Proposal would require car technology alerting parents when child left behind in hot car

New legislation introduced Wednesday would require cars to implement technology that would alert parents if their child is left in the backseat, preventing heat-related deaths.

The “Helping Overcome Trauma for Children Alone in Rearseat Act” or Hot Cars Act, was introduced in Washington, D.C. It would require cars to alert drivers when a passenger is left in the backseat once the car is turned off. It would work similarly to the beeping noise a car makes when a driver leaves their headlights on.

According to HotCarsAndKids.org, since 1990 more than 800 children have died from heat-related strokes in hot cars. Texas leads the country with 113 deaths. In accidental cases, parents reported fatigue, change of routine or stress.

Eric Stuyvesant is a father from Garland, Texas. Stuyvesant almost lost his three-year-old son when he left him inside a hot vehicle two years ago. Stuyvesant was heavily involved in hearings last September and testified before Congress.

“We live in a very busy world and people are multi-tasking and things happen. People get distracted and it only takes a second to get us out of a routine that we’re pretty accustomed to and we go into what we would call auto-pilot,” Stuyvesant said.

The father of eight says it was a normal day and a simple distraction that caused him to accidentally leave his son, Michael, in the car.

“I was driving to the babysitter after dropping my wife off at work. Normally, we drop the child off first, but that day Michelle was running late to work so we went there first and on the way back I took a couple of phone calls and Michael was falling asleep in the back seat. Once the phone calls started, I got distracted. It was a near-fatal distraction in my case.”

Stuyvesant tells ABC-7 he found his son before it was too late.

“We caught him just before we lost him. We got him in a cold shower, took a cold shower and apparently that was enough to give him a window of opportunity. When the medics got to him, they iced him down, and we were off to the hospital. He spent four days in an induced coma and then 28 days in in-house rehabilitation. He learned to walk again, he learned to eat again, everything that was natural for a three-year-old child he had to learn again.”

Stuyvesant says it’s been a long two years, but Michael has fully recovered and is back to being a normal five-year-old boy playing t-ball. He says not all parents who leave their child in a car are bad parents.

“For the most part, these are good parents that made a mistake. That’s what happened to us. I raised or have been a part of raising seven other kids, Michael was our 8th child. And this was old habit for me, I’d never done anything like this before.”

Stuyvesant urges manufacturers to take the legislation seriously and says it could save a life.

“It took approximately 100 deaths from airbags for legislators to move carseats from the front seat to the back seat. We are now closing in on 800 deaths since that law was passed where we had to put the car seats in the backseat. And manufacturers have been very slow to move on it. There’s some that are certainly doing their part and I would hate to see this have to be mandated, but the fact is they’re not all taking action, they’re particularly slow on it.”

The Hot Cars Act must be approved by Congress before it’s approved by the president. The U.S Department of Transportation would issue a final rule requiring cars to be equipped with the alert system. Car manufacturers would have two years to implement the technology.