Nissan Rear Door Alert won’t let you leave anyone inside the car

A vehicle parked under direct sunlight can reach temperatures of up to 43 degrees Celsius, or even more. It basically turns your car into an oven. Now, imagine leaving a pan of lasagna in the rear seats of your car for hours in that scenario. I bet there are no words to describe the stench that the sauce will leave after that. But what if it’s a sleeping person or a kid who was left inside the car?

Those where the exact thoughts of Marlene Mendoza when she started developing the Rear Door Alert (RDA) system with her colleague Elsa Foley. Both engineers, who happen to be mothers as well, started the development of the RDA system with a vision to reduce heatstroke incidents brought about by interior heating of cars.

A Nissan vehicle installed with the RDA system will let the drive know if he or she left something in the rear seats. Wait, what sorcery is this?

So, here’s how the sorcery works. The system detects when you use your rear doors before a trip and stores it in its memory. If after the trip and you didn’t use the rear doors again, the system will be able to detect that and warns you of it. That way, anything or anyone that goes through the rear doors will have to come out, otherwise the car will tell you that you didn’t.

Once the vehicle is put in park and the ignition is turned off, the system will first display a notification in the instrument panel, then it will progress to subtle, distinctive chirps of the horn. We reckon, it can be quite annoying at first but think of it this way: safety is always important. Besides, RDA is easy to configure and can be temporarily, or permanently, turned off through a menu in the cluster display.

RDA is currently standard in 2018 Pathfiner in the U.S. as of this writing. Nissan plans to add this to the Rogue and Altima in 2019, then ultimately to all four-door Nissan vehicles, including pickup trucks and SUVs, by 2022. Should Nissan Philippines bring RDA here? We definitely think so.