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Comment by Turskarama | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

And it only kills missophoniacs so it's okay

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