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to say nothing of Socks and Fifi

A CNN story today talks about alarms to alert drivers before they leave kids unattended in potentially-hot cars. As of this writing 61% of responders to their poll think such warning devices should be required in all new cars. The article quotes someone saying that, hey, your car will tell you about your headlights being on, and isn't this more important?

We can take as given the riff on parental responsibility, right? It's not Toyota's fault if your kid gets left in the car, but that's clearly where the suits will be directed when one of these systems fails. That's not what this post is about.

I suspect that most of those 61% don't care about the difference between worst-case cost and expected cost. While leaving a kid in a hot car for an hour is much much worse than leaving your headlights on for an hour, I submit that the probability is much much lower, or there'd be a lot more news stories about it and a lot fewer calls to AAA. The expected cost of the headlights is higher and carbuyers care, and that's why that alarm is standard equipment. No one but the market requires that makers put it there.

Speaking personally, the expected cost over, say, the next decade of my leaving a kid in my unattended hot car is 0. The expected cost of my leaving my headlights on is some positive fraction of $100 for a new battery and several hours of my time, at least one of which comes at a time when I, demonstrably, wanted to be somewhere else. 61% of poll responders would say "tough noogies" to me and wouldn't care if adding this device costs me hundreds of dollars. (I don't know what it costs.)

I predict that I'll get few takers from among the 61%; they would rightly say "you can't prevent everything". Yes, exactly. And given that, you have to cost-justify, and not just emotionally justify, the burden you would place on everyone else. Here's an idea: if you want a requirement, require that the device be built into the car seat, not the car. It'll be more expensive to do right (and be amortized over fewer buyers), but, well, it's the price we pay for safety, right?

Am I missing a sound argument in favor of requiring unattended-child alarms in all cars, or do all arguments boil down to "a possibility of one child's death is worth the certainty of $X in increased cost for everyone"?

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When we were that little, we were in the front seat. My parents were less likely to forget me because I was right in front of them.
An adult is less likely to be forgotten because they are more visible, more present, and more likely to make themselves known.

I can see an argument for the car seats themselves to have an alarm, but not the cars.

If that's what those voters truly believe, then they do not go far enough. If the goal is to prevent the deaths of those who can't see the danger or get out of the car themselves, then clearly it's not just about kids. Some adult passengers are unable to care for themselves and could die in hot cars too. I think it's actually more likely that an adult suffering from dementia would be ignored by passersby than that a kid would be. We don't think it's unusual for adults to sit in parked cars. Isn't gramps at least as important as an infant?

I predict that I'll get few takers from among the 61%

Er, I think you are mistaken about that. All the mechanisms listed in the article would work just dandy on gramps, too. Indeed one is not being marketed as a child safety feature, but as a safety feature for women: an alert that there is someone in the back seat whom you might not know about.

It's reasonable to assume the 61% would take that as bonus features in favor of the plan, not opposed to it.

Yes, I agree, cars should come with a generic "someone unattended has been left in the back seat" alarm, not just one for infant car seats. (

lucretia_borgia points out that since gramps is consuming Social Security money and a baby will [hopefully] grow up to pay into Social Security, it is economically better for society if we save the baby and leave gramps.)

If such a safety system would really cost "hundreds", then it's probably not worth mandating for all cars, but I don't think that it would necessarily be so expensive. If it were installed in all cars rather than built into infant car seats, the cost per car would be much lower, especially since (a) infant car seats generally don't have 110-dB horns built in, (b) infant car seats get replaced much more often than cars, (c) a lot of "family" cars have toddler seats built into them anyway, and (d) economies of scale are your friend.

I want an alarm that tells me I left the doggie bag in the back seat, so my car doesn't reek of old chicken the next morning.

When we were little, my sister and I rode in the back seat even if there was only one parent up front. It resolved the fights over who got to ride up front.

I guess I'm just a little boggled by the idea of forgetting the kid in the back. It does seem that putting them in the back to avoid the airbag problem has made things worse.

I haven't been paying attention; are front airbags still a problem? For some makes of cars they advertise a feature where the passenger airbag only goes off if weight is detected on the seat (to save you the cost of repacking it if it wasn't needed); if they can do that, can't they set the threshold at, say, 75 pounds? Would that allow kids to ride up front again? Or are car seats incompatable with front passenger seats?

Ah, I misunderstood. I thought the latch in question was intrinsic to the car seat. (An alarm keyed to weight on the back seat would be problematic for other reasons; not all weight is alive.)

I was trying to work in "but think of the grandparents!", but couldn't do it cleanly. :-)

You already know I'd never be among that 61%. There shouldn't be any mandatory features on vehicles, period. :-)

Yes, I agree, cars should come with a generic "someone unattended has been left in the back seat" alarm, not just one for infant car seats.

Or "people should buy gadgets for their back seats if they deem it relevant". One of the devices mentioned in the article is apparently a small thing you can install in a couple minutes; the idea seems to be that you can take it anywhere. Parents should get some of those to keep in the diaper/toy/food/etc bag. But now I'm getting into personal responsibility.

