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Waze's New Safety Feature Reminds Drivers Not To Forget Their Child In the Car (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: The navigation app Waze has released a new safety feature that reminds users not to forget their child, pet or other loved ones in the car before getting out. The feature, called "Child reminder," was made available to the public on Thursday, when Waze released its latest update on app stores for Android and iOS. The new feature comes amid concerns over recent child hot car deaths. Since 1998, there have been 37 child heatstroke fatalities on average per year in the U.S., according to the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University in California. Waze's Head of Brand, Julie Mossler said in a statement: "Just as drivers sometimes forget to turn off their headlights, they sometimes forget things in the car too. This new feature helps keep people present in the vehicle and gives them an important, possibly life-saving reminder, that drivers sometimes need." The "Child reminder" feature is opt-in and can be turned on and off in the app's "general settings." Mossler also said that drivers can customize the alert "to include their child's name or pet's name -- anything that will get their attention at the end of a drive." It will only disappear if a driver has entered a destination in Waze and has arrived at that destination.
Yup. I'd wager it's about 50/50 between knowingly leaving the kid in there but intending to be back soon and leaving the kid there intending to kill it. The people who actually forget the kid is in the car when they themselves leave the car represent a rounding error.
If this were true, you'd expect statistics to be relatively constant over the past few decades. Instead, there was a sudden uptick in deaths per year beginning right when car seats were required (1998) to be placed in the back seat to avoid the required dual airbags now always present in cars. Analysis of stats suggests that the majority of these deaths are attributed to "accidents," and mostly by people who thought they already had dropped the kid off somewhere else (and thus didn't go check), rather than those "intending to be back soon."
> I for one do not believe the parents involve in these children in hot cars incidents simply forgot they had their children with them while leaving the car.
I can attest that it's happened to me. Not on a blistering hot day, but on a cool one when I was quite tired and the child I was baby sitting for fell asleep. The child was comfortable and reasonably safe, but on a very hot day it could have been tragic. Small children also often nap on car rides, and many parents with small children are chronically sleep deprived. So accidents are unsurprising.