Some car companies ignore important safety technology
Normally the auto industry stays pretty bunched up when it comes to offering important safety features to consumers, but the recent story about the Seattle woman who nearly died after being trapped in her Toyota Camry for eight days shows there's a serious safety disparity in the market right now.
On October 2, the Toyota that 17-year-old Laura Hatch was driving went off the road and slid 60 metres down an embankment before crashing into some trees. Search parties went along the road but did not look down the hill for a week, at which time the girl was found badly injured and severely dehydrated. Local authorities said it was a miracle that she survived that long without food or water, or from a lack of treatment her injuries.
The safety technology that could have helped Laura Hatch and lots of other people who are trapped in their cars after a crash but is not used by Toyota, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, BMW, Volvo, Hyundai, Kia, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen and others is called crash notification.
This system can send emergency assistance (ambulance, fire, police) to your exact location if you ask for it, or if your vehicle crashes and you aren't able to call for help yourself. If crash notification is imbedded into your car correctly, it operates virtually all over North America, which includes lots of places where no cell phone would ever work.
Crash notification is high on the wish list of many of the continent's emergency service providers and hospital ERs, since they all know how critical it can be to reduce the time between an injury and its treatment. As a result, they have formed an alliance dedicated to promoting crash notification, making the case that it reduce the cost of emergency services as well as save lives.
At the moment, the primary provider of this service is General Motors, as part of its OnStar service. The company has offered OnStar for about a decade now and is constantly expanding its features (including route guidance, data on local attractions) and the vehicles it's offered in, but crash notification is its heart.
It should be noted that Honda offers OnStar in some of its models (VW just announced it was dropping it from its cars), and that Mercedes-Benz has a similar system of its own, but no company is remotely as committed to crash notification as GM is.
Ford was looking at a similar system before its financial crisis of 2001 but isn't now. Crash notification was a key ingredient of Volvo's Safety Concept vehicle a while back, but the Ford-owned Swedish firm abandoned the idea when publicity over that car died down.
GM's crash notification uses an abnormally strong cell signal and a built-in GPS locating device to provide emergency assistance for its OnStar subscribers. Because the GM vehicle with activated OnStar is essentially a dial tone on its own, it's able to use a signal that's much stronger than anything in a regular cell phone. So it will connect with the OnStar service centre from virtually anywhere in North America that there's a road, or perhaps more importantly even where there isn't.
When the driver presses the OnStar button in the car, she is immediately connected to an advisor 24 hours a day. If the driver needs help, the advisor will call the emergency service closest to where the vehicle is and send it to the precise location as provided by the car's GPS system.
If the vehicle's airbags deploy, the crash notification system alerts OnStar by itself. An advisor then calls the driver and asks if she needs help. If no one in the car responds, the advisor automatically sends help.
Consider the experience of Michelle Creager of Fort Wayne, Indiana, whose Pontiac Montana minivan hit a slick spot on a two-lane highway and plunged down an embankment before slamming into a tree and landing in a ditch filled with water.
Normally the auto industry stays pretty bunched up when it comes to offering important safety features to consumers, but the recent story about the Seattle woman who nearly died after being trapped in her Toyota Camry for eight days shows there's a serious safety disparity in the market right now.
On October 2, the Toyota that 17-year-old Laura Hatch was driving went off the road and slid 60 metres down an embankment before crashing into some trees. Search parties went along the road but did not look down the hill for a week, at which time the girl was found badly injured and severely dehydrated. Local authorities said it was a miracle that she survived that long without food or water, or from a lack of treatment her injuries.
The safety technology that could have helped Laura Hatch and lots of other people who are trapped in their cars after a crash but is not used by Toyota, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, BMW, Volvo, Hyundai, Kia, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen and others is called crash notification.
This system can send emergency assistance (ambulance, fire, police) to your exact location if you ask for it, or if your vehicle crashes and you aren't able to call for help yourself. If crash notification is imbedded into your car correctly, it operates virtually all over North America, which includes lots of places where no cell phone would ever work.
Crash notification is high on the wish list of many of the continent's emergency service providers and hospital ERs, since they all know how critical it can be to reduce the time between an injury and its treatment. As a result, they have formed an alliance dedicated to promoting crash notification, making the case that it reduce the cost of emergency services as well as save lives.
At the moment, the primary provider of this service is General Motors, as part of its OnStar service. The company has offered OnStar for about a decade now and is constantly expanding its features (including route guidance, data on local attractions) and the vehicles it's offered in, but crash notification is its heart.
It should be noted that Honda offers OnStar in some of its models (VW just announced it was dropping it from its cars), and that Mercedes-Benz has a similar system of its own, but no company is remotely as committed to crash notification as GM is.
Ford was looking at a similar system before its financial crisis of 2001 but isn't now. Crash notification was a key ingredient of Volvo's Safety Concept vehicle a while back, but the Ford-owned Swedish firm abandoned the idea when publicity over that car died down.
GM's crash notification uses an abnormally strong cell signal and a built-in GPS locating device to provide emergency assistance for its OnStar subscribers. Because the GM vehicle with activated OnStar is essentially a dial tone on its own, it's able to use a signal that's much stronger than anything in a regular cell phone. So it will connect with the OnStar service centre from virtually anywhere in North America that there's a road, or perhaps more importantly even where there isn't.
When the driver presses the OnStar button in the car, she is immediately connected to an advisor 24 hours a day. If the driver needs help, the advisor will call the emergency service closest to where the vehicle is and send it to the precise location as provided by the car's GPS system.
If the vehicle's airbags deploy, the crash notification system alerts OnStar by itself. An advisor then calls the driver and asks if she needs help. If no one in the car responds, the advisor automatically sends help.
Consider the experience of Michelle Creager of Fort Wayne, Indiana, whose Pontiac Montana minivan hit a slick spot on a two-lane highway and plunged down an embankment before slamming into a tree and landing in a ditch filled with water.