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?
Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
151–160 of 303 posts
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#152Why 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.
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"
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#153Why 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.
It's likely in case of key detection failure, and considered safer to keep the engine running when the car is empty than cutting out when in motion.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#154Why 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. That could cause some seri…
Brakes usually work fine for 5 minutes after you switch the engine off. At least they do in my car.
Seems like an easier solution would be to turn off the car if it hasn't moved for 10 minutes.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#155If 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.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#156This 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…
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?
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#157Something 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 increa…
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.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
By forget you mean you opened the door and instantly realised your mistake because of the alarm it triggered?
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#159This 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…
> 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.
Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sentence following the one you quote says: "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…
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).