Gadgetory

it's sort of odd if you think about it your car alerts you when your headlights are left on but not when your kids are left in a trickier problem to solve for of course but also vastly more important the feds tracked the problem of child fatalities and locked hot cars but many people actually follow the work of meteorologists on all of San Jose State University in Silicon Valley he call eighths media reports and estimates that between 1998 and 2009 494 children about 37 each year died locked in hot cars in the u.s. more than half the kids who die of hyperthermia in cars are 2 years old or younger about half of them were left in the car by accident by a forgetful parent we just parked next to a car Walmart Cadillac Escalade ok the baby is been in the carrier screaming and no one around a modern car is unfortunately a very efficient calorimeter of sorts its seals and insulation are deadly good at trapping solar energy the majority of heating happens in the first 20 minutes or so cracking the windows has almost no effect even flow has a new set of there baby seats out with a technology called sensor safe it's an electronic sensing technology to warn you you've got a child buckled in the seat in the back and especially a rear-facing one which is another hazard in and of itself out of sight out of mind now an electronic sensing baby seat is actually not anything new the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration looked at nearly two dozen of these things back in 2012 and decreed most of them junk let's see how Evenflo seeks to break the mold now if you're in the front of the car you do a one-time install of this dongle that comes with the sensors safe seat as you can tell by that in this is an obd2 port dongle this goes up underneath your dash now once that's installed that stays there you're not having to take that in and out all the time it works on any car with an obd2 port made since 2008 not since 1996 when obd2 first arrived so you've got to have a later car because that's when they implement it what's called the can protocol an electronic language that that dongle relies on okay now here in the back of the car you install the seat and of course latch it in safely that's a whole different topic get your child in here and then this is the key this is the little sensor safe clip this green thing once you click this across their chest under armpits and around their legs that locks in now you close the loop as soon as you drive above five miles an hour for more than a few seconds this thing starts transmitting to the receiver we just installed that there's a child in here then the next time you stop and turn off the engine you get a chime instantly reminding you this is buckled around your child in the back don't forget them a lot of experts like this approach better than some of the previous technologies which were proximity based where once you got far enough away from the car or the seat you then got a warning a lot of folks say no warn parents immediately so there's no chance of them getting far away and forgetting now a few notes about this apparatus if you're concerned about EMF or radiation coming off this transmitter Evenflo says it's about the same power as a car remote key fob which is pretty low power and that it barely uses any time transmitting about one second in two hours of driving if you want to use this as a hand-me-down which of course you do the battery here is not replaceable but you can get or buy another one from evenflo you just replace the whole clip you'll buy it if it's after the first year or so of the seat you'll get a new one for free if it's before then if you have more than one kid you're gonna have more than one seat well you can have multiples of these that report into one receiver under the dash it's not just a one to one relationship and if you have a hybrid or a car with automatic start/stop technology that would stop and perhaps throw this thing off you need to get a separate special receiver up there under the dash which Evenflo will send you and it's green instead of the one we have which is black so electronic sensing that warns you immediately when you come to a stop some interesting modern technology innovations for today's cars that are hybrid and have auto start/stop and it's from a major maker at a major retailer Walmart's got the exclusive on this for one year until summer of 2016 goes for about a hundred and fifty bucks now without the sensor safetech looks like you can get almost the exact same seat for ninety dollars so you're definitely paying a premium here but it seems to be going down the right path