Would you buy this?

This picture has nothing to do with the post, but I don’t use nearly enough pictures of my Moree dog.

As most of you know, I am as involved in the personal finance blogosphere as I am the pet blog arena. I am also active on some personal finance message boards. Today, one of the other posters there posted a link to his indiegogo site where he is trying to raise money for an invention he has. Here is the link. I don’t expect you to fund anything. I don’t even really expect you to click on the link. I’m providing it so if you’re interested in reading the actual inventor’s perspective.

What I am interested in, is would you buy this product if it existed.

So what’s the product? It’s a cooling system for your car that runs even when the car isn’t on and keeps your dog from getting heat stroke.

The basic idea is that it is a cooling pad (as opposed to heating pad) with a fan/cooling system that runs off your car’s power when the engine is on and off a rechargeable battery when the engine is turned off.

The inventor views it as a health and safety product for pets. Others on the personal finance message board saw it as a luxury product. I can see both arguments. For me, it would be a luxury product because my dogs don’t need to go everywhere with me. In fact, they rarely go anywhere other than the dog park, the vet, or the occasional trip to PetsMart.

But there are people who take their dogs places. There are people who leave their dogs in hot cars while they just run into Target for one thing. The question is, would most of those people actually pay for this product?

Based on the donation gifts here, I’d guess that price point for the device will be around $200, or more, retail.

While I know that as a nation, we are spending more and more on our pets, but are the majority of people really willing to spend $200 for a situation they just don’t really see happening?

To me, the ideal market would be dog show or agility people, maybe those with therapy dogs- people who are most likely to be out and about with their dogs already and are more likely to need to run an errand while their dogs are with them.

For those folks, I can see this being thought of as a product that solves a health and safety issue.

One other thought that came from the finance boards was that the product would need to come with a window sticker (or something) that said “this pet kept cool by…” to prevent other animal lovers from calling the cops/animal control, or even breaking your windows out of concern for your dog.

But I come back to my original question, since pet bloggers tend to be pretty obsessed with our dogs and their health and safety, but most (at least of the blogs I read) also seem pretty practical- would you buy this, if it were on the market?