I had a pretty scary run in with CO from my car once and it had nothing to do with the keyless fob. My car with gasoline direct injection had two bad injectors fail while I was driving home. It went into limp mode. When I got home I inserted the OBD2 scanner to diagnose the issue in the garage. Because it was in limp mode, the engine was running rich and I guess producing a lot of CO in my garage. In the roughly 5 minutes it took me to start the car, get the code, and shut it off, it had produced a dangerous level of CO. I left the garage and went inside. About 30 minutes later while I was in bed my Nest smoke/CO detectors alerted me to CO in the hallway connecting my house to the garage. I ventilated the entire house and garage and the alarm stopped. I did get a light headache from the short exposure.
Moral of the story, never run a car inside the garage with the door closed and always have CO detectors throughout the house. Nest probably saved my life that night from my own mistake.
If we want a more general solution, we should look beyond the keyless fob and just make CO detectors a requirement. You don’t need fancy ones like Nest. Cheaper ones that cost 20 dollars still works.
Yep, that's my rule even with properly-running engines: The car won't start until the garage door is open.
If I could hack up some sort of ignition interlock such that an Arduino or Pi could broadcast a killswitch signal while the garage door is closed, I could more effectively enforce that rule.
If the car is turned on and in range of your home WiFi, it makes sure the door is open. This is mostly a convenience thing (when I leave home in the morning, it opens the door when I start the car and closes it after I leave, same process returning home) but it also address the concerns floated in the article.
I would say you took a pretty big risk running a car for 5 minutes in a closed space. I've started a car briefly in a closed garage, but we're talking for maybe 10-15 seconds (post oil-change in the winter). Even then I started to wonder if I was taking too big a risk.
Yeah I didn't know better and was lulled into a false sense of security. For a couple of years, I always started my car first and opened the garage door and always shut the car off after the door came down. Why? Because my car's built-in garage door opener doesn't work with the car off. This hasn't been an issue for a long time and after a while I figured "a few minutes is okay". Also, I didn't grow up in a place with garages (coastal part of Florida) Gas heating is really not a thing there either (again because Florida). So CO poisoning wasn't a thing I learned to worry about. So the combination of ignorance and "it was okay if I ran the car inside for 15 seconds so it must be okay if I ran it a little longer".
Dumb for sure but thankfully I did know enough about gas water heaters and gas stoves to have CO detectors installed throughout my house.
A 2L engine uses 1L of air every cycle. At 1000 rpm, that's 500L (or .5 m^3) of air every minute.
A single car garage is 4m x 2m x 3m or 24 m^3. Running the car for 5 minutes just exchanged ~10% of the air for exhaust.
I'm sure my math is wrong somewhere and someone will come by to mention it's the CO concentration, not the % of air consumed (which is true), but it's interesting math none the less.
It's interesting to see what some people consider "common" knowledge. Or maybe how common "common" is.
I grew up in Florida's coastal area where houses are built on stilts (this is to spare the house in case of hurricanes and flooding). People live upstairs and the downstairs areas are largely empty. The empty space underneath the house is where people park their cars. This means when I was growing up and learning how to drive garages aren't a thing. No one told me about running a car in a garage. Later on, all the places I lived in did not have garages either. It's only in the last few years that I actually had a garage.
Did I know about running cars in a garage is a bad idea? I had a vague notion from pop culture and stories of people gassing themselves as a form of suicide (hello "Office Space"!). I had no idea how long is "too long".
More over, I've been parking my car inside the garage and then shutting the car off as my garage door comes down or slightly after (I sort of have to because the car's built-in garage door opener doesn't work when the car is off). I did this for a couple of years and nothing has happened. This lulled me into a false sense of security.
Maybe this is a more ingrained into the majority of people's heads because they grew up with garages but that's never the case where I grew up.
The car's going to make a very small amount of CO in those fifteen seconds. If you take 'never' as 100% absolute then it's going to really distort your numbers, if your goal is counting how many people aren't aware of and safe around the danger.
The reason these sort of rules are absolute "never" are not because you'll end up with dangerous amounts of CO in 10 seconds, but because it makes it a simple rule to follow. Is 10 seconds OK? 15? 30? When does it stop being OK? Following an absolute rule eliminates much of the grey area where mistakes are made.
What if you open the door but the remote doesn't work? Then you go back inside and look for new batteries, meanwhile the car keeps running. Those cases will be rare but can occur. And switching on the car once the door is open costs at most 2 seconds.
It is a little tricky to get right. For instance, it shouldn’t trip if the car is in motion.
Even harder to get right (and very likely to increase the current, extremely low accidental CO death toll), it definitely shouldn’t trip if the car is stuck in stop-and-go traffic in a tunnel full of idling cars.
I think we're talking higher numbers than is possible in a tunnel. If there was as much CO in the air there that it would trip CO detectors, it wouldn't be safe for people to use.
I will never cease to be amazed how relatively orderly that evacuation was. Only two people died in that evacuation and that was due to a car crash. I think it's great evidence that, when the going gets really tough, people band together and try to do the right thing.
Yeah it was pretty dumb but I grew up in the coastal parts of Florida. People there don't usually have enclosed garages and gas heating really isn't a thing. CO poisoning isn't something I really learned about growing up. I only knew of it via pop culture (i.e. "Office Space").
Attached garages are really a terrible misfeature, which will be emblematic for future generations (as they already are for those overseas) of our poor taste and judgement. No matter how ugly the house, it would be a lot more pleasant without the garage. In addition to the dangers cited here, garages make houses less effective at their primary purposes: controlling the movement of air, moisture, and heat. The garage door itself is a big part of that, since every time it opens and closes it opens the house completely to the outdoors. Automobiles bring moisture, dirt, heat, and noxious chemicals into the garage and thence into the house. I've never rented a house and been sorry there was no attached garage. If I ever build my own house it won't have one either.
I live in a house with an attached garage. Opening the garage door does NOT leave the rest of the house exposed to the outdoors, as there's a door which leads to the inside of the house (and it's the same construction as the front door).
Secondly, it's about a 50/50 chance in our neighborhood that the garage will be used to store vehicles. The other half of the time I've seen garages used for general storage, or for a workshop of some kind (my girlfriend has a ton of wood working equipment in the garage).
I completely disagree with you. It's an enormous convenience in poor weather, with very minor risks that are easily mitigated (I can't believe there is anyone that doesn't have a CO detector and smoke detector at least on every floor, it should be illegal not to have them) and they can be very easily insulated. I have had both and I'd never have a place without a garage or carport.
> The garage door itself is a big part of that, since every time it opens and closes it opens the house completely to the outdoors. Automobiles bring moisture, dirt, heat, and noxious chemicals into the garage and thence into the house.
...Are you aware that there's a door between a house and its attached garage, much like the one between the front of the house and the street outside?
Your description sounds like you think garage doors open directly onto the living room.
No, I've lived in, remodeled, repaired, and torn down houses with attached garages. It's possible to build them so that the house in general will have problems before the garage starts causing its own problems. It's common not to build them so.
Also I never had an attached garage when I lived in Boston, Denver, and in the Colorado Rockies, so I'm not so sympathetic to this "oh, it's cold!" argument.
Many places in North America, it is forbidden to park a car on your property in front of your house except on a driveway leading to a garage. The result — unsurprising to anyone except an urban ‘planner’ — is houses whose face is almost entirely garage.
Huh, interesting. I've never actually known this. I live in an extremely rural area (300 people population, only ever lived in a larger city curing college) and it's pretty common for cars to be parked wherever (one of mine has been parked in the lawn diagonally for sale.) Never made the connection.
