Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising, Toyota Motor Corp. (TM)

We here at BloggingStocks are quite diligent about reviewing the comments from our readers. Whether added to a blog post or submitted directly to our editorial staff via the home page widget, your viewpoints are critical to making this a well rounded presentation. In response to a comment by a reader whom I’ll identify only as Laura B., I’d like to address a very important issue which she offered for our consideration.

Laura expressed a concern which is brought to her mind by a TV commercial which was produced for Toyota Motor Corporation (NYSE: TM). You’ve probably seen the commercial yourself. In the advertisement a dad labors valiantly to build a tree house for his kids to play in, only to have the kids absently spurn his efforts in lieu of playing in a Toyota Sienna outfitted with all the latest electronic gizmos. Laura’s issue is with the action of the father closing the door on the vehicle and then leaving view. The kids (I assume) remain in the automobile unattended.

Each year an unacceptable number of children and pets succumb to the heat which is swiftly generated by sunshine beating down upon tightly closed motor automobiles. I’m reminded of an incident which happened near to where I previously lived. A woman returned to her minivan after shopping and placed her infant in it’s automobile seat. She then shut the van door, accidentally locking her keys inside. The good news is that this particular story had a happy ending, another shopper swiftly produced a tire iron and they entered the van by breaking a window. However, the time span from door locking to window breaking was estimated at three minutes, and even in that short time span the child became over heated to the point that they needed to immediately employ extra measures to cool the child’s body temperature back to a safe level.

Toyota’s TV commercial is in no way careless, thoughtless or harmful. In fact, I think it’s a good commercial and we should note that the children in the ad are of an age at which we would expect they could protect themselves from this type of hazardous occurrence. However, people do need to be reminded from time to time about the possible dangers in commonplace situations. The rapid overheating of automobile interiors is one prime example of that.