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Freak Accident or Design Flaw? Diagram Explains Student's Accidental Death Inside His Parked Minivan

By Rain Noe - April 18, 2018

in Cars

This is an awful story that automotive designers should take note of.

On Tuesday afternoon last week, 16-year-old student Kyle Plush went to his minivan in the parking lot of his Ohio high school to retrieve some tennis gear. He never returned.

Around 9pm that night his father, looking for him, located the minivan. Plush was dead inside, having suffocated.

Plush's car was a 2004 Honda Odyssey. The third row of seats in that car are designed to fold backwards into a storage position. This illustration produced by a Cleveland news organization explains what happened:

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Just awful. Even worse is that Plush managed to reach his phone and made two 911 calls, connecting both times, yet officers never found him due to a bizarre confluence of events.

This does not appear to be a common cause of death, and one could argue that there's simply no way the designers could have foreseen such a freak accident; but now that it's happened, all automotive designers working on similar features ought be made aware of it.

Reuters reports that the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has contacted Honda and "will take appropriate action based on its review."

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Francisco Hernandez

7 years ago

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Another regurgitation of news/stories.
I wonder how many news people or writers even think more than 1 minute before re-posting this kind of news. Right away people want to blame somebody, 911, Honda, Collapsible seats. Could this be a freak accident or user error?
Fold down seats are in many SUVs and Minivans. They all have a strap to release the locking mechanism.
a) The locking mechanism failed or disengaged due to having the weight of the kid on the highest point of the backrest or
b) The kid pulled the straps to reach a little bit further down and then couldn't overcome the inertia.

Either way, what matters now a days is the "HEADLINE" not the content.

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Allen Johnson

7 years ago

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I would imagine this is an issue that started in 2005 when Chrysler released the first with the Stow-N-Go system. At some point they figured out they could advertise this as a feature and the currently market it as Tailgating Seats.

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