When you’ve been in the biz for a while your email address becomes the destination for daily press releases. It’s a slow day if I only get six releases about sales numbers, five about a new paint color on a car nobody cares about and something from BMW bragging about German superiority. But today a press release caught my eye. No, it wasn’t about a new car, a new hybrid technology or a new photo of a Weiner running for mayor, it was a about a car seat. Have I been corrupted? Am I now going to copy/paste the press release on TTAC?
The reason the Tomy IAlert caught my eye is that this has to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. Seriously folks. A “smartphone connected child seat?” What’s next? A smartphone connected wet fart?
Aside from the concept being asinine, the YouTube video is worse. I’m not going to bother posting a link because that would somehow be supporting the sheer madness. If you care, google. In the video, the dad pops the seat into a minivan (of course) and then has to refer to the smartphone app for installation instructions. Seriously, I don’t have kids and I know how to install a car seat properly. I read the instructions once with my friends and had no problems popping that bad boy into my car when I needed to take my godson somewhere. Yes I know LATCH anchors are a bit more involved than car seats of the 1980s, but I want to meet the parent who needs to refer to an app every time. So I can send them to be sterilized. We don’t need those genes in the pool folks.
Yes, the seat has a fancy digital level so you can tell if the thing is at the right angle. Guess what? Most rear facing seats have a level indicator as well. It’s a metal ball in a little plastic raceway and it doesn’t involve Bluetooth pairing or batteries to charge/replace. The “old” seat is also faster; this dad has to pause, take out his phone, unlock it, start the app, wait for it to sync with the seat and then adjust. Meanwhile the guy with the “dumb” seat is already at the park.
But wait! It gets worse! The app will also tell you if your kiddo is strapped in. The video shows mom driving the van, glancing down to check the app. Where do I even begin? Instead of looking at the app, how about paying attention so you don’t get in an at-fault accident? Should your progeny unbuckle themselves, the app will test message and/or email your family. Why? I have no idea. So they can track you down? Shame you the next time you show your head?
If none of these features seemed strange to you, here’s something fun. They claim that 33 kids died of heatstroke in hot cars last year. To combat this problem, they didn’t put a huge sticker on the seat saying “don’t leave your kid in a black car in the Phoenix sun,” they integrated temperature monitoring so you know when your kid is fully cooked. Yet again the video shows the driver glancing DOWN at the smartphone on the passenger seat to check the temperature of the car seat. While in motion. Hello, you’re in the same car, just do what every other mom does: reach back and use your hand to see if its hot back there. Making this feature all the more insane is the fact that the app appears to communicate over Bluetooth. If you leave your kid in the car and expect a short-range data protocol to relay temperature information to isle 23 at the WalMart, you get what you have coming.
If you have cash to burn Amazon will happily sell you one for 350 smackers.
Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children!
Good grief. Sadly I think the gene pool will shrink as soon as some phones are not charged.
I’d say something but I’m completely speechless.
I nearly got run over yesterday by someone texting and driving, while I tried to cross a pedestrian crossing… I am not getting warm and fuzzies for this car seat app…
Seriously, this is what happens when a company needs an app more than they need a reason to have one. Let me guess, it needs your email address and it needs to track your moments by GPS to…
I realize you’re trying to be entertaining, but before you start talking $hit about child passenger safety please get your facts straight. I’m a huge gearhead, and an avid reader of TTAC, but I’m also a parent to three young kids and am a certified Child Passenger Safety Technician as a volunteer with Safe Kids USA.
If you truly are having zero trouble installing carseats, then count yourself as one of the few, because the real-world data says that over 3 in 4 seats we see pull into a seat check event are seriously misused.
Also, before you so nonchalantly disregard the dangers of hyperthermia for kids in cars with statements like “don’t leave your kid in a black car in the Phoenix sun” do some F-ing research. This pulitzer-prize winning article would be a good place for you to start. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html
Now, I’m certainly not saying this particular seat is the answer to all of the problems out there, and I honestly have no opinion on its particulars, but the fact is I’m happy when any company is trying to solve the numerous problems surrounding child restraint misuse. Your points about distracted driving are good, but your disregard for the safety issues surrounding children in motor vehicles pisses me off, quite frankly.
Motor vehicle crashes are the #1 cause of death for children between age 1 and 14. Please remember that and do you research before you post about child passenger safety in the future.
At no time did I suggest anyone should be leaving their kids in the car. Quite the opposite. If you’re not in the car, the kid shouldn’t be in the car.
