To Prevent Hot Car Deaths, Evenflo & Walmart Introduce Child Seat That Reminds You a Baby's on Board
Every year about three dozen children die after being accidentally left in hot cars. Babies fall asleep, parents get distracted, and tragedy results. Baby products maker Evenflo and retailer Walmart have worked together to produce a baby car seat that alerts the driver if the seat is occupied when the car’s ignition is turned off.
The Evenflo Advanced Embrace with SensorSafe has a retail price of ~$150, similar to what you’d pay for many of the popular child seats available today. The seat has a wireless sensor in the chest clip that secures the two shoulder straps in place on the child. That sensor communicates with a device that plugs into the car’s on-board diagnostic (OBD) port, which interfaces with the car’s systems.
While there are accessories and smartphone apps that accomplish the same task, this is the first child car seat with the technology built in. It took some work to come up with a unique alert, one that was easily distinguishable from existing tones used in vehicles or on phones. The seat is designed for children up to 30 inches tall and up to 35 lbs in weight.
Because of Walmart’s involvement in the seat’s development, it will be exclusive to that retailer for a year. You can buy one right away on Walmart.com, or wait till mid August and buy it at one of their brick and mortar stores.
The new child seat is a good idea, but if I can digress slightly…
While, obviously, one should never leave a child ( or a pet) in a hot (or cold), car, for what it’s worth, as a parent and grandparent I chafe at those absolutist nannies who say, “You should NEVER leave a child alone in a car.” Would they let a two year old run free in their house while they brought in the groceries? Providing the car is running and locked, the HVAC system is set to a safe temperature, and the car is in sight, I see no reason to wake a sleeping small child and unstrap them, just so I can run into the FedEx store and drop off a package. In that situation, it seems to me that the child would be no less safe then he would be sleeping alone in his crib at home, unsupervised for hours at a time.
Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, the original 3D car site.
More by Ronnie Schreiber
Latest Car Reviews
Read moreLatest Product Reviews
Read moreRecent Comments
- Varezhka Suzuki Jimny, Toyota Century, and I know it technically just ended production but Honda e.
- CoastieLenn For those that care to read the details of the crash NOT included in this article but published elsewhere- this happened at nearly 10pm when the CRV was stopped in the center lane of travel, lights off, with the driver remaining in the car. Not only is it not known if Blue Cruise was being used, it would have been a nightmare for most alert human drivers to mitigate that driving the 70+mph speed limit on many sections of I-10 in Texas, much less an AV system.
- Jeff This is what I would want: Toyota has now released an affordable truck called the Toyota IMV 0. The newly developed vehicle made in Thailand comes with a rear-wheel drive and a gasoline 2.0-liter inline-four matched to a 5-speed manual transmission. NEW $10,000 Toyota Pickup Has Ford & GM Crapping ... YouTube · Tech Machine 8 minutes, 46 seconds Dec 26, 2023
- Jalop1991 At the same time, let's take these drivers off the road--at least the ones that haven't yet taken themselves off the road.I can guarantee, at no point was this guy or any of the dead Tesla-stans actually driving the car. They were staring at their phones, because, HEY, SELF DRIVING!!
- 3-On-The-Tree To Maintenance Costs His best friend did the union meetings and he said that there wasn’t a lot of negotiating taking place between the union and state because they were happy with how the state was treating them. He said it seemed more like a formality having the union.
Comments
Join the conversation
So my options are to be reminded that my kid is in the car because I'm a self-absorbed jerk, or to save money on my car insurance because I'm a sucker. Decisions, decisions...
It should never happen, but it does. If you think the product is idiotic or appalling, don't buy it, just as I do with pre-tied neckties and "no iron" shirts. And keep in mind that there may be good, solid reasons it seems to happen more than it did 50 years ago, when I was an infant: 1. We weren't strapped into a comfortable device in the back seat, out of sight from our parents. 2. Power locks and remote locking means you no longer look into the car (and possibly reach into the back seat) to lock it. 3. Parents today have electronic distractions that our parents didn't. 4. Children of my generation simply weren't taken out in public nearly as much as they are today. 5. When things like this happened back then, the prevailing attitude was, "they suffered enough by losing a child." No prosecution, no sensationalized stories on the evening news. So it happened; we just didn't hear about it.