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Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

nytimes.com

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Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#161

Post by kss238 »

IshKebab wrote: post #156
intopieces wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So what happens in winter when I go turn my car on thirty minutes before I leave to make sure it's nice and warm?

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#162

Post by kss238 »

justin66 wrote: post #130
rpcope1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mec…

> 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.

Have you never turned your car on before you left to heat up the passenger compartment?

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#163

Post by otherme33 »

justin66 wrote: post #130
rpcope1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mec…

> 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.

"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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#164

Post by jablan »

megy wrote: post #53
Qwertie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats 2 per year that were totally avoidable though.

All of them are totally avoidable, except a lot of people thought it was a good idea to increase out reliance on cars.

Not sure why are you downvoted this much, this is such an obvious case of elephant in the room.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#165

Post by zaarn »

justin66 wrote: post #130
rpcope1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mec…

> 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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#166

Post by mseebach »

romwell wrote: post #80
helloworld wrote: post #3

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 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 fo…

> 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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#167

Post by PhasmaFelis »

kss238 wrote: post #161
IshKebab wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So what happens in winter when I go turn my car on thirty minutes before I leave to make sure it's nice and warm?

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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#168

Post by ghaff »

eertami wrote: post #158
ghaff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m not sure that’s universal behavior. It’s not my recollection and I’ve seen material online suggesting only some cars do this.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#169

Post by PhasmaFelis »

jessaustin wrote: post #69
hangonhn wrote: post #48

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 mi…

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…

> 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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#170

Post by aequitas »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #135
lordnacho wrote: post #133

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.

Same, and exactly; the car should just shut down when it detects the key is not inside the car. Could someone just get in and drive off? I'm fairly sure this might be true for older models though.

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.
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