Alex, I’ve never been convinced that it’s *always* a bad idea to leave your kid in a car, but then I think that a 12 year old and a 10 year old can watch themselves at home since my older brother and I did that plenty of times, that is when we weren’t going “See you later , Mom” in the morning, getting on our bikes and going someplace miles away, not to be seen again till it was almost dark.
I’ve raised three children and managed to not let any of them die in a hot car. They’re all now adults and I babysit my 14 month old grandson once a week. As a matter of fact I’m planning on including ease of babyseat usage in my upcoming reviews of the Land Rover LR4, Chrysler 300S AWD, and the Dodge Dart.
If a baby is sleeping and you just have to pop into a friend’s house, or a storefront, and you have line of sight to the car, I don’t think it’s unsafe or irresponsible to leave the child in a locked car with the engine running, the parking brake set, and the HVAC set to an appropriate temperature. Are you going to wake a sleeping baby? What real practical risk to the child is there to sit in an air conditioned car? People leave their kids in their cars all the time when they’re unloading groceries and the like. The important thing is that the kid is safe, not that we’re adhering to this or that rule.
I want to stress that I’m talking about situations that are more like seconds long rather than minutes. I wouldn’t do it for more than a minute or two, but I think it can be done safely for short periods of time, in certain specific circumstances.
The problem is not responsible parents who make sure their kid is safe when they have to leave them alone for a few seconds. The problem is the idiots that don’t know you can’t leave a kid in a car in the summer without A/C, they don’t understand just how quickly the temperature rises to dangerous level in a car with the windows up.
I will come to Alex’s defense here a bit. Sometimes, when something is not 100% a good idea, it’s not wise to get into a habit. Basically, if there is a risk, just don’t do it. Humans are just that and make mistakes or get distracted. So, you can play the responsible card, and it is unquestionably a good one, but, Alex’s point is correct, there is risk that you can mitigate by just not taking the risk. Wake the beby up, I say.
+1 there is a million things that could happen in “just a moment” that could detain you from getting back to that car. I was secure in my bassinet, car running when my mother had to, “just run in the house” to retrieve something she forgot. In that moment I was able to reach up and pull that column mounted gear selector. My mother found me and the car stuck in some bushes 50′ away. My mother still refers to it as her low point in her “Mom career” I think of it as the starting point of my thing for cars
Sure some don’t have a clue about the risks. Some mom may intend to leave the kid for a minute, but gets distracted and it ends up being too long. Or the busy dad off to a critical meeting who forgot to drop baby off at daycare. Sadly, times aren’t as simple as they were when some of us were kids. There isn’t always that 1950s-era mom who is tending to baby’s well-being every minute of the day. Whether you subscribe to Darwin’s cold theory about the baby or not, why the rage at an entrepreneur selling these people something that might save their kid’s life? If you know you’ll never, ever make this kind of mistake, then don’t buy it. Right? You save the bucks and as some suggest, baby somehow learns a valuable lesson! I mean it’s not even being forced on anyone, like those evil brake shift interlock systems or seatbelts or airbags that have been foisted upon us all!
If cost is the biggest drawback, it’s certainly no worse than someone who drops $50,000 on a car that goes 150mph, or a truck that can tow 10,000 lbs and drive over mountain rivers and trails, but end up using either one just for their daily stop-and-go commute. Anyway, hard to judge a book by its cover, as they say. Just so happens a box with one of these arrived at my door for review. Now I just have to find someone with a baby to test it to see if it’s as awful as claimed or if it has some potential to save a life. A potential that doesn’t even exist for most things people buy for their cars.
“I don’t think it’s unsafe or irresponsible to leave the child in a locked car with the engine running, the parking brake set, and the HVAC set to an appropriate temperature.”
“Responsible” or not, that’s illegal in my state.
Also, I don’t have a car I could leave running, lock, and still be able to re-enter unless I carried an extra key, which I can’t imagine doing.
“Alex, I’ve never been convinced that it’s *always* a bad idea to leave your kid in a car, but then I think that a 12 year old and a 10 year old can watch themselves at home since my older brother and I did that plenty of times, that is when we weren’t going “See you later , Mom” in the morning, getting on our bikes and going someplace miles away, not to be seen again till it was almost dark.”
That seems to be par for the course when it came to average folk up until the 90’s at some time.
My folks both had to work in order to cover expenses and couldn’t afford for somebody to watch us (sigh… denied the chance to be sexually abused by a hot blonde baby sitter) so we were left to fend for ourselves as early as age 9 and we would do the same, get up with the sun and go home with the moon.
