- 0. Call the car owner's phone or alert them through any communication app they use
- 1. After 5 minutes, call the police
Ether or both would save lives. It doesn't seem like a very difficult technical task to me.
I would be worried that it would erroneously call the cops on me and not purchase it.
If you mandated it I would do my best to see the people that voted for it out of office as soon as possible.
What you are discussing seems complicated, error prone, and expensive. My kid is an adult. I don't want your half assed system calling the cops to save my packages that I'm carrying home.
What if people are transporting their animal in the car and the the line is long when they go inside to pay. Shall we call the cops on them after 5 minutes?
I am content and capable of reasoning about the real world and intelligently avoiding negative consequences by not doing stupid things.
I do not want to have to think about what conditions erroneous or real will cause my car to rat me out.
Not everything in life has a technical or legislative solution lots of things in life can only be avoided by rational people taking the time to do reasonable things every day like not leaving their babies in oven like cars and by and large do well at this. Out of 300 million Americans 30 manage to off their kids which is safer than bathtubs let alone the real risk of violent death in an accident.
If you imagine a unit cost of 500 usd and we have 263 million passenger vehicles outfitting them all would cost 130 billion usd to save 30 lives annually. If you imagine a time frame of 10 years you can imagine savings of 300 lives at a unit cost of 433 million per life saved.
In any case, my suggestion was to call the owner first. They would have several minutes to respond. Or the product could only do that, and forget about the police part, which would also save lots of lives.
Or instead of calling the police, start the air conditioner and continue notifying the owner every few minutes if they do not respond to the first notification.
I'm not sure how much it would help here (no idea what the climate is like in this place), but I've sat inside when its 35c/95F outside, and it's just as comfortable as sitting under a tree - maybe more so as you can feel the wind.
It seems like such a simple feature (the solar system is completely isolated from the 12V and HV battery), I'm surprised more cars don't have it. Here is a picture - right is the (slightly opened) moon roof, and left is the solar panel: https://blogmedia.dealerfire.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/19...
A fairly simple weight sensor as used for passenger seat belt alarms would seem likely to work (it's a little more complicated because you need to zero it for the weight of the child seat.) You'll get false positives if you carry goods on that seat, but if you have an installed child seat you are unlikely to do that.
The notification aspect is probably harder to get right than the sensor. Though an internally audible alarm and warning light for a short period when turning off the car with a detected child would probably itself be a big help to prevent the initial problem rather than reacting to it the way “call the owner and then the police” mechanisms do, plus be far simpler to implement.
Remind the driver to check the back seat if they opened one of the back doors before they got in the front seat.
Heck, most cars have seatbelt+weight sensors. Just give a warning if you detect anyone under 100 lbs in the back.
Now I can see the car manufacturers don't want the liability for the a monitor failing to go off (false negative) due to any malfunction, when the number of false positives will be much higher. Thermometers and radars do fail, but humans will become dependent on them, and blame them and the manufacturers for anything that goes happens.
No, because what you're describing isn't stupidly simple, but incredibly complex. Even just the 'call the police' bit - How? Which police? How do you communicate with them? What language do you use? How do you convey the problem? How do you detect and respond to emergency numbers that prefilter (where I am, call emergency and a human asks you for police/fire/ambulance, and then puts you through)? Do you use the standard voice channel, or an API? If API, whose API? What about areas that don't have an API (or much of a tech stack)? If voice, how do you make it not sound like a prank call? How do you provide extra data if the dispatcher needs more? Do you use a radio band instead? If so, which one? How do you ensure you're not spamming the channel? What if the police in the area don't work off GPS co-ordinates? I'm sure there are plenty more issues with just this part of the hypothetical system, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
Besides, while it sounds nasty, 30 deaths/year is but a drop in the bucket compared to other transport-related deaths. The amount of effort required to make a robust, reliable system to prevent those 30 deaths would be much more effective when applied to other transport problems resulting in death.