You're speaking in some kind of holier-than-thou tone of voice, I don't think you're seeing the full picture here. Do you have a car? Do you live in an area that gets bad weather from time to time? Do you even own a house?
This is certainly an interesting case study in the pitfalls of behavioral design, but one important detail that the story glosses over is how rare these incidents are:
More than two dozen people [have been] killed by carbon monoxide nationwide since 2006 after a keyless-ignition vehicle was inadvertently left running in a garage.
On average, that's two deaths a year in a country of more than 260 million passenger vehicles.[1] These accidental deaths are tragic, but it's actually impressive how infrequently they occur.
"Dozens of others have been injured, some left with brain damage."
So deaths are not the whole story.
While one is certainly far more likely to die in a automobile collision, of heart disease, or cancer, I don't think it helps anyone to ignore the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Incidentally, other sources of carbon monoxide can also exist in the home, so it's a good idea to have a carbon monoxide detector there. Perhaps cars too can be outfitted with them.
You make a reasonable point, and I don't mean to trivialize a serious issue -- carbon monoxide poisoning caused by keyless cars -- but in comparison, bathtub drownings are far more common: about 335 a year.[1]
Yeah, but the anti skid pad in my bathtub (which might prevent drownings) is slippery when damp, so I fell in the bath while taking a shower, and could have been killed.
I guess that sort of death goes under the “drowning” category, since the bath mitigation can kill shower-takers.
In my shower/tub combo, I sometimes accidentally plug the drain by bumping the attached drain cover with my foot, causing it to slightly turn and fall into place. This could easily happen if I fell.
Sometimes I have a slow drain and I don't fix the until it becomes slow enough to fill up substantially during my shower. If I were unconscious in the sub with the shower running, it could have enough time to fill up. This would be especially true if my fall caused the water to switch to tub mode, which sends a lot more water into the tub.
I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
That was very informative, decent reasons not to let your drain maintenance get out of hand, or leave the stopper next to the drain.
> I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
Jesus Christ, I wouldn't know about college, but that seem crazy. I hope your friend got the help he needed.
If you're considering bathtub usage, you'd also have to consider how many people park their cars in enclosed garages and how many of these cars lack safety features to prevent you from leaving it on.
Ok, but what’s the ‘deep enough water to drown in’ usage rate of bathtubs compared to usage of keyless entry cars by their owners? These days bathtubs seem to be inconvenient showers...
Unfortunately this will have to entries into the Darwin awards. If you are careless enough not to double check, there are consequences. I drive an electric car, so this will never happen, I however always make sure everything is locked, all lights are off, and plugin every night.
The Darwin award implies people "eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner". I don't think that doing what you were doing for years without any danger is now considered idiocy.
It's like in 40 years a toaster or an oven keeps running if you don't disable it through your "home controlling mental device" and burn your house to the ground while you are sleeping. Oh, and you cannot opt-out of the "mental device", you have to use it like it or not.
Old people have the mental muscle to think "I have the car keys with me, therefore the engine is off" built after decades. It's a serious design flaw to not offer at least an opt-out for these people (like key not IN the car, engine shuts off).
I'm surprised this is even allowed, in the UK it is illegal to leave a car unoccupied on a public road with the engine running. Obviously we're talking about private garages in this case, but the technical ability to have the car running with nobody in it seems to run counter to the spirit of the law.
Where I live, the temperature regularly goes well below 0F every winter. If I start my car and get into it right away, it will be at least 10 minutes before it becomes noticeably warmer.
In colder climates (e.g., further North in this State), people may leave diesel vehicles idling for hours while at work, etc., because it can be so difficult to restart them outdoors in the cold.
There's a reason people start their cars and leave them running for a while.
As far as I'm aware, cars are modified for the UK market and they're not allowed to do this - I think normally a start/stop button is added and an alarm goes off if you get out of the car with it running.
Nice to be so perfect (or is it overchecking via OCD?) to never have forgotten your keys/specs/coat, ever left a light on or been distracted by an interruption.
A friend of mine owns a Tesla but on more than one occasion has left the engine running when he has borrowed his partner's car or had a hire car. It's amazing how quickly one gets out of the habit.
The right question to ask is how many CO deaths from accidentally leaving the car running in the garage were happening before the introduction of key fobs vs. now.
The difference amounts to the multitude of easily avoidable deaths that lie entirely on the auto manufacturer's shoulders.
A dozen people is a dozen people too many.
Stopping the engine when exiting the car with a fob should be the default, as it is consistent with the old, physical key behavior - and will prevent someone from driving off with your car while you have the key (as happened to someone in the thread).
Stopping the engine when one exits the car is NOT consistent with the old physical key behavior. One had to actually turn the car off. I'm not sure how that is different today. Before you removed the key, nor you press a button. But you still had to take an action. It wasn't automatic
>Stopping the engine when one exits the car is NOT consistent ...
Attention to details: stopping the engine when one exits the car with the fob is consistent with what happens when you exit the car with the key you used to start it.
Before, you had to remove the key.
Now, you have to remove the keyfob and press the off button.
Maybe it’s just because I’m used to physical keys but the reflex seems different. I’ve caught myself forgetting to turn off rentals that don’t have a physical key. But I’m open to chalking it up to different habits.
But it's not "stop killing people" vs. "keep killing people". It's is this improvement a higher priority than any of the other changes that would also save lives?
The bottom line calculation should be total $ / death prevented. And then compare that to any of the myriad other changes or improvements possible. Like the early warning crash systems (more expensive, but probably more lives saved). Or more airbags. Or backup cameras (to prevent people getting run over). Or drowsy/alertness sensors. Or more $$ for self-driving tech that could take over if a driver becomes incapacitated (long shot and long-term but huge payoff).
One other point on the auto-shutoff is that this could lead to the deaths of children in overheated cars where the parents had no clue the car would turn off by itself. The car should either turn off immediately or not at all, imo.
Finally, why not install CO detectors on the cars and shutoff the car then? It couldn't be too sensitive, but surely could tell the difference between an enclosed space and bumper-to-bumper traffic.
> the multitude of easily avoidable deaths that lie entirely on the auto manufacturer's shoulders
Ah, but that's not quite how it works, either. There is a certain, small risk involved with being in the world, we can't offload responsibility for any small accident on to the shoulders of manufacturers. Yes, if you can show negligence, there's a case to be made, but you can't.
> ...how many CO deaths from accidentally leaving the car running in the garage were happening before the introduction of key fobs vs. now.
The great thing about the free market is that information spurs innovation. News stories like these make consumers aware of risks they couldn't recognize before. Now we, as informed buyers, can seek out these safety features in the products we buy.
Yeah, no. Humans are awful at estimating any low-probability event. That's why seatbelts and air bags took so long to catch on, despite being positive changes.
Well, in fairness, another big factor in the case of air bags for sure, and seat belts to an extent, is that the auto companies fought them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970118).
It seems that the humans in this thread are equally bad at it, considering the clamor for government force over an infinitesimally small number of admittedly tragic events.
> On average, that's two deaths a year in a country of more than 260 million passenger vehicles.[1] These accidental deaths are tragic, but it's actually impressive how infrequently they occur.
The deaths and injuries are utterly avoidable with decent design. Also, this is a feature that isn't prominent yet. The number of deaths is only going to get higher until the cars are built to turn the engine off under the right conditions.
> The number of deaths is only going to get higher until the cars are built to turn the engine off under the right conditions.
