51–60 of 303 posts
I wonder if these vehicles wouldn't benefit from an onboard CO detector? Automatic shutoff if the vehicle is stationary and CO hits a given threshold. There's indubitably a bunch of reasons not to do it that way...
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. :)
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?
Thats 2 per year that were totally avoidable though.
I guess one advantage of driving a manual car is you won't make that mistake after violently stalling your car a few times.
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.
Sounds to me like a big part of the problem is that these cars are too quiet. (I call that a nice problem to have.) My car beeps at me pretty loudly when I get out with the engine running.
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.
I wonder if these vehicles wouldn't benefit from an onboard CO detector? Automatic shutoff if the vehicle is stationary and CO hits a given threshold. There's indubitably a bunch of reasons not to do it that way...
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. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...
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.
[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf, pp14
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222366/
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/199983/us-vehicle-sales-...
I've certainly often forgotten to turn off the Prii [1] I've used. [1] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/02...
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.
I've certainly often forgotten to turn off the Prii [1] I've used. [1] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/02...
The fact that you have to link to that article to justify your use of Prii says a lot about Toyota's marketing. ;) Also, obviously not nearly as dangerous given that it shuts off the engine when it is idle, on or not.
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. Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705990