Patent 7397146 was granted and assigned to Honda on July, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A child lock apparatus is capable of electrically controlling a child lock function, which disables a door opening operation when a door of a vehicle is opened from a vehicle cabin side by operating a door inner handle. The child lock apparatus includes a child lock mechanism which child-locks the door, and a controller which controls the child lock mechanism based on driving conditions of the vehicle detected by a driving condition detector. The controller controls the child lock mechanism to child-lock the door if the driving condition detector detects that the vehicle is running.