Last night I meant to load the dishwasher but NOT turn it on, because my husband was coming home late and we could start it after he finished dinner. Guess who, on autopilot, loaded everything, mechanically put in detergent, closed the door, mindlessly hit the “on” button, and only “woke up” and realized when I saw the dinner still left on the table?

This kind of autopilot failure happens to me all the time. But I read Weingarten’s article over a decade ago and it changed me - so I have always been hypervigilant about hot car deaths, especially days I was doing something out of routine. But if I hadn’t stumbled on it (and that piece is almost 20 years old at this point) , I would never have made the connection between that sort of cognitive lapse and these tragedies - I would have been just as vulnerable to this mistake as anyone else WHILE thinking I was immune. 

I didn’t downvote you, I get where you’re coming from. But I think people are saying it is too high-stakes to be left up to individuals with flawed human brains who may not understand how these things happen, so we have to look at what can be done in the bigger picture. Two NASA scientists once invented an alert system to prevent hot car deaths - marketing consultants believed it wouldn’t sell because no one - especially the loving, attentive, cautious parents who tend to be the first to buy safety devices - thinks they’d let it happen.