Janette Fennell has played an instrumental role in standardizing a number of safety features on cars, starting with the glow-in-the-dark emergency release lever inside the boot.Back in 1995, Janette Fennell and her husband were kidnapped outside their home.
This little T-shaped device has come stock in nearly every single one of the ~
250m new cars sold in the US since 2002.
You’ve likely never used the lever or even noticed it but it took a monumental effort to get it there.
An emergency trunk release (Cars.com, via YouTube)
Like many safety devices in your car, the emergency trunk release was the result of one woman’s dogged fight against a multibillion-dollar industry intent on cutting costs.
Her journey required hundreds of hours of data collection, dozens of letters sent to auto execs, and years of persistence.
And it all began with a kidnapping.
The NHTSA had been petitioned as far back as 1984 about the need for a release switch to be incorporated into the trunks of passenger cars, stating ”that persons such as alarm and stereo installers, mechanics, playful children, pranksters, and crime victims may be trapped in the trunk. The petitioner also believed an elderly person might fall into the trunk and thereby become entrapped.” At the time, the agency declared the chances remote that such entrapments would be likely.
From 1984 to 1998, the agency would receive two dozen more requests for action. In 1998, The National Safe Kids Campaign was asked by NHTSA to form a task forceto investigate the matter, no doubt compelled by the tragic deaths of 11 children in three separate occurrences within three weeks of each other in July and August of 1998. Children dying trapped in hot trunks was not a new phenomenon, but it was definitely one the auto industry could address.