Nissan is introducing a new system designed to honk at owners as they depart their vehicle in case they’ve left something important in the back seat, such as their kids. The automaker is calling its Rear Door Alert (RDA) technology the first of its kind, and very technically that’s true. General Motors launched its own Rear Seat Reminder in the 2017 GMC Acadia and has since been expanding it across several Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC models, but Nissan’s new Rear Door Alert differs ever so slightly in how it functions.
Like GM’s system, Nissan’s RDA monitors the rear doors’ switches, detecting whether the doors have been opened and closed before and after a trip. If the system detects a door was opened and closed before a trip but then was not reopened after the drive was over—with the ignition off and the vehicle in park—it sets off a series of alerts. A notification is displayed on the instrument panel, and then “subtle but distinct chirps” from the horn begin to sound, Nissan said in a release Wednesday.
But what if someone just opens the rear door and casually tosses a gym bag or something in the back seat before driving somewhere? Nissan said the RDA system is configurable and can be turned off temporarily or permanently by following prompts in the cluster display. “The idea is, if you open a rear door, whether to put a child or a package in the rear seat, the vehicle will help alert you when you get to your destination that you may want to check the rear seat,” Marlene Mendoza, a Nissan engineer who worked on the RDA, said in the release. “We’ve built in enough time that you don’t have to rush, but if you don’t open the rear door again when you get out of the vehicle, we want [you] to think for a moment about what you may have put in the back seat.”
Nissan’s RDA makes its debut as standard equipment on the 2018 Nissan Pathfinder when it arrives in September, and it will be rolled out on other models later.
GM’s Rear Seat Reminder also activates when a rear door is opened or closed and sounds a series of chimes while displaying a message that says “Rear Seat Reminder/Look in Rear Seat” when the vehicle is turned off. And like Nissan’s system, GM’s Rear Seat Reminder can be turned off by following prompts on the instrument cluster. “Ours does not honk the horn, so maybe that’s the differentiator,” a GM spokeswoman told us Wednesday morning. Neither GM’s nor Nissan’s systems actually detect items in the back seat, so, as GM notes, “it is always important to check the rear seat prior to exiting the vehicle.”
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