Cars develop killer heat, even on cooler days

I am so super sorry...i've not updated this blog for like a week? haha..okay..so i've found this rather informative article in NewScientist, 05 July It's title is "Cars develop killer heat, even on cooler days" It's quite important actually especially for parents who drives and usually leave their kids in the car for a while: "Sunlight can heat car interiors to lethal temperatures in just 30 minutes, even if the weather is relatively cool, a new US study has found. The researchers strongly urge parents not to leave children alone in parked cars, no matter how mild the weather.

“Even on relatively mild-temperature days, the internal temperature of a vehicle left in the sun quickly gets very warm – the average rise in one hour is 22°C," says lead author Catherine McLaren at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "My guess is that parents would be surprised that leaving children in the car is very much like leaving them in a sauna.”
In 2004, 35 children died of heat stroke in the US after being left unattended in a parked car. Previous research has shown that when ambient temperatures rise above 35°C, sealed cars reach a suffocating 65°C in just 15 minutes.

But research on car heating has all been conducted on hot days – never less than 28°C. So McLaren and her colleagues wanted to test how hot cars could get on cooler days, when the dangers of enclosed vehicles might not be as obvious to parents.

Open windows (sub-heading)
On 16 cloud-free days in Northern California, the team measured a car’s inside temperature at 5 minute intervals for one hour post-parking. Ambient temperatures on the study days ranged from 22°C to 35°C.
They found that, regardless of outside air temperature, the car heated up at a similar rate – gaining 80% of its final temperature within 30 minutes. Cars that started out comfortable 22°C, for example, rocketed to over 47°C after 60 minutes in the sun. And keeping the windows open a crack hardly slowed the rise at all.
Young children and infants are much more susceptible to heat illnesses than adults, write the authors, meaning that such temperatures could prove dangerous. Toddlers’ body temperatures rise faster and they lose proportionally more water than adults in hot weather, for example.

The team suggest that laws against leaving kids in cars could help to raise awareness of the danger. But they note that because these heat-related deaths are mostly unintentional, additional public education is probably the best way to decrease the number of these preventable tragedies. "

Hmm..This is quite serious, especially for Singapore, where it is a tropical and warm country.Sometimes when my mum leaves me in the car for a while to get something, I do feel realli realli warm even with the door open on my side or with the window open. So, yea,there should be additional public education for this in every country to raise awareness.

Researchers strongly urge parents not to leave children alone in parked
cars, no matter how mild the weather.