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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

#171

Post by hanbura »

otherme33 wrote: post #163
justin66 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#172

Post by mritun »

mayniac wrote: post #55
lisper wrote: post #19

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#173

Post by notahacker »

rdiddly wrote: post #77
notahacker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#174

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

chemmail wrote: post #104
pmoriarty wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#175

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

otherme33 wrote: post #160
chemmail wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#176

Post by hanbura »

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.

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

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#177

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

twblalock wrote: post #90

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.

...and test them regularly!

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#178

Post by undergrowth54 »

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.

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.

And where would everyone park?

/s

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#179

Post by itsZero »

otherme33 wrote: post #163
justin66 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#180

Post by Angostura »

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.

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