I assume implicit to this statement, is that some heuristic algorithm needs to be created to turn the car off. This seems like a grossly over-complicated (and failure prone) solution in comparison to just using a key for the ignition instead. If you can do something easily with a strictly mechanical simple solution, why reinvent the wheel?
Why not just start an alarm 10 seconds after the key is out of range? Or automatically shut off the engine if the key has been out of range for more than 5 minutes. That still prevents accidents while driving (there were cases where children threw keys out of the window) but should be safe otherwise. And programming that timer shouldn't be a lot of work. The detection already exists anyway.
The cars need to work when the key battery is dead. My LEAF has an inductive charger near the start button that allows you to "charge" the key just enough to do the security exchange and then start it.
It's quite possible, even likely, that more than 2 people per year would die from environmental exposure if we programmed cars to not work if the key battery dies (as a proxy for "key out of range"). (Drive out to a deserted location, shut down, enjoy the day, get back in to find a dead car key battery. You want to be able to get home rather than stay at the trailhead.)
An alarm would still be fine though? Maybe with an option to deactivate it. I'd want to know when the key gets removed from the car, not having any notification appears wrong.
My car displays something on the screen, but I don't recall it making a noise.
I've left the car running while stepping into a store because someone was in the passenger seat. If I get too far, my bluetooth music stops, but the air-conditioning keeps going without the key.
> I assume implicit to this statement, is that some heuristic algorithm needs to be created to turn the car off.
If you say so. I'm pretty sure just turning the car off if there's nobody sitting in any of the seats and the key is not in the car would be a good start.
Even simpler. If two of three conditions are met, switch engine off:
* Rising Carbonmonoxide levels
* No weight on driver seat for 3 minutes
* No driving activity for 3 minutes
The first factor alone should already prompt a shutdown though. It wouldn't even matter if the key was in the car, that might happen by accident and isn't a terribly good indicator.
I don't think this is actually simpler. I was deliberately trying to give an example that didn't require any new sensor tech. I don't think the cars have monoxide detectors right now.
Determining whether anybody is in the car doesn't sound trivial beyond the driver seat. The seatbelt warnings are triggered by weight, but people frequently store stuff on their seats, and occasionally that stuff has a weight plausible for a human
> Have you never turned your car on before you left to heat up the passenger compartment?
With the remote start system I have a passing familiarity with, if you remotely start the car and warm it up with no person and no key in the car, the car automatically shuts off fifteen minutes after it has started if someone doesn't get in with a key. Seems to be compatible the simple guidelines I mentioned.
If you live in a cold climate, you often have to let your car idle for a few minutes to heat it up, or your windows will be all foggy and you don’t see a thing.
It's also really hard on the motor if the fluids are cold, as you're more likely to induce wear because of boundary lubrication and similar effects. Additionally, like on my truck, the synchronizers on the transmission are really cranky when they're cold, and it's hard to get it moving without warming up a little bit.
"Key not in the car" should be condition enough. I'm having a hard time thinking of a scenario where you NEED to have the key away from the car while the engine is running.
My car key's battery suddenly gives out mid-drive once and I had to listen to a warning tone every few minutes but at least it got me home. It would be incredibly frustrating if the car just decided that it doesn't see the key and shuts it off.
It also breaks the backup mechanism for no-battery situation where you can tap the fob on where the ignition lock would be for key cars to start it up.
That would lead to far more accidents where people leave kids or animals alone in a car in direct sunlight, assuming the AC will keep them cool. But as they step away from the vehicle, the engine and AC turn off, leaving anyone in the car to die from heat stroke.
Those people don't need to take the car key with them, but with a keyless car you don't think about the key (that's the entire point of keyless cars). The key is just one of many things in your pockets.
Isn't keeping a car running with children inside incredibly dangerous? What if they release the breaks or shift to drive? I'd think taking the child with you should be safer than leaving them in a running car.
For animals that's different of course. But wouldn't an override be enough?
When I was a kid, I was at my babysitter's house waiting to be picked up by my parents. Another kid's parent showed up, parked her car, and put one of her kids in the front seat. Her other kid ran in the house, and she ran after him. The first kid let the e-brake off, and the car went rolling down the driveway and hit a tree. It didn't roll very fast, so there was no damage and nobody was hurt. But the mom was freaked out as she came back out 10 seconds later and saw the car rolling away...
This was in the late 80s. The car wasn't running. It was a mechanical e-brake. I know a lot of cars have electronic parking brakes now, but most probably still don't.
On another note, I can't think of a single car that will let you take it out of Park without a foot on the brake, or without using an override.
The ratio to study is not how many deaths per vehicles, but cost-of-implemenation per vehicle vs deaths. The article mentions that the feature can be implemented "for pennies per vehicle." If you could save 1 person's father for $.01 per car, why not?
You could surely prevent this purely in software. The car knows that is hasn't moved, nobody is sitting in the driver's seat and nobody has touched any controls for 10 minutes. Surely it can switch itself off?
Could be a special switch on the fob for that. Could beep every five minutes to remind you. Lots of ways to handle it that would save lives at the cost of only minimal inconvenience.
How is beeping every five minutes any different than what cars do currently? Cars with push to start are already required to beep when the key is taken out of the car.
If you add a special switch, that increases costs. Why should car buyers bear extra expenses for less than 100 deaths a year?
Should we require special bathtub sensors that beep when they detects still water because hundreds of people drown in bathtubs each year?
The pennies per vehicle line confuses me, honestly. Building it in to a car should cost zero cents, since it's just a config change, and apparently a retrofit is in the realm of $5. Where do pennies come in?
A config changes requires someone to design the configuration, right? That's at least x hours of coding, testing, and final validation. Nothing is 'free'.
Keyless cars are a tiny fraction of overall vehicles.
The net befit is also minimal, so if they became popular you would expect a ~hundred deaths per year for what? Do save 20$ per car because they lack CO detectors?
It would be easy enough to only use the CO detector when the car is in park or the emergency brake is on. That way it could never activate while driving.
For modern cars, I think that's what's happening actually - engines will power off when stationary and not in gear, but the car is still on and the engine will restart when it's running low on battery power. Thus, people leaving their car in the garage thinking it's off.
If the engine’s off because of stop/start the warning noise should already be much louder and accompanied by dashboard warnings. See also what happens when you leave the lights on.
That’s what doesn’t make a lot of sense here before we dash off to design some sort of countermeasure - there’s either an engine running (and “modern” engines aren’t that quiet, especially in a confined space), or there should be some loud visual/auditory warning. I guess it’s possible the victims didn’t hear either?
Some more math, adding a 1 cent component (not counting one time costs of R&D and tooling) to every new car sold in the u.s. (~17.5 million) would equal out to 175,000; which equates to a spending of $87500 per death prevented, a reasonable amount.
On a counterpoint, 15 times more people die from lightning strikes per year than this, so are kinda going after extreme edge cases here
>Toyota models, including Lexus, have figured in almost half of the carbon monoxide fatalities and injuries identified by The Times. Toyota says its keyless ignition system “meets or exceeds all relevant federal safety standards.”
That's quite significant, and I wonder why that is?
I have a hypothesis:
Personally I've had problems with Toyotas (specifically, Prius GenIII and Camry XV50) where trying to shut off the car too fast, eg using "muscle memory," results in the car not shutting off.
At first glance (and according to the manual), the steps to shutting off the Prius / Camry appear to be:
1. Shift the car into Park.
2. Press the ignition button.
3. Exit the vehicle.
Simple, right?
