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.
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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.