Please, no more ding ding. You have a backpack on your passenger seat, ding ding, passenger seat belt alert. You're driving at 5mph on private roads, ding ding, driver seatbelt alert. Your TPMS hasn't worked for 3 years, ding ding, 'service tire pressure system'.
Please let the user decide how they want to use the vehicle instead of a one-size-fits-most model. Also, please give me the option to add a baby seat monitor - if I want one!
My car beeps occasionally, but it certainly doesn't rise to the level you describe. Some of them represent real safety issues, even if you don't think they do in that moment. For example, my TPMS has saved alerted me to low tire pressure when I didn't know I had a leak, and the fact that it beeps a couple times every time I start the car is both helpful ("oh right, I need to get that fixed soon") and far from annoying.
Accidentally leaving a kid locked in a car on a hot Summer day is beyond horrific. How many kids should die before we think the annoyance of an extra beep would be worth it?
> Accidentally leaving a kid locked in a car on a hot Summer day is beyond horrific. How many kids should die before we think the annoyance of an extra beep would be worth it?
It's not about annoyance, it's about whether it's effective at all.
If the car dings every time you turn it off to remind you "check back seat", it doesn't matter if the alert is completely unique and obnoxious and annoying, you will be trained to ignore it and it will quickly become ineffective.
There's a whole field of study here ("alarm fatigue" or "alert fatigue") that's generally looked at in terms of things like healthcare or aerospace. For example, there's a study in healthcare[0] where they found that when dealing with a system warning about drug interactions (including critical dosing errors, fatal interactions, etc) providers overrode 96% of alerts. Their "high priority drug-drug interaction" alerts were overridden 87% of the time, and on review only 0.5% of those were deemed appropriate. Other studies[1] have directly attributed this to repeated exposure desensitizing people and training them to ignore the alerts. People have died because of this.
I have a kid. I can't imagine the horror of being in that situation. I am certain that it would completely and utterly break me. I am fully onboard with a system that prevents this happening. I would be fully supportive of regulating a system that prevents this from happening. More unspecific beeps and dings is not that system.
The problem is that the driver might have so many beeps, that they decide to ignore yet another beep.
I suppose a beep that sounds very different would get their attention, like for pilots in plane cockpits. A terrible stand-up comedian suggestion would be to reuse the plane's "retard, retard!" for parents who forget their kids...
The problem is it ALWAYS dings (the car seat is always there or it detects door openings) and so it just gets ignored along with the fifty other billion warnings it gives.
Which is insane because it obviously has much more intelligent sensors - if I try to lock the doors with the windows down and the wind blowing it screams bloody murder and refuses to lock because it detects motion. Windows up and someone moving? Same thing.
