cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18901880
A Texas mother was taken into custody Tuesday after police alleged her 22-month-old child died when she left the infant in a car outside a Corpus Christi school on one of the hottest days of the year.
The mother, 33-year-old Hilda Ann Adame, was jailed on charges of causing serious bodily injury to a child and child endangerment/abandonment with imminent bodily injury, according to a Corpus Christi Police Department incident report.
It was not clear how long the infant had been in the car before the baby was found unresponsive, according to the incident report.
I don’t have kids and I don’t plan to, but instead of all the smart crap in cars, why don’t car manufacturers put some kind of car seat detection in? Like a little alarm that plays if you walk away from your car with a baby or child in it?
They can tell if someone’s in a seat without their seatbelt, they should be able to work out a way to detect car seats too. This is 100% preventable.
Hell, not even car manufacturers. If someone made a Hackathon-type event where the goal was to make the best baby alert system, I’m sure there’s at least one smart person out there who could crack this.
No can do, that makes too much sense.
Here is a touch screen and the HVAC controls are 4 menus deep.
Dagnabbit you’ve got me there!
They exist, some models do alert you if you have something in the back seat.
That’s good to hear! Hopefully it becomes more common or someone makes a universal kit to adapt existing vehicles someday. It probably wouldn’t be as elegant as a built-in fix, but definitely less waste and expense.
Why not reduce reliance on car centric commutes or something?
That would be ideal, I agree. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make cars safer in the meantime for children, who don’t have a say in the matter.
Simple reason, people ignore/disable it.
Most people using cars are adults, only a small number also have a young enough child that this would be a worry. You can buy specialized pads that you put on the seat which reminds you if something was left there, and yet this happens a lot.
The truth of the matter is, people are the problem and a technological solution would have to be mich more complex to work around peoples’ carelessness and ignorance