(lucretia_borgia points out that since gramps is consuming Social Security money and a baby will [hopefully] grow up to pay into Social Security, it is economically better for society if we save the baby and leave gramps.)

I suppose that depends on how long you think Social Security will be relevant and how many resources the kid consumes on the way to paying in. Once you add up tax deductions, tuition credits, subsidized health care and food where relevant, etc, it's not obvious that gramps is the loser. :-)

I don't have good instincts on costs. I assume that the cheapest ones to produce have flaws, like over- or under-sensitivity. (For all the times I hear car alarms go off, I'm pretty sure mine did not go off when my car was actually broken into.) And I note that my electronic key/fob/etc would cost $150 to replace (according to the dealer); in a way that's just another portable transmitter/receiver. I'm not sure how you would implement this without some sort of a fob; tying it into the car directly (e.g. sound the alarm if the driver's door closes while the seat is still buckled) seems like it would be expensive, too. But I dunno; it's not my area, so I'm really just guessing. If the design is generic then economies of scale help.

*laugh* When I first read this I parsed "doggie bag" differently -- and the bag you follow your dog around with would smell worse than old chicken the next morning. :-)

(I guess it's a good thing I don't often get (conventional) doggie bags and passengers at the same time. I'm more likely to remember the thing sitting on the front passenger seat.)

Oh, it's intrinsic to the car. And, yes, weight on the back seat was one mechanism mentioned:

NASA is on the verge of licensing its Child Presence Sensor, which replaces the clip with a weight-sensitive pad that fits under the car seat cushion.

That seems insane to me for the reason you mention but, hey, they actually are rocket scientists; maybe they have that covered.

Yeah, I was already counting you in the 39%. :-)

While in principle I'd like to join you in saying "no requirements at all" in favor of requiring outcomes for driver-vehicle pairs (like "must be able to stop in X feet at Y MPH on public roads"), I find that in practice, I'm willing to accept requirements like "must have working brakes". I recognize that this slippery slope leads to "must detect forgotten doggy bag in back seat", but until credentialing gets a lot more mature, I don't know if mandating ends (only) is feasible. How do you envision a "no requirements at all" system working? Is it kept in line entirely by damages suits when people are stupid (and fear of same)?

daylight headlights are great in my opinion - especially for visibility!

Both the sensor and the clip seem like things that are easily end-user-installed without having to be built into the car. I assumed I was missing something in the implementation, but maybe people really are saying "we could solve this for ourselves on our own but instead we want to make you do it for everyone". I can (barely) understand the "if it saves just one child" argument for something that (practically speaking) the manufacturer has to do if it's to be done at all, but without that?

*shrug* I presume the weight sensor is not readily end-user-installed, needing to be put under a cushion which is sewn-in, in cars. But the clip? Is it a matter of needing to be wired in to a power source? No idea.

And I took both the Child Minder (clip) and the weight sensor to be part of the child carseat.

Regarding the strap, I know that on our carseat, the seatbelt from the car is always engaged when the car seat is in place, simply because we leave the carseat in place and it's secured using a seatbelt. I thought the clip was attached to the 5-point harness that secures the child into the carseat itself.

And it would also make sense to install a weight detector in the carseat itself, starting at say.. 4 lbs rather than the car's seat.

I am frankly a bit disturbed that forgetting your kid in the car for hours is becoming such a problem that we'd even consider the mandatory installation of a preventative device in everyone's car.

I forget my briefcase or my lunch in the car every once in a while, but forgetting the kid? Yikes.

But, fine, people are forgetful. I'm a fan of technological solutions for working around the foibles of the human brain. I personally have benefited from the "you left your lights on" alarm several times. If the solution for people forgetting about Junior, Grampa, or Fluffy in the back seat is a $50-or-so sensor, fine. But beyond that, if I can remember to check my headlights in older cars that don't have the helpful alarm because draining the battery would suck, surely people can remember to check for Junior because roasting him in the car one hot summer afternoon would certainly suck a lot more.

"No requirements" means no requirements for manufacturing or purchasing a vehicle. If someone wants to buy a car simply for display that would be an incredible hazard on any roadway, that should be his or her prerogative. If you want actually to use the vehicle on someone's roadway, the owner has every right to institute whatever requirements he or she wishes. One of the reasons why this gets complicated is because we have government-owned roads, but even the requirements on those should be for nothing more than the safety of those outside the vehicle (e.g., brakes, headlights, etc.), not inside (air bags, the alarms under discussion, etc.).

The libertarian non-aggression principle of "do no harm" means do no harm to others. :-)

Agreed, but you can see my comment above for a bit of an elaboration on my earlier point. :-)

Ah, got it -- in that case we completely agree. I thought you were advocating something looser, and I want to be able to use those roads too. :-)

Yeah, really. In following links on this yesterday I came to the datum that there have been (presumably in the US) 340 cases of this in the last decade. We're talking about fewer than three dozen incidents a year, and for this they want regulations? I can think of far bigger problems.

