211–220 of 303 posts
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>> never run a car inside the garage with the door closed Are you implying this is not common knowledge?
Yes. I know a lot of people who start their engine while waiting for the garage door to open.
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Or just turn the car off after eg 20-30 minutes of idling?
For modern cars, I think that's what's happening actually - engines will power off when stationary and not in gear, but the car is still on and the engine will restart when it's running low on battery power. Thus, people leaving their car in the garage thinking it's off.
That’s what doesn’t make a lot of sense here before we dash off to design some sort of countermeasure - there’s either an engine running (and “modern” engines aren’t that quiet, especially in a confined space), or there should be some loud visual/auditory warning. I guess it’s possible the victims didn’t hear either?
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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.
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…
Huh - how about a CO detector on the air intake of the engine that shuts it off if the concentration is too high.
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Huh - how about a CO detector on the air intake of the engine that shuts it off if the concentration is too high.
Ever seen a video of people having to drive through a wildfire to escape?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTQvIdG-Vo
The craziness starts about 30 seconds in.
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…
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?
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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…
If lightning strikes would really only kill two people a year and not cause property damage, we should not be adding lightning rods to buildings. That's probably fewer than the number of people who die while fitting lightning rods.
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Have you never turned your car on before you left to heat up the passenger compartment?
Uhm, apart from the fact that it's actually forbidden, no. Idle takes ages to warm up the engine, it's better to just start driving.
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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.
Any time someone says a huge class of deaths is totally avoidable, take it with a mountain of salt. It's a useless idea, completely disconnected from the useful realm of risk management.
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Why not just start an alarm 10 seconds after the key is out of range? Or automatically shut off the engine if the key has been out of range for more than 5 minutes. That still prevents accidents while driving (there were cases where children threw keys out of the window) but should be safe otherwise. And programming that timer shouldn't be a lot of work. The detection already exists anyway.
The cars need to work when the key battery is dead. My LEAF has an inductive charger near the start button that allows you to "charge" the key just enough to do the security exchange and then start it. It's quite possible, even likely, that more than 2 people per year would die from environmental exposure if we programmed cars to not work if the key battery dies (as a proxy for "key out of range"). (Drive out to a de…