All cars – new or old – should be required to have reversing cameras and beeping parking sensors, says the car review website dogandlemon.com.

Editor Clive Matthew-Wilson, who is an active road safety campaigner, was commenting after the sentencing of a man for reversing over a young child.

Matthew-Wilson pointed to a major study showing that children were often invisible behind many popular cars.

“Drivers should always be careful when reversing, but often, children can be very hard to spot. The safest solution is a reversing camera, which shows the driver what’s behind his vehicle.”

Matthew-Wilson says reversing cameras are now ‘cheap as chips’ and should be compulsory on all vehicles, adding that the government should make interest-free loans available to poorer families so that they can retrofit reversing cameras and parking sensors to the family vehicle.

Matthew-Wilson advises that reversing cameras and parking sensors work best when installed together. He explains how his own reversing camera and parking sensors may have saved a child's life:

“I was reversing out of a parking bay at a supermarket. Like all good drivers I checked my three rear mirrors. Just as I began to reverse, a sudden beep warned me that a small child was running straight past the rear of my car. He appeared from nowhere, running across the reversing camera screen, then disappeared past the vehicle. He was too short to show up in my rear view mirror. If I had not had a reversing camera and parking sensors fitted, I could easily have reversed straight over this child.”

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