Well, I, too have three children who managed to grow into adulthood despite the best efforts of my wife and me to prevent it. ;-) However, those efforts did NOT include leaving a kid(s) alone in the car for any reason at any age up through 7 or 8 (if then; I can’t remember), regardless of the outside temperature or anything else.
While it’s certainly true that one could leave a child unattended in a car without ill effects, I think Alex’s point is that any device that encourages or enables someone to do that is suspect.
As for the difficulties in installing car seats in the LATCH era (after my time as a kiddie dad), all I can say is RTFM! and don’t mess around with some smartphone app.
Ak dad, me thinks with your 3 kids, you don’t get enough sleep. Take a break, chill……
The notifying by an app that the kid’s still in the car would be a great feature, but the bluetooth only thing wipes out what could have actually been a good selling feature. None of the sad hyperthermia cases I’ve read about would have been avoided by this product. I see nothing wrong with the author’s attack on this feature
Many people are lazy and don’t ream on the seat to get it ultra tightly secured, but even more text while driving. That said, the author is probably overconfident about his baby seat abilities.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. [I can’t believe I need to say this, but no one is advocating leaving children in cars.] Your assertion that motor vehicle crashes are the number one cause of death for the childrens 1-14 may be true, but the claim is meaningless. What else would be the number 1 cause of death for kids? Old age? Heart disease? Murder?
It seems to me that we need smarter parents, not smarter seats. I survived just fine for 50+ years without any apps, and I don’t recall kids dying in cars from heat or cold until the last few years…maybe if the parents weren’t so self-absorbed with their phones they would remember that they have kids.
To be fair, any fool stupid enough to buy this really deserves to be parted from their money, and soon.
We are recent first time grandparents, just had to deal with purchasing a car seat.
Car seats now expire in 6-7 years, so don’t even think about buying a used one on e-bay or craiglist even if it still packaged in the original un-opened box.
It also seems like 90% of seller(s) either aren’t aware or pretend not be aware of that.
Supposedly it’s dangerous , and if something happens and you are involved in an accident even if it’s not your fault Insurance may not pay out!!
What a crock, how about instead of iphone apps putting a small sensor in the seat that detects a previous impact. What a waste,how many of these are hitting the land-fill.
I was not aware of that, but it is not unique to them. Hard hats also expire. The reason is not that they may have been in an accident and lost integrity; rather, it is that the plastics degrade with time.
Back in the day, momma would hold you while father drove…. …. Wait is this considered politically incorrect?
Before my time anyways…
No not politically incorrect because the context was back in the day. In fact it’s a great reminder as to why baby seats exist. When holding bebee in Mom’s arms does the phrase “meat bomb” mean something?
Back in the day, my mom put me in a carrier in the passenger footwell of a VW fastback. No idea where the hell she put her feet.
Meat bomb is right. I rode on mom’s lap. Or slept on the parcel shelf behind the back seat. It is indeed funny that I somehow survived. Fallacy is, a lot of people didn’t. Crashes took the lives of many more adults and children 40 years ago than today, even though there are so many more vehicles on the road and so many more miles driven now. It’s just that those kids who died aren’t around to debate the facts about being properly restrained. http://www.iihs.org/research/fatality.aspx?topicName=Child-safety
And whats funny is these things might even sell, because so many parents today think you have to make every single decision based on providing the absolute highest possible safety for your children regardless of cost or practicality. It really is a wonder any of us made it out of the 70s or 80s alive.
Those of us who were raised in the 50s and 60s are shaking our heads in disbelief. Child seats and bicycle helmets mitigate risks that are insignificant compared to stuff I did as a kid and I was far from the wildest.
It doesn’t really apply to this car seat because a toddler won’t learn anything from a car ride either way, but the worst cost of this obsession with all things safety isn’t money and practicality. It’s the independence and self reliance which children never develop when their entire world is sanitized and bubble wrapped for them. Cowards raise cowards.
“Cowards raise cowards.”
No, I tried. My boys turned out annoyingly macho.
Another example: the son-of-peaceniks ma deuce gunner in Restrepo.
Dan. Spot on. While few will argue with the need for well made and safe seats, sometimes I look at all the warnings out there on products and shake my head. My favorite is the warning on soda bottles that states I should use caution when removing the cap because it may “forcefully eject” causing bodily harm. I can’t even image what would be said with one of my favorite things to do as a kid, which was to build wooden karts to coast down long hills and smash into wood structures we built out of materials from construction sites. While that might not have been the smartest move, today’s parents and kids are so risk adverse that they are often unprepared to deal real risk assessment. Step one should be to look up when you walk and drive instead of staring at a phone. That’s far riskier than opening a soda bottle and you can actually be killed or kill someone.