Well, it's not. If you don't wait ~1 second between step 1 and step 2, the car has a race condition where it doesn't realize that you already put it in Park, so it displays a "Shift to Park" message and fails to shut down. To fix, you have to shift the car into Reverse (or really, Anything-But-Park), shift it back into Park, and press the button again.
This sequence is extremely confusing, especially if you don't notice the error message. Neither conventional shifters nor conventional key-based ignitions make you wait -- when you put it in gear, it's in gear!
Toyota's system has hidden state that's related, but separate from the physical movements of the shift lever and the start button (unlike a conventional key and shifter).
So if you want to reliably shut off the car, here are the actual steps to shutting down a Prius / Camry:
1. Shift the car into Park.
2. Wait a beat (for the vehicle to realize it's in Park).
3. Press the ignition button.
4. Exit the vehicle.
The proper way for Toyota to do it would have been to buffer the inputs in order, so the same sequence of actions always results in the same result, and the mere act of speeding up one's muscle memory doesn't result in unexpected operation (ie, acting just like the old, more-easily-predictable physical controls).
Are you saying it's impossible to shut off the car while not in park? I find that odd, and will certainly have to try it on my mother's Toyota when I get the chance
Yeah, that seems odd to me. I drive a Nissan, not a Toyota, but it will shut off if I hit the button before going into park, then beep like there's no tomorrow until it's in park.
Though it occurs to me that the old Dodge Caravan I drove before may have required being in park to turn off, though it used the key for ignition, so that made sense.
>Are you saying it's impossible to shut off the car while not in park?
Yes! The vehicle faithfully ignores you when you press the Start button, beeps softly, and displays a message: "SHIFT TO P POSITION."[2]
As I said, in my experience there's a ~1s delay between shifting to Park and being permitted to turn the car off. You get the same error message, but it's already in Park. The result? Performing the same sequence of actions at a different speed results in a very different outcome. And the Park button (yes I know) is very close to the Start button, so it's easy to perform the two actions in quick succession. Classic race condition.
Btw, you can't just press Start again. Even though it's now "in Park." It's in some strange, poorly defined, in-between state, not Park but not Not-Park. To recover, you have to press the Park button again, and then press the Start button again. From a software perspective, this makes me uneasy.
It would be easy to miss such the subtle cues indicating an error (soft beep/message/IC doesn't down). Especially for older people who are hard of hearing, and just pulled into the garage from a sunny drive (bright pupil adaptation takes longer to dilate for older people).
From the Prius GenIII manual[1], pp549
> * Stopping the hybrid system
>Set the parking brake, shift the shift position to P and press the “POWER” switch as you normally do when stopping the hybrid system.
Setting the parking brake is optional, but shifting to Park is not.
There's also a confusing chart with all the warning messages that should explain this behavior, but doesn't. It's on pp525, and it seems to have evidence of incomplete revision:
>The driver’s door has been opened with the shift position in a position other than P and without first turning the “POWER” switch is OFF.
There is no power switch, just a button, and the grammar is wrong. Hmmm...
[2] Btw, googling for "shift to P position" indicates that both Hyundai and Kia have this interlock. Whether they're subject to the same race condition is unknown.
35,000 people are being killed in the US every year by cars, but now suddenly it's "Deadly Convenience," now that 2 people a year are dying from CO poisoning?
Ford has had issues with some models sold to law enforcement due to CO leaks - some people believe it's endemic to all Explorers - and no one has died as far as I know yet.
any time human lives are involved it's worth moderating one's outrage at such distortions, but the point you make is worthy of consideration: the number of deaths per year (21 in some unspecified time period is quoted in the article) seems to be relatively small compared to other addressable hazards.
the number of deaths and injuries per year from carbon monoxide poisoning by car is roughly on par with lightning strikes. we address that particular danger with a relatively straightforward technology, the lightning rod.
so i'd expect the response here would be of similar magnitude (rather than some convoluted rube goldbergian contraption). the auto-shutoff mechanism seems to fit the bill and some cars are already fitted with it.
so all in all, it's worth being aware of this danger and the solution, but not worth spending much more time thinking about it. it's much more fruitful to focus on reducing one's heart disease vectors, cancer risks and distracted driving.
Looks like, in the last 10 years in the US, lightning has claimed less than 50 lives per year [0]. I'm not sure how that would compare to carbon monoxide deaths from cars when making the proper adjustments, but I suspect lightning is a bigger threat. The male to female ratio (221 to 62) is interesting, and I suspect that it's because males tend to work outside more than females (anedoctal).
If lightning strikes would really only kill two people a year and not cause property damage, we should not be adding lightning rods to buildings. That's probably fewer than the number of people who die while fitting lightning rods.
This. LIghtning rods are a very cheap insurance policy against the enormous property damage that lightning does to your building (think fire + widespread electrical damage).
You can't just "not use cars". No matter what you need some form of transportation, and people will die on it.
Any time someone says a huge class of deaths is totally avoidable, take it with a mountain of salt. It's a useless idea, completely disconnected from the useful realm of risk management.
But in order to decrease our reliance on cars, we would have to let builders replace the single-family housing in cities with taller multi-unit buildings. This would:
- Be very profitable for people we don't like.
- Employ carpenters building prefab housing in Maine rather than carpenters who live in the city.
- Fail to destroy capitalism.
- Destroy the character of the neighbourhood by casting shadows.
- Let the wrong sort of people into people's neighbourhoods.
If we can save lives by installing a simple alarm that goes off when the key is out of range, why shouldn't it be done? The cost per vehicle are negligible, no new hardware needed, just updated software.
We live in the sort of weird world where people would rather look into ways of stopping those people dying from CO poisoning than snarkily dismiss their deaths as statistically irrelevant.
Pretty much all of those 35000 deaths involve mistakes, faults or cases of pure bad luck whose individual contribution to fatalities is comparatively small; pretty much all of them get investigated to see what went wrong and whether it's something that's likely to be repeated or something which can be avoided in future without disproportionate cost.
Your comment is the snarky one, and you attempt to dismiss 35,000 deaths rather than 2. In every single one of those 35,000 cases, someone decided to drive that day, on purpose. You almost got it right: In this crazy wacky weird world we live in, people would rather talk about 2 CO deaths caused by some dumbshit accessory nobody needs, than the 35,000 caused by their own complicity and laziness. Nobody asked whether those deaths were intentional, but you answered anyway, so that's interesting.
Way to totally disregard my point that pretty much all the 35000 deaths consisted of one or two individual deaths, some of which see junctions redesigned or products recalled as a result without anybody haughtily dismissing their interest in seeing a fix with "how can you consider this to be deadly when many more people die from many other things related to vehicles?"
Personally I think there's more value in fixing the dumbshit accessories nobody needs which are a recurring cause of relatively small numbers of injuries and death than focusing on many accidents attributable to discrete random errors and deciding we're all powerless to change a thing, and I think dumbshit accessories nobody needs are a more easily corrected problem than need for motorised transport or humans (and AI) are not infallible. Evidently your mileage varies.
Another issue negated by electric cars. No burning fossil fuels, no carbon monoxide in my garage.
Ironic that the only mention of EVs in this thread was about how Teslas turn themselves off and lock automatically. It's like everyone is complaining about having to do wiring at colos and some techs getting accidentally electrocuted, while I spin up another instance on AWS.
BTW, my two Nissan Leaf EVs have the a keyless fob thing, and like the ICE cars, they beep if you leave with the car on. It seems like manufacturers just can't come up with a sensible and intuitive way for the keyless fob and car state to interact. Maybe the idea of putting a physical key into the ignition was a better paradigm.
and here with GM (I own a Chevy Volt) they have decided the phone app provided to remote unlock/lock the car and start it will now be a paid service to the tune of 14.99 a month via Onstar.
