Comment by plastic3169 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plastic3169 | Hacker News Reader

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”In 2003, the Transportation Research Board Committee, chaired by two psychologists, reported that "Enhanced SBRs" (ESBRs) could save an additional 1,000 lives a year.[100] Research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that Ford's ESBR, which provides an intermittent chime for up to five minutes if the driver is unbelted, sounding for 6 seconds then pausing for 30, increased seat belt use by 5 percentage points.[100] Farmer and Wells found that driver fatality rates were 6% lower for vehicles with ESBR compared with otherwise-identical vehicles without.[101]” [1]

Not asking nicely for seat belt makes people actually use the seat belt. It’s saving bunch of people every year vs annoying me. And it sure does annoy me, but truth be told sometimes when I move the car just a bit the only reason I use seat belt is that the car is angry at me.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

That's the driver, but I've had similar problems with the car yelling at me when I put a sufficiently heavy bag of shopping on the passenger seat.

The only seat where the weight is guaranteed to be a human is the drivers seat. By all means, put an alarm on that seat, but the other seats can contain things other than passengers.

Worth noting that something heavy enough to trigger the seat occupancy sensor can still do you a lot of damage as it flies around the inside of a car in a crash. I put the seatbelt on around boxes and bags if they're on the seat.

I have child seat in my back seat secured to designated attachment points (not the seatbelt) and its heavy enough to warn me EVERY time. It's secured, not dangerous, and is a persistent false positive. Badly designed systems can also do harm by training people to ignore them or even actively circumvent them.

This. Even outside crash situations, a brusque movement could send things flying, distracting the driver enough to cause Bad Things.

Use the boot, people; at worst, put stuff under the seat, never above.

Yes to clarify the false positives are also the thing that annoy me. Not when the system works as intended. But as somebody else said here if you have a passenger it really makes a difference to the social situation. I don’t know that much about safety engineering, but my hunch is that if there was a bypass button it would weaken the system significantly. Maybe it could be temporary and deep in the menu.

And it only kills missophoniacs so it's okay

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