doing something to curb hot car PNAs. But unless they force every breeder to buy the PNA-proof vehicles and put into law that every breeder with children under the age of six has to drive their child in one of those cars, it's not going to stop anything. Unless they put the caveat that after this mandate, anybody who kills their child via hot car will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because they'll require all cars to have a PNA-proof alarm, but then still go soft on the murderous breeders who "forget" their child in the car.

Frankly, it should be on the car seats, not the car. Breeders with cars have to buy car seats anyway, so they can take the financial hit. Those who don't have kids or whose kids are out of the car seat stage and somehow managed to not ever forget their kids being in the car shouldn't have to take on the burden.

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"Why children take so long to grow? They eat and drink like pig and give nothing back. Must find way to accelerate process..."
- Dr. Yi Suchong, Bioshock

"Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born."
- Garrett Hardin

"I feel like there's a message involved here somehow, but then I couldn't stop laughing at all the plotholes, like the part when North Korea has food."
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- Reddit comment

"Bitch wants a baby, so we're gonna fuck now. #bareback"
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Oh whatever. Abortion doctors are crimestoppers."
- Miss Hannigan

Also, this is not that widespread a problem. That sounds cruel because every child who has died this way has suffered a terrible, gruesome death that should never have happened and could have been prevented. However, it's not like large swaths of chyyyyldren are dying from this.

http://noheatstroke.org/

According to this website, 30 children died in a hot car in the US in 2016. It's been 39 so far this year in the US. If they force all new car buyers to buy cars equipped with an alarm to prevent something that only happens around 30 times a year, that's ridiculous. We're all going to have to bear the cost and annoyance to possibly save 30 individuals a year? I know that sounds harsh, but why do we all have to pay for a problem caused by 30 parents a year (assuming usually one caregiver per case is responsible for the "forgetting")?

If it were millions of deaths I'd say something needed to be done, but 30?

Definitely this should be included in the car seat, not the car, so as to target the cost to the responsible parties. Even then, the vast majority of parents don't do this. I think this is a solution in search of a problem, actually. This is lawmakers trying to look like they are doing something and people buy it because the thought of a li'l sizzler is so horrifying that it makes the problem seem more widespread than it is because it makes such an emotional impression.

Caregiver education and legal consequences are what are needed here IMO and perhaps including this feature in car seats as others have said.

The bottom line is no matter how many preventive measures are put into place to try to stop hot car deaths, parents will still find ways of offing their kids. The media continues to treat this trend as a bunch of tragic accidents, but as many of us here have hypothesized/figured out, odds are VERY good that these hot car deaths are fully intentional and are carried out by parents who want out of their jobs and want to make child disposal look accidental to avoid punishment.

So how exactly would these backseat alarms work? By sensing weight in the backseat? By that logic, you couldn't put anything in the backseat of a car without it going off. Would the alarm sound from a car seat being back there? People pay no mind to car alarms anymore and it would probably only be a matter of time before they quit paying any attention to backseat alarms too if they go off from anything being in that backseat, living or not.

Parents will find ways around this kind of technology. They'll find ways to disable the alarms, or if the alarms are easily accessible, might just break them or remove them entirely and then sue the car manufacturer for a "faulty alarm system" when they kill their kids and say it was an accident. Or they'll cook up an excuse as to why they aren't guilty, such as, "I didn't know it was MY alarm going off!" or "It didn't sound like an alarm!" Cue tons of recalls to make those backseat alarms as idiot-proof as possible. Or parents just won't buy cars with backseat alarms in them. There are plenty of used cars out there and I'm sure they can't all be equipped with new-fangled alarms.

Just charge parents with murder when they broil their kids to death in their SUVs. Those l'il sizzler incidents will see a sharp decline if we start throwing the book at these parents instead of blindly believing that no parent would ever kill their own child on purpose. It's that exact delusion that allows these fuckers to get away with murder.

I also notice from my job at the zoo that most parents cannot hear very well and will just ignore the alarm. I know from personal experience that this happens. I was about 10 in 1974 when dad bought a then-new Chevy Kingswood Estate station wagon (it pains me to type that) that had the system where everyone had to buckle the seat belts or a buzzer would keep buzzing. Dad was hard of hearing, so it didn't bother him. After one very cold winter day, the buzzer would not stop even with everyone buckled in. We used mom's car, but dad drove the wagon every day to work for the next 3-4 years with the buzzer going off the whole time, until it was traded in. Funny how back then, I never heard much about kids dying in hot cars.

My idea is that the alarm would also be linked to their smartphone, and would not be a program that could be set to vibrate or silence, so they'd have no way to ignore it.

Yep, build them into child safety seats and link to their cell phones, which they never forget. Make it like the annoying Amber Alert but you cannot ever shut the noise off.

I do like my backup camera, but do not feel they should be forced on anyone.

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From a bottle cap message on a Magic Hat #9 beer: Condoms Prevent Minivans
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I want to pick up a bus full of unruly kids and feed them gummi bears and crack, then turn them loose in Hobby Lobby to ransack the place. They will all be wearing T shirts that say "You Could Have Prevented This."

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addiea raine
I would bet anything if they started charging these assholes for murder this shit would stop. Then you wouldn't need to add something to remind pahrunts that "the most important thing in da world" is still in the car. They never forget their purse, phone or anything else in the backseat yet they forget the kid. People who do this are a specific kind of low that I hope everyday gets used as prison currency.

I have a friend who is a PNB and extremely forgetful. She's forgotten her keys in her car, forgotten her wallet, purse, etc. She never once forgot her freakin' CHILD.

Navi8orgirl said, "I do like my backup camera, but do not feel they should be forced on anyone."

Unfortunately, these cameras are required on new cars and light trucks sold in the US as of May 2018. Canada passed a similar law.

If I'm understanding correctly, the proposed bill would call for cars to have a sensor that knows when the back door has been opened before driving away and then puts a notification on the dashboard when you arrive at your destination. Not sure if it is supposed to ding-ding-ding too (probably). So that would mean every time you put anything in the backseat, even just a bag of groceries, your dashboard is going to alert you. That is something that will be easy for any parent to tune out after a while and just ignore.