Used to be free to use the phone app to do these things. Better yet GM now will collect data from usage and send it to affiliates.
Now I know other manufactures charge for navigation and such after a trial period but GM is going to charge just to use a phone app to unlock/lock/start your car. They have plans with data that go up to 60 a month
Chrysler is the same way (we have a Pacifica PHEV). Our one-year free trial just ended, and there's no way I'm going to spend that much money for such a small amount of convenience.
I'm still unsure how a country could switch from gas to EV. Could a city keep up with the power demands when everyone plugs in their EVs at night? I am assuming we'd have to build more power generation capacity, and what is the source? How do you transmit all the high capacity power to quick charge stations on the highway when you have 200+ cars an hour needing to quick charge?
It all sounds like an enormous infrastructure upgrade. Europe is already committing to EV and outlawing gas engines in the next 10-20 years so it will be interesting to learn how they plan to accommodate the huge electricity generation and transmission demands that go with that.
Most nations still have peak demand infrastructure setup for daytime industrial power demand, most of which already requires high capacity delivery. That demand hugely drops off in the evenings as factories shut down for the day and workers return home.
Most new EV power demand happens in the evenings, "filling in the bathtub" (because the average demand graph looks like a bathtub) that the industrial demand curve leaves behind. The difference between industrial (daytime/peak) and consumer (evening/off-peak) demands is a big enough bathtub that estimates are that it would be a while before EV cars get even close to filling in the bathtub.
One estimate I saw was that if every car on the road switched to an EV car tomorrow and charged only at off-peak times, it would almost fill the bathtub, and thus require no actual generation increase.
That doesn't deal with the infrastructure chicken-and-egg issues of street-level and parking structure access to car charging, of course.
Street level charging and parking are only important if you think car ownership and not mobility services will be the way electric gains the bulk of its market share.
Even "mobility services" would need parking structures with chargers, and comprehensive street level charging would also be useful to them for just-in-time logistics.
Personally, I think that if there is a transition coming from car ownership to "mobility services", it's going to be a slow one, especially in America where personal vehicle ownership is seen so much as a rite of passage and requisite "freedom".
Ironically it is going to be easiest for places with the cleanest power (hydro, nuclear, geothermal, wind) because clean power tends to be non-burstable while fossil fuels are.
So in places like France or Ontario what will happen is that the cars will automatically charge when rates are low (at night) and may even help the grid by acting as remote batteries. For example, you could keep your car at a 70% minimum charge as a configuration then allow the power grid to pull from you as needed. This would passively reduce your overall power bill as you're selling at peak demand and buying at peak supply.
Distributed grid battery storage via EVs is an interesting idea and I'd think a 70% charge would be possible for commuters. However, when everyone gets home plugging in to get back what they supplied out during the day I am curious to see how the network would deal with that load. Imaging Toronto with 25% of households consuming an additional 20kwh a day, that's a considerable change. Apartments in Toronto probably use about 18-25kwh a day on average, you'd essentially be doubling that for a quarter of the city. I'd love to know if that's manageable / what industry experts are thinking. (My numbers are all backed by very crappy quick internet searches and guestimates)
sounds like a perfect opportunity to get careless car owners to destroy their own property for a company's revenue.
especially hilarious if the car owner doesn't use an expensive UPS between the grid and the car. I'm sure the next lightning storm isn't too far off - and some of the plugged in cars won't survive it.
I'm not against EV though. There'll however be a lot of growing pains as they take over the cities. (though thats still far off)
This can be modelled with net present value accounting. If, at scale, it is financially worth it for Tesla to manufacture giant batteries for the electric grid then it will also be financially viable for the electric grid to use spare battery capacity.
li-ion battery lifespans are generally calculated in power cycles. They don't really age with years...
Generally, power cells have about 300-500 power cycles until there is a significant drop in performance. This is one of the major faults of EV that is often quoted, as some parts of the batteries aren't recycled. So, you're essentially trading the co2 pollution to toxic waste.
maybe you should check the facts before you spout nonsense yourself?
> But, overall, the data offer some basis for confidence that a Tesla Model S will lose—on average—less than 15 percent of its battery capacity over the average 150,000-mile (250,000-km) life of a vehicle.
Tesla has it exactly right. Put the car in park and take the key out to turn it off.
This extends easily to ICE cars, especially newer ones that can auto-restart from 0 RPM idle. When the car is in Park for more than a few seconds, turn off the engine. When the key goes away, turn the rest of the way off. And get rid of the on/off button: it’s unnecessary and annoying.
Is it not normal for a keyless car to beep like crazy when you leave the car with the key inside?
My car does this. As soon as it detects the key is not inside the car it will beep and remind you the car is on. The other problem this solves is that you don't want to be driving somewhere without the key either, eg when you're dropping off your wife and she happens to have the key.
> the car should just shut down when it detects the key is not inside the car.
Well, you can't have the car shutting off if the key is suddenly not detected. The battery might be low, or the key gets dropped behind some metal. But it does mean that after you've turned it off you are stuck there.
The keyless car I owned would warn and beep like crazy about the key missing, but it would continue driving. Then when coming to a halt and shifting into neutral/park it would deny switching back to drive. So no danger while driving and no risk for stealing.
My Honda CR-V will periodically beep with "NO KEY" lighting on up on the dashboard(say I give my wife the key to get inside our home on a crappy day while I go park the car elsewhere), but doesn't make impose any restrictions on using the car while it's on, regardless of your current speed or gear. Once you shut the car off though, that's it.
I would bet that collectively the time wasted due to mishaps exceeds time saved by this feature. For me personally, I don’t think I will ever make the time up in my lifetime - I have accidentally killed a battery once because the car was in ACC mode and I didn’t realize it, and another time I drove away without the key because I was dropping the owner of the car off at the airport.
These problems are not as bad with an electric car like a Tesla. I have left AC on but the battery was fine. I have been dropped off while the driver had no key, and it posed a slight issue once they stopped the car and got off the seat. Obviously, no CO poisoning.
I always thought all cars had alarms for these cases. Similar to when your child throws the key out of the window while driving. Shouldn't happen but has happened (there were some news stories on that last year) and there's no reason the car shouldn't give an alarm.
There are certainly a large list of reasons a car should be automatically shutting off without the keys present, but I feel it's also important to put the article and the figures they use into perspective.
Check out the GM Ignition issues where the cars lose electrical power because the key ignition moves out of the "on" position. The owners own key ring adding additional weight increasing the chance of this happening. This literally created the opposite problem... Keyed ignitions causing accidents.
We are so used to vehicles that it's so easy to forget that they are large and heavy machines. Just driving the car to work every day puts you at risk.
The article reads like... complaining about the rain while a tornado is heading your way.
Anyhow. Don't get me wrong... getting out of your car with your keys should certainly make the car yell at you and then automatically shut itself off after a period of time. With the option for the user to manually turn these things off of course. (I am a firm believer that one should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot if they explicitly go out of their way to make it possible). I am just a bit irritated at the article. :)
I really don't think the article is saying much more than you do.
A simple, silly, trvially fixable design oversight caused a number of deaths when the product became common enough. The only way to nudge the manufacturers to fix it is by raising awareness, which is what the article does - which would, hopefully, lead to proper regulation.
Additionally, we can only expect the number of accidents like this to rise as the number of newer cars increases. This article is also a PSA.
While a lot of people die in car accidents, I see it as an orthogonal issue. Using your analogy, it's like complaining about floods in TX while there's a tornado in KS heading North.
