Safety is one of the primary concerns for car buyers and drivers worldwide; if a vehicle is not considered to be safe, the amount of people willing to drive it decrease drastically. Regardless of what type of vehicle you drive, sometimes the components are misused or can malfunction, accidentally causing injury to one of its passengers. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the passengers in your vehicle are less safe, but that vehicles can be dangerous in a number of ways, not necessarily involving a collision. For instance, if you have children or frequently have passengers in your vehicle, you may wonder just how safe your power windows are. While they seem to work well today, power windows can seize to work properly at any minute, particularly in older models with less advanced technology—motors can burn out or wiring can become faulty and malfunction. If this happens when a child is rolling up a window, a finger or appendage can become lodged in the window, unable to roll down the window and release the pressure. In this sense, power windows do not increase passenger safety, but they can become a liability if they aren’t working properly. However, compared to the alternative of manual windows, they are a safer option for a number of reasons.
Power windows outweigh manuals
As mentioned before, you may be hesitant to leave your kids in the back seat with power windows for fear that they could injure themselves playing with them. In newer vehicles, power windows have a feature that detects that an object is between the window and its closure point. This was designed as a safety feature for preventing injury. Manual windows, on the other hand, have no such feature, which could lead to disaster. For instance, if a child’s appendage becomes lodged in the window, and the mechanism breaks, drastic measures would need to be taken to get the appendage out.
Drivers can control rear windows too
Speaking of kids, one of the greatest safety features of power windows is the driver’s ability to lock the back windows, keeping backseat passengers from rolling windows up or down, and only allowing the driver to control the windows. This comes in especially handy with children. Kids could potentially throw objects out of car windows, or could fall out of a parked or moving vehicle if not properly restrained in a seat with a seatbelt at all times. Potentially dangerous, and annoying, kids play with windows causing a distraction to the driver. Sure, rolling the windows up and down repeatedly can be a fun game for bored youngsters, but this changes the air pressure and the temperature in the cabin, could potentially burn out the motor in the window, and sure makes a lot of annoying noises in the process. Rear window locks, or child-safety locks, are a safety feature for power windows that prevents accidents, but also allows parents to have a less distracting driving experience with children.
Benefits of the power window system
Beyond just engaging child-safety locks in the rear windows, the driver can autonomously control the entire power window system. Only the individual nearest to it can control a manual window; this makes it a total hassle when one of your passengers leaves a window rolled down. Your vehicle’s safety should not be left up to the passengers, but the driver. Before leaving a parked car unattended, the driver can be sure that all the windows are securely closed—it seems pointless to lock a vehicle leaving it with the windows rolled down. Furthermore, leaving a window down can cause water or sun damage to the interior of the vehicle. Of course, the driver’s control of the window decreases the opportunity for a child to be injured from playing with it.
Conclusion
If you are having issues with your power windows, causing you concern for the safety of your passengers, then stop by Mike’s Foreign Car; they are one of the highest-rated automotive shops in Anaheim, CA. Specializing in European import brands, they have expertise in various European manufacturers such as Audi, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, and the list continues. They have been serving the community with outstanding automotive knowledge and skill — check out their website for more information.