That said, I'm all in favor of devloping technology to help with this and marketing it to forgetful parents (and all other parents, caretakers, and pet owners "just in case"). You can build a good business case around that. Where I balk is at the idea that because there are a few dozen incidents of heavy-duty forgetfulness per year nationally, every car manufacturer should be required, and every car buyer should finance, this new safeguard. Further (to go down a path I didn't in the original post), you just know that someday one of those things is going to fail, the forgetful parent is going to kill a kid anyway, and it'll all be the manufacturer's fault and personal responsibility will be off the table. Personal responsibility is already at risk in society today; should we make it even worse?

When the technology fails, you definitely get lawsuits.
Sort of like wrongful life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_life) suits.

Not all weight in the front seat is necessarily alive either. My briefcase regularly sets off the "front passenger hasn't fastened seatbelt" indicator.

I doubt you'd want to set off an alarm if the drivers door closes while the child seat is buckled. What about those in-between times (put kid in, walk around to driver's door (especially in a minivan or such where the rear is only accesible from the passenger's side), and the reverse upon arrival). The distance from car seems the ideal measure of "has the person left?"

Wow. I hadn't heard of that before. Before I followed the link I thought it would be about sterilization that didn't work, and I can see the possibility of a valid suit there. But "didn't catch the birth defect"? That's a different class of problem. I wonder how many of those suits are successful.

More children, by at least one order of magnitude, are killed as pedestrians hit by automobiles. First, automobiles need to be banned from residential areas.

Kind of like worrying about your air conditioner not working while your house is on fire.

(fyi, I'd like to see that be an option, the non-automobile neighborhoods. It'd require there to be neighborhood stores again. I'm not a rabid car-free person, even if I do cycle to work more often than not)

makes more sense! thanks.

I think no-car areas in cities could work, and you get a different character when you don't have to worry about cars. (I saw that in parts of Israel.) We used to have an area here several blocks square that was pedestrian-only; in addition to housing it had a lot of small businesses. Popular opinion (I haven't researched the facts) is that putting a road through the center was the major contributor to the downturn the neighborhood took (property values, crime, overall satisfaction, etc).

Here in CA we have an "amber alert" system: huge billboards and text-message spams telling people "watch out for this vehicle, they may have captured a child!". They are now celebrating five years of success.

I understand it cost dozens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. The savings? About 23 kids a year. The false alarms and distractions? They don't talk about that.

I completely agree, it should be a choice, not something mandatory. I do not want a V-chip in my television. I do not want daytime running lights (which were only safer initially because when you saw a car with its lights on during the day, you knew they were a moron and kept closer watch). I do not want a passenger airbag, because I rarely drive, and when I do, 99% of the time it is with the same passenger, who is short enough that the airbag is more likely to kill than save them.

And I suspect it's not just that 61% of people don't care about the difference between worst-case and expected cost. I would wager that it's more than 61%, and that they don't understand the difference. But I always assume people are stupid.

I would also say that the people who bounce around at work distracting everyone by talking about how perfect their bundle of joy is, and then leave it in a hot car to die, probably shouldn't have been allowed to breed in the first place. It really sucks for the kid, no doubt. But this is one of those cases where "an eye for an eye" punishments would send a very good lesson.

But when you say "allowed to breed" you're coming back around again to people doing thinking for eachother, and deciding other people's destiny.

People need to be free to make their own mistakes. That's what freedom's all about.

Sadly true. There are people who really really should not breed, and it's tempting for society to try to force the issue, but it's the top of a slippery slope. I am, however, all for making unfit parents suffer the consequences when some can be brought to bear; sadly, we can't prevent some damage from accruing to their kids.

In principle, I'd be completely fine with adult children being able to sue for gross abuse and negligence, with the parents doing jail time if convicted. It's deferred punishment, but it's something. I'm also fine with automatically taking away additional kids if someone already on public assistance or convicted of child abuse (no I am not equating those!) has more, IFF that is considered a net win for society (there's someone who wants to adopt).

so far as I understand it, studies still show that regardless of the air bag issue it's safer for kids to be in the back, period. Most (all?) states REQUIRE that children be seated in the back seat if there is one (if you have, say a pick up truck without a back seat, obviously you're exempt from the rule).

Not necessarily obvious; I can imagine some state ruling "no back seat? that's rough; you'll need a new vehicle before you can transport kids".

Thanks for the information. Airbags aside, I didn't know that people in the back did better in accidents.

children in the back seat, not people. I don't know about general population statistics. And of course, this is all assuming proper car seat installation and seat belt usage, etc. I do know that according to at least SOME even with children who have outgrown car seats, if they are below a certain height/weight, they are safer in the back. Though I'm sure there's some other contradictory study elsewhere that says something different.

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to say nothing of Socks and Fifi

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