On a side note, it's a legal requirement in some countries to having a working CO detector in the home, certainly for rented properties in the UK. Also in some (30+) states by the looks of it [1]. A $10 detector would have probably saved the gentleman's life.
>A $10 detector would have probably saved the gentleman's life.
True, but making the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring the $5 sensor in that $10 detector in every vehicle equipped with keyless start (or perhaps, every vehicle) would lead to nearly 100% deployment as the vehicle fleet is replaced.
By comparison, despite decades of passing laws and funding public education campaigns, only 33% of households ("occupied units") having a working CO detectors[1], and 40% of "working" detectors failed to alarm in hazardous levels[2]. So overall, just 20% of households have adequate CO protection.
FTA:
> From news reports, lawsuits, police and fire records and incidents tracked by advocacy groups, The Times has identified 28 deaths and 45 injuries since 2006, but the figures could be higher.
Let's estimate they found 1/3 of all cases, for a total of 56 deaths and 135 injuries. Estimating $6m per statistical life and $3m per injury (some injuries, like brain injuries, can be more than $6m for lifetime medical care and lost productivity, but this estimate is intentionally conservative). That's $61.75m annually, compared to the average of 13,532,750 annual vehicles sold in that time period[3], so about $4.5 of harm reduced per vehicle.
So economically it seems like a wash, and it prevents awful tragedies. Sounds like a good idea to me.
>True, but making the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring the $5 sensor in that $10 detector in every vehicle equipped with keyless start (or perhaps, every vehicle) would lead to nearly 100% deployment as the vehicle fleet is replaced.
It's a trade-off, like everything else.
That those $5/$10/$50/$100 components add 10x their cost to the vehicle in terms of R&D, testing, supply chain, warrenty claims, etc. All that gets passed down to consumers. Increasing cost increases replacement interval and increases the age of the average vehicle. The result is that incremental progress that improves safety takes longer to trickle down through the market.
Note that the scarily high 40% failure is heavily biased by people keeping units long past their design lifespan. If you have a 5 year old Carbon Monoxide detector, buy a new one.
The failures prior to 5 years in that test are disturbing, but they're not statistically significant on their own so it's hard to be sure how serious that would be in practice.
Everyone should have a CO detector in their homes and it's already law in some countries. CO poisoning is very dangerous and can happen independent of cars. IF you have a smoke alarm at home there's no reason why you shouldn't have a CO detector as well (those probably make even more sense, CO can kill you even if you're awake, smoke detectors mostly help when you're sleeping).
I believe the parent poster was referred to the keyless start feature only, not shutting down during regular driving.
But if keyless start isn't available (and gives a warning message) when the ambient CO levels are borderline hazardous ... isn't that a feature, not a bug?
Now that you mention it, it would be nice to get a warning light during driving as well. Or better yet a PPM reading.
Possible? Trivially. Doable? Not really, because cost margins are tight on cars. Remember, you're talking about the industry that once viewed it as cheaper to pay out lawsuits than to fix a dangerous fuel tank.
If it were a FMVSS requirement, it would solve the Prisoner's Dilemma of the manufacturers. All vehicles would get more expensive by Z dollars (where Z * annual_vehicles_sold < annual_harm_reduced, in the non-futile case).
If you're reading this and you don't have carbon monoxide detectors in your home, please go buy some. They are generally integrated in modern smoke detectors, and the standalone units are pretty cheap.
I'd recommend having one in the garage if you have a gas water heater. But you should definitely have them in the house no matter what.
> They are generally integrated in modern smoke detectors
No they are not. Most smoke detectors do not have carbon monoxide detection built in. You can buy combination units but you should not assume a smoke detector has carbon monoxide detection just because it’s new. Verify that the unit you purchase provides detection of both of you want both in one.
And replace your detectors if they’re 10 years old (or don’t have a date, in which case they’re way older than 10 years).
Source: Old heater in a caravan broke, bit too much fuel in it during ignition caused a small explosion that blew the chimney (?) pipe off. We got away with a collective headache at least.
Tesla handles this quite well. You stop driving, then open the door. This puts the car in park and engages the parking brake. Other stuff happens like the door handles present and the stereo volume turns down. Then when you close the door (if nobody is detected in the driver's seat) the car shuts off, much to the chagrin of any children sitting in the back seat listening to the music. As you walk away, the car locks automatically.
The car then automatically wakes up as you approach it. Sit in, put on your seatbelt, and put it into drive to go.
It's certainly VERY easy to leave an internal combustion car running (even a keyed one) if you are used to that!
And even then the worst that can happen from leaving an electric car turned on in your garage is your battery getting drained. Even keeping the lights on this will likely take days when fully charged.
I feel like I read sometime last year 'DannyBee saying that modern cars were efficient enough that it was unlikely they'd be dangerous running in a garage.
Not mentioned in the article, but I imagine that this could be exacerbated by the fuel-saving 'auto engine off' behaviour of newer cars... you arrive home, engage the brake and the engine turns off automatically.
... only to automatically restart 15 minutes later when the engine sensors detect the oil temp is dropping.
This happened to me with a hire car. I parked the car and pressed the button to stop the engine. The engine cut out so I got out of the car, locking the vehicle with the remote as I walked away. After some time I was contacted by the security team of the company I was visiting to tell me the engine was running on my vehicle. The auto engine off had kicked in as i pressed the engine stop button, but because the engine had stopped I didn't hold the button for long enough to actually switch the engine off. When I locked the car the turn indicators flashed with a non-standard pattern to warn that the lock had failed (because the engine was not off) but because it was a hire car I did not recognise it. When I drove the car home the same thing happened at the end of the journey but this time I was expecting it and switched the car off properly.
It just occurs to me that this is probably only an issue with automatic cars since any shift car will just have the engine die immediately if you start it with the shift pedal unpressed.
No. (I drive a manual shift car in the UK). If you stop the car, put it into neutral and press the foot brake, the engine will stop if conditions are correct.
I have been taught to always put the first gear in when parking the car, that's where that idea comes from. If you leave it in neutral, I am indeed wrong.
There was no tone when I opened the door, not that I heard anyway (it was a 2017 Citroen C4). The dashboard may have stayed lit but as it was a hire car I had no idea what the normal behaviour should have been. I had two passengers who also did not notice anything out of the ordinary when we left the car. A colleague had the same thing happen in a C4 but he was still in the car when the engine restarted.
My car has the start-stop technology and the engine always starts up when I put it in park if the system switched it off when I stopped on my driveway. It will also start again if you open the doors while in drive.
I'd rather see people install CO detectors within their homes as it is a more general solution to this problem. CO poisoning can occur with any fuel burning appliance in your home. It would be better to cover all sources instead of each one individually.
>a software change that it said could be accomplished for pennies per vehicle. In the face of auto industry opposition, the agency let the plan languish, though it says a rule is still under consideration.
Why the car industry would oppose such a minor fix is beyond me. If it does not even hurt the bottom line, why not make that change.
I'd think some drivers prefer the current behavior. Like if you don't have a garage and live somewhere with cold winters you probably want to be able to start it and walk away.
Sure, but 30 mins is more than enough time to warm up in situations where externally powered heaters aren't required. Surely there must be some safe ground that would not drastically affect most drivers, but still save lives
Yeah, that's fair. I drive a manual car, which makes it very hard to absent-mindedly leave your car running (at least if you park it in gear, but I think most people do).
