I'd think this would be more common with remote start.
Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
71–80 of 303 posts
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#72My 2015 Ford automatically shuts off after roughly 15 minutes of being without the key whether you start it from inside or outside of the vehicle.
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.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#73I 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…
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.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Where I live, Santa Cruz, it's against the building code to insulate the garage lest it get converted into an unpermitted extra room.
Speaking from experience here.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#75I 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 mi…
Huh - how about a CO detector on the air intake of the engine that shuts it off if the concentration is too high.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Where I live, Santa Cruz, it's against the building code to insulate the garage lest it get converted into an unpermitted extra room. Speaking from experience here.
That law would have more teeth in Maine.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#7735,000 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?
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 whethe…
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.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#7835,000 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?
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 stri…
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).
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#79This 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 thei…
> CO can not just kill the occupants, you could have a big pile-up on a motorway due to CO poisoning.
Do you have a source for this? I would be interested in reading about it.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#80This 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 veh…
You are asking the wrong question here.
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).