Seems like if they integrated it with On-Star and other such systems, that would be VERY useful. Then if you did forget the kid in the car, it would let you know very quickly.
On the other hand, would the seat know that you forgot the kid in the car, and not a 2 liter of soda you put there after a trip to 7-eleven?
Well, you don’t want that soda getting hot, do you?
Does it play “words with babies”?
I think it’s a good idea. I strongly, truly suggest taking the time reading this article, which is maybe the only thing I’ve read in the last few years that made me cry:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html
The article, written by a brilliant guy whose career I have always envied, won a Pulitzer and made me understand the problem of leaving a child in the car, and how it can happen accidentally, and why we think it will never happen to us. More importantly it placed me in the shoes of the people who have actually done it.
With this in mind, $350 doesn’t seem so bad.
Mr. DeMuro – thank you for the link. That was a sobering, thought provoking article. I read through it twice, and my perspective on the tragedy of children left to die in cars has definitely shifted. I can admit that I’ve been very quick to judge when hearing stories of this nature, which I will try to temper the next time it happens.
Perhaps the car seat being reviewed may save a few lives, in which case it may well be worth the cost. I’ll save my knee jerk reactions for other tales.
Well, as long as we have smartphone apps instead of common sense and logic, I’m all good. Then again, I’m pretty stupid. Plus I have a cool phone…
This is a brilliant product.
There’s only one thing which will make a woman ignore a price tag faster than her own vanity and that’s the safety of her children.
If the manufacturer can plant the seed that buying a car seat without this idiotic feature WILL PARBOIL UR PRECIOUS BABY they’ve already made the sale.
Its been a while, because my daughter is now 23. But I remember the biggest problem was getting her to stay in the seat. Yes, it had the 4 point seat belts with “childproof” latch, but she could somehow wriggle out of it. I knew right away because I would hear “Hi Daddy!” and see her smiling face in the rear view mirror as she was standing up in the seat. We nicknamed her ‘Houdini’. So I stopped the car and put her back in and give her a lecture. All to be soon repeated. This thing wouldn’t have accomplished anything for that child.
Fortunately she now has a good man who knows enough not to confine her.
I agree with Ronnie Schreiber. I’m a father to three minions – 5, 2.5, and 7 mos. Quick line of sight errands, engine running? Yes. Any PUBLIC situation where line of sight is lost? No way.
Furthermore, I would pay significant money for a device that would alert me and the wife if carseat weight detected, ignition off, and temperature in vehicle outside of range. I’d freak out over a 2liter of coke in the carseat rather than run the risk of my child suffering death by hyperthermia. Just like the people in that article, I’d be broken. Forever. Read that article a few years back and texted my sons babysitter daily for three weeks to make sure he was there until my wife found out and told me to stop.
Carseat monitor is a great idea! Bluetooth = poor execution. Which corporation wants to take the risk of being sued if device failed and resulted in death of a tiny human?
This had to have been thought up by an attorney. All this does is expand the amount of money awarded when the intrinsic flaws in this system are revealed by reality/stupidity. So instead of being able to sue ‘just’ the seat manufacturer, and the car manufacturer you can also include Apple, Motorola et.al as well as Verison, Sprint (fill in your favorite carrier). Can anyone say ‘class action lawsuit?’ Sure you can, I knew you could.
Well, I am uneasy with leaving a kid in a car for any reason unless there’s an adult in there with them. We waited in the car with my dad many times while mom popped into the local Wrigley’s for bread or milk. Heard about a lot of Al Kaline home runs on the car’s AM radio that way! That car didn’t have air conditioning but it didn’t seem to matter then with the windows down.
I will not be the person to tell people with children how to raise those children, or even how to protect them. Our society is full of know-it-all politicians and bureaucrats that are dumber than the masses. Your family’s safety is your deal and I’ll trust you to use good judgement.
But if the kid dies on your watch and you were found to be texting, buying beer, visiting the 7-Eleven redbox, or whatever other stupid thing you were doing, then you will not want me on your jury, especially if you did something against state or federal law.
You assess the risk and act accordingly, and as a fellow citizen, I’ll trust you as long as you’re right. But be wrong even once, well I guess that’s how it works.