Many reasons why they’d oppose. Making it automatic means you become liable when it doesn’t work. Software has bugs. Adding it to older cars means you have to admit your cars aren’t safe and that’s hard plus recalls are annoying to deal with. People are fed up with all the beeping in modern cars and are becoming alarm deaf.
I have a 2010 Prius with keyless entry and start. If the car is on and you close any door without the key in the vehicle it will make a loud audible beeping noise. It means if you jump out to get something from the trunk, it first starts beeping when the drivers door is closed and again when the trunk is closed. Pretty hard to miss.
If you try and lock the car while it is on (using the keyless entry), it will just produce a continuous audible noise and won’t lock - again pretty hard to miss. The same thing happens if you try and lock a key in the vehicle.
It’s horrible that people have lost their lives... but I don’t see this as an issue with the car. I actually think it calls for having more CO detectors in homes (along with fire alarms ).
I have a key less ignition car, and if I leave it running... I want it to stay running. With or without the key. However, the audible alert seems like it would be valuable. What about having the Fob vibrate periodically when outside the car and the car is running ?
This is a good feature. At work we used to get emails about people leaving their lights on, now we get emails about people who left their car running (!) in the garage. Combination of keyless start and quiet engines is the culprit.
That is a good thing since some newer Fords leak CO into the interior. I'm sure they wouldn't have added it if they could've gotten away with doing nothing.
Air quality sensors that would detect this any many other potential hazards would likely cost $5 or less. Even if lawsuits resolve this issue its interesting to see how its only resolved post harm.
This was my problem when I rented a keyless car for the first time last year. To preface, it was a v6 mustang which I wasn't actually expecting to be quiet, but in comparison to what I'm used to it was practically silent.
Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state the car is in? With a key you can reach under the wheel and verify what state the car's in, in under a second. I haven't seen a keyless car system that was anywhere near that intuitive. Engine noise is usually the best indicator but as you've mentioned, cars are quiet now.
With the rental car it took me a good half hour to figure out all the nuances of the keyless ignition. Compare that to seconds, occasionally minutes, of getting used to "normal" cars with keys/fobs.
> Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state the car is in?
Glance at the tachometer, if it’s at zero, engine isn’t running.
Yeah, when I first got the car I have now I had trouble telling whether it was running because it was so quiet. It also has engine noise piped through the speakers, I guess to make it feel sportier.
> Despite years of deaths, regulatory action has lagged.
In California at least, all new homes and all rentals are required to have CO detectors. It seems like that would be a good regulation to have nationwide, which would help with this problem as well as other CO related issues.
I suspect if they looked at attached garages and their toll when cars are left running the incident will be higher. How many people have died because of attached garages? Folks can help mitigate this by having carbon monoxide detectors in their garage and in the house. Car manufactures tho should have this built in, if the car is not running and the CO level inside get's too high, shut it off and sound the car alarm. The only challenge is that CO sensors seems to need replacing more than the life of the car and of course the price of car will go up and those without the need will be upset.
I wonder how many people died because they locked their keys in a running vehicle in the garage, called a locksmith, but didn’t think about CO entering the house while they waited.
At the rate of 2 per 100’s of millions of people per year, these scenarios become plausible.
Why is the default is to leave the engine running with the fob out of range of the vehicle? I'd expect that the default would be to turn off the engine. If you really want to leave the engine running with the vehicle empty, that should take special action to set up.
Maybe that should only be available with the "remote engine start / preheat / precool" option, which would include interior and exterior CO detectors.
> I'd expect that the default would be to turn off the engine.
That would be very dangerous. For example, think about the following scenario:the co-driver has the key within his pocket, he leaves the car and the driver wants to drive around the corner to find a parking spot. So the driver accelerates and after a few meters the engine would turn off and his breaks would be completely manual.
Why would it not be the default? You started the engine, but you never stopped it - so it should keep running,no? As for the fob in range issue - the keyless system is not perfect and I've gotten a warning(while driving!) That the key is missing , even though it was sitting safely in my pocket - shutting the engine down based on that is not ideal.
Most modern cars in my country turn off the engine when you idle at the lights, confident they can restart the engine in a fraction of a second as you press the pedals. So there's plenty of precedent for software turning off the engine (when stationary and not in gear) without being explicitly commanded to.
It's true you wouldn't want to do it while the car is moving - but the ECU knows if you're moving or not. The rule would instead be "turn off engine if card is out of range, not in gear, stationary for 60 seconds or more, and user hasn't disabled this feature"
Has anyone compared the rates of carbon monoxide poisoning with and without keyless ignition? I could actually see an argument for keyless being safer: if people can leave a car and completely forget to turn it off, they can certainly do that and forget to take the keys with them. At least with the keyless ignition you have the _possibility_ of being alerted to your mistake (my Toyota beeps so loud that it would be pretty much impossible to ignore).
Here's the thing: leaving a car running and unoccupied is, from an engineering perspective, completely stupid.
Running a car on idle for a long time basically slowly degrades it. It's just sitting there getting hot and wasting gas. Without adequate cooling, the engine will overheat. And if you have multiple catalytic converters, the car can explode from built up gases. Many manuals explicitly state not to idle the car for more than 10-20 minutes.
You don't even need to idle it. Many cars today have automatic engine shut off and start when the car is stopped at a red light. New cars could easily add this to prevent idling.
Now consider the non-technical reasons not to let it idle. One, someone can steal it. Two, it's wasting gas. Three, it's pumping harmful gases into the atmosphere and creating smog. Four, someone could die from carbon monoxide.
The solution is simple. The default should be to turn off the car if the keys are gone after idling for 10 minutes, with an override switch to let it idle for, let's say an hour. After an hour you have to flip the switch again.
Regardless of whether you think this is necessary, there are hundreds of such modifications already that add up to make cars safer and more reliable. You can't switch into or out of park or reverse without depressing the brake. You can't remove the keys without being in park. Your can't operate Bluetooth controls while the car is in motion.
So it's not like these changes are new or difficult. Automakers add them over time as they see the need. But when they don't act, it's up to us to pass legislation to require them.
> Running a car on idle for a long time basically slowly degrades it. It's just sitting there getting hot and wasting gas. Without adequate cooling, the engine will overheat. And if you have multiple catalytic converters, the car can explode from built up gases. Many manuals explicitly state not to idle the car for more than 10-20 minutes.
Do you have a citation for any of this? I think letting an engine idle for extended periods of time does run up the hours on the engine (if you've got the sort of engine where you would even think about adding an hour meter, anyways), but especially if not under a load, I would very, _very_ surprised if you incurred actual damage letting the engine just run. The cooling system on every car I've ever encountered is more the sufficient to keep the engine at the correct operating temperature indefinitely, even if it's real hot out.
A quick Google search has many different sources, none of which are scientific. One is all the manufacturers that warn against idling, for various reasons based on the particular model, probably. Two is the increased fuel mixture in cold weather, leading to increased wear on cylinder walls from running rich until the engine reaches temp. Three is that cars are designed to operate under median load, not idle: half of how a car cools its engine is air passing over radiator plates, and that doesn't happen when the car is stopped. The engine actually has to work harder to keep the fans going in hopes of keeping temps down (in hot environments it'll just run hard constantly). And in winter it's the opposite problem, with oil viscosity and antifreeze working at potentially the end of their design spec to both keep the engine lubricated and coolant circulating. If it had load it could keep itself warmer easier, rather than depend on all these extra factors to keep from damaging the engine. And all of this for gasoline cars; diesels have a much more difficult time, especially if they're supposed to be fuel efficient.
