Hot Cars Cookie Challenge

Hot Cars Cookie Challenge is a little experiment we whipped up (along with some cookies) in the parking lot of Kars4Kids. The Hot Cars Cookie Challenge involves leaving a tray of unbaked cookies in a car to prove that the car gets hot enough to bake cookies. It’s kind of a new riff on the streets of New York being hot enough to fry an egg in summer, only this time it’s cookies. In your car.

We decided we’d undertake the Hot Cars Cookie Challenge and film the experiment to illustrate how quickly cars heat up on a hot summer day, and to show just how hot a car can get. So how hot can they get?

Hot enough to bake a tray of cookies.

It may not be the most efficient a way to harness the energy of the sun. It takes about two and a half hours to bake a tray of cookies in your car when the temperature outside is 90° Fahrenheit. That’s as opposed to the usual 10-12 minutes in your oven.

Hot Cars Cookie Challenge: Why We Did It

But the Hot Cars Cookie Challenge should manage to illustrate the point that cars get really hot on hot summer days. At Kars4Kids, we’re hoping the Hot Cars Cookie Challenge will also persuade you to download our free Kars4Kids Safety app. The Kars4Kids Safety app triggers an alert when you leave your car, reminding to check the backseat of your car to make sure you’ve haven’t left a little one back there.

Why do the Hot Cars Cookie Challenge now? Well, we’ve been telling parents about the dangers of hot cars, because it’s summer, and every summer, babies left behind in hot cars die. That’s precisely why we created Kars4Kids Safety, to help prevent these tragic, senseless infant deaths.

So we know you know all that stuff. You know about hot cars and the dangers they pose.

You know about the parents who leave their babies in their cars during the hot summer months. You know about the babies who die of heatstroke.

But you would NEVER let that happen to you and YOUR baby. You’d never leave your baby alone in the car. You’d never forget HER.

Right?

So picture this:

It’s a perfect summer day. The sun’s out with not a cloud in the sky. The weatherman says it’s 90°F.

Your friend offers to lend you some folding chairs for a meeting you’re having in your home. You pull up to the friend’s house and see your baby has fallen asleep in her car seat, the way she always does in the car. Something about that purring motor.

You hate to wake her. She hasn’t been sleeping well. She’s been cranky. Cutting a tooth. So you leave her in the car “just for a minute” because you’re just going to get the chairs and then you’ll be right back.

You walk up to the door, glancing back to make sure Baby is really asleep, and wait for your friend to answer the door. “Oh! I didn’t expect you so soon. Come in for a minute and I’ll run right up and get those chairs down from the attic.”

You nervously look back at your sleeping baby in the car and your friend says, “She’ll be fine. I won’t be but a minute.”

You come in. She closes the door. You wait, sneaking peeks at your watch, growing nervous as one minute stretches into two. But you know the baby’s out like a light.

Ten minutes pass. Any idea how hot it now is inside your car? You know, the one you left your baby in, just for a minute?

It’s now 122° Fahrenheit in there.

Hot enough to bake cookies.

Now that we’ve got your attention, with no further ado, we give you the Hot Cars Cookie Challenge.

And just in case you think we’re pulling your leg, why not try the Hot Cars Cookie Challenge for yourself? Go on, we dare you. Because there’s nothing more important than making sure we get this point across: Cars get hotter than you think. Don’t leave baby behind even for a short time. Get the Kars4Kids Safety app from the Google Store.

It could save your baby’s life.