Now, obviously I'm not claiming idling your car is going to ruin your engine, cars idle all the time with no problem. It's just not at all what the car was designed to do most of the time, and it will cause undue wear in various conditions over time. At the very least an hour of idle is equivalent to driving 25 miles (according to Ford Fleet) and your gas mileage will be worse.
I was thinking the same thing. My car shuts off if you come to a stop in D, but for some reason it doesn’t when you shift to P, even though there’s even less reason to leave the engine idling in Park.
If the key leaves my KIA while the engine is running, an alarm sounds. Works perfectly well and if you ignore alarms without knowing what they are about... Well, then no system can help you.
So the real issue here, is that some cars do not seem to have such an alarm (probably should become mandatory) and that many owners don't know how to properly use their cars. After all, there is a reason why you need a license to drive those things.
This would never happen in the UK or Norway as petrol costs too much and people just would not have a house big enough that they would not notice an automobile engine chugging away right next to them.
Cheap petrol in the USA means that people are in the habit of doing things like starting their car remotely to 'warm up' or 'cool down' before they then have a shower, brekkie and what not before finally getting in their car. Usually the car is on the driveway and not the garage in these scenarios, however, that is something that would not happen in the rest of the world, where petrol costs real money in part because a U.S. dollar has to be bought in order to buy the oil that is always priced in petro-dollars.
Given that people do suicide themselves by connecting some hosepipe from the exhaust to the interior of a car I am actually surprised that there are not rules regarding CO detectors already. CO can not just kill the occupants, you could have a big pile-up on a motorway due to CO poisoning. This happened a few times with police cars last year and 3/4 of all CO deaths are due to vehicles, not central heating or other sources.
> the rest of the world, where petrol costs real money in part because a U.S. dollar has to be bought in order to buy the oil that is always priced in petro-dollars.
This contributes nothing to European gas prices. You can convert all the dollars you want with fees of 1% or less. European gas costs more than double the price of American gas. You're paying high prices because your gas is taxed heavily, not because oil is denominated in dollars.
There are many stories, Google 'carbon monoxide police ford explorer' to start. Holes drilled in the vehicle for the flashing lights and other accessories were given as the cause in those police incidents, of which I think there were a few.
A City Car Share used to park behind my house and I had to call the company a half dozen times because someone left the keyless hybrid running after they dropped it off. I had them unlock it so I could turn it just so there wasn't a running car next to my back yard. This was exasperated by people who weren't familiar with the car but it was a real enough problem that I knew to listen for it.
I learned to drive in a manual transmission truck made in 1987, with a clutch interlock. But I bought an '87 car with a manual transmission last year, and to my surprise, it doesn't have a clutch interlock. So I have inadvertently started it in gear once or twice.
As it happens, I also have a 2016 car with a manual transmission and it is keyless - I haven't had any problems with it.
I assume people start their cars to warm the cabin. I expect there are much more efficient ways to warm the cabin than using excess heat from an internal combustion engine under the hood. Perhaps the solution is to provide a way to warm the cabin (including seats and steering wheel) very rapidly when the car starts, or provide a way to warm the cabin without starting the engine.
The latter solution requires an energy source. Perhaps a hybrid car's batteries are it - not an option until recently, but hybrids are now relatively common - and the energy could be used efficiently: Ambient air heaters, of course; plus heaters directly in seats and steering wheel to warm them more efficiently than the ambient air would; plus of course sensors to shut down heaters when things are sufficiently warm.
OT: Did the NY Times change their layout recently? For the first time, IMHO, it's gone from functional to appealing.
This was one thing I really liked about driving an electric car in the winter - you can start the heater remotely through the app. Since it's an electric heater it warms up way faster than ICE. If it's plugged in, it will not even drain the battery.
My old diesel car had an electric heater for the cabin. (The engine just didn't produce enough waste heat, I assume. In winter, the bonnet would still be icy after a 20 minute drive.) Such a great feature! The heater didn't start until the engine was running, or anything clever - it was a late 90s design, so nothing fancy - but you'd still get noticeably hot air within 2 minutes of setting off, and, with controls set appropriately, the cabin would become uncomfortably hot and dry, like a sauna, after about 5 minutes.
I've got a petrol car now, a later model of the same line, and the designers clearly decided that there was no need for any trickery, and they could just use the heat from the engine. Big mistake! It's absolutely rubbish by comparison.
Lexus is noted in the article as being one of the problematic cars, but mine beeps fairly insistently if you get out of the car with the keys with the ignition still on. I get that people are mentally on autopilot sometimes--I certainly am often--but I feel like what it does already should be enough to snap you out of it.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. I think it's unreasonable to count on computers to warn and protect us about every possible mistake people might make.
Isn't one of the major benefits of computer automation that such adjustments (e.g. adding a safety feature that uses existing hardware) can be made with little cost/effort? If a few lines of code will save 2 lives a year, is it worth it?
I get where you're coming from and you ask a very interesting question: where do we draw the line? I think a good place to draw it is after we've eliminated accidental fatalities.
I wonder how many deaths there are per year due to remote start. A kid (or another key in your pocket) presses one button on the dongle twice, and the whole household dies.
Something does not add up in this article unless I am missing something. So safety features such as alert tone if engine kept on running for some time might be missed by older people who might have difficulty to hear but I assume that if a home has a garage to park the car then it should have and usually has a Carbon Monoxide alarm inside the house as well. Would not it start making loud alert noise when CO is increased at harmful levels?
Florida (where at least one of these deaths occurred) only recently began requiring CO detectors and only for new construction.
Requires that every building for which a building permit is issued for new construction on or after July 1, 2008, and having a fossil-fuel-burning heater or appliance, a fireplace, or an attached garage shall have an approved operational carbon monoxide alarm installed within 10 feet of each room used for sleeping purposes.
I think this is actually a stronger argument for sealing the garage off from the house, detached if possible. There are any number of bad things being stored in many garages that make it useful to seal your garage well away from the house.
Pretty easily solved with a $15 carbon monoxide detector. They are required by rental codes around here, and are just a plain good idea. Unlike smoke detectors they rarely fault out due to smoke from toasters/etc.
Keyless ignition over complicates the solution to a simple problem. I’ve never liked them on those grounds alone, and I hadn’t even considered the risks for injury. Then again I’ve always felt that more bells and whistles on a car are just more opportunities for breakage and repairs.
Most keyless systems have a physical key backup in case stuff fails. So if the system breaks you're no worse off than a car that has a physical key. Also, in my experience, keyless systems are pretty reliable, I've never had one fail on me or anyone in my family.
I also really like the convenience they provide in being able to lock, unlock, and start my car without needing to take anything out of my pocket. If I can help it, I'll never buy another car without a keyless system.
Let's talk about real killers, which kill far more. https://on.cc.com/1hCMleQ. Falling Coconuts kill dozens of times more people but no one is seriously looking at active countermeasures.
I've forgotten to leave with the keys, several times. Not so bad at work, which is in an office lot in suburban sleepytown, but kind of scary when I get back from paying a social call in a higher-petty-crime area like the Mission district.
While tragic, I don't want my government protecting me from myself. I mean, where does this end? What about leaving the stove on? What about using my barbecue indoors?
There have been cases where government intervention to help may have actually been worse than that original problem, such as the rise in cases of forgetting children in rear seats on warm days after laws were written forbidding car seats in the front where parents find it harder to forget their child.
Moral of the story, never run a car inside the garage with the door closed and always have CO detectors throughout the house. Nest probably saved my life that night from my own mistake.
If we want a more general solution, we should look beyond the keyless fob and just make CO detectors a requirement. You don’t need fancy ones like Nest. Cheaper ones that cost 20 dollars still works.