Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll • Hacker News Board

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#231

Post by nkrisc » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:01 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #211

dx034 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I know a lot of people who start their engine while waiting for the garage door to open.

The car's going to make a very small amount of CO in those fifteen seconds. If you take 'never' as 100% absolute then it's going to really distort your numbers, if your goal is counting how many people aren't aware of and safe around the danger.

The reason these sort of rules are absolute "never" are not because you'll end up with dangerous amounts of CO in 10 seconds, but because it makes it a simple rule to follow. Is 10 seconds OK? 15? 30? When does it stop being OK? Following an absolute rule eliminates much of the grey area where mistakes are made.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#232

Post by mavhc » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:06 PM UTC

CharlesMerriam2 wrote: post #142

Let's talk about real killers, which kill far more. https://on.cc.com/1hCMleQ . Falling Coconuts kill dozens of times more people but no one is seriously looking at active countermeasures.

Not sleeping under coconut trees?

Vehicles kill 3000 people a day, that's before the pollution they cause.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#233

Post by tzakrajs » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:21 PM UTC

TheForumTroll wrote: post #42

tzakrajs wrote: post #5

My 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.

That is a good thing since some newer Fords leak CO into the interior. I'm sure they wouldn't have added it if they could've gotten away with doing nothing.

Thank you for the tip! I am going to do research into my Taurus to see if it is affected.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#234

Post by luma » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:23 PM UTC

tadfisher wrote: post #65

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…

Yep, that's my rule even with properly-running engines: The car won't start until the garage door is open. If I could hack up some sort of ignition interlock such that an Arduino or Pi could broadcast a killswitch signal while the garage door is closed, I could more effectively enforce that rule.

I built a quick project to address this from the other direction: https://github.com/aderusha/MQTTCarPresence

If the car is turned on and in range of your home WiFi, it makes sure the door is open. This is mostly a convenience thing (when I leave home in the morning, it opens the door when I start the car and closes it after I leave, same process returning home) but it also address the concerns floated in the article.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#235

Post by RankingMember » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:24 PM UTC

wycy wrote: post #209

Lexus is noted in the article as being one of the problematic cars, but mine beeps fairly insistently if you get out of the car with the keys with the ignition still on. I get that people are mentally on autopilot sometimes--I certainly am often--but I feel like what it does already should be enough to snap you out of it. The line has to be drawn somewhere. I think it's unreasonable to count on computers to warn and…

Isn't one of the major benefits of computer automation that such adjustments (e.g. adding a safety feature that uses existing hardware) can be made with little cost/effort? If a few lines of code will save 2 lives a year, is it worth it?

I get where you're coming from and you ask a very interesting question: where do we draw the line? I think a good place to draw it is after we've eliminated accidental fatalities.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#236

Post by EADGBE » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:24 PM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #169

jessaustin wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

> 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…

Welcome to the internet, where opinions and guess-timates are spewed as fact behind a veil of anonymity.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#237

Post by throwawayts » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:25 PM UTC

ddnb wrote: post #191

eertami wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By forget you mean you opened the door and instantly realised your mistake because of the alarm it triggered?

Wait, you can't open your door with keyless cars? What about in winter when your car is running to heat up and you get out to clear your windscreen?

Yeah you can, but while the door is open, the car will (in my experience with 4 different brands of keyless cars in Europe) sound an alarm to remind you it is still running.

I think this is a good thing.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#238

Post by EADGBE » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:25 PM UTC

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…

They're quite a nice feature for areas which contain "seasons".

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#239

Post by monkeynotes » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

205guy wrote: post #205

Another issue negated by electric cars. No burning fossil fuels, no carbon monoxide in my garage. Ironic that the only mention of EVs in this thread was about how Teslas turn themselves off and lock automatically. It's like everyone is complaining about having to do wiring at colos and some techs getting accidentally electrocuted, while I spin up another instance on AWS. BTW, my two Nissan Leaf EVs have the a keyless…

I'm still unsure how a country could switch from gas to EV. Could a city keep up with the power demands when everyone plugs in their EVs at night? I am assuming we'd have to build more power generation capacity, and what is the source? How do you transmit all the high capacity power to quick charge stations on the highway when you have 200+ cars an hour needing to quick charge?

It all sounds like an enormous infrastructure upgrade. Europe is already committing to EV and outlawing gas engines in the next 10-20 years so it will be interesting to learn how they plan to accommodate the huge electricity generation and transmission demands that go with that.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#240

Post by schiffern » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:34 PM UTC

>Toyota models, including Lexus, have figured in almost half of the carbon monoxide fatalities and injuries identified by The Times. Toyota says its keyless ignition system “meets or exceeds all relevant federal safety standards.”

That's quite significant, and I wonder why that is?

I have a hypothesis:

Personally I've had problems with Toyotas (specifically, Prius GenIII and Camry XV50) where trying to shut off the car too fast, eg using "muscle memory," results in the car not shutting off.

At first glance (and according to the manual), the steps to shutting off the Prius / Camry appear to be:

1. Shift the car into Park.

2. Press the ignition button.

3. Exit the vehicle.

Simple, right?

Well, it's not. If you don't wait ~1 second between step 1 and step 2, the car has a race condition where it doesn't realize that you already put it in Park, so it displays a "Shift to Park" message and fails to shut down. To fix, you have to shift the car into Reverse (or really, Anything-But-Park), shift it back into Park, and press the button again.

This sequence is extremely confusing, especially if you don't notice the error message. Neither conventional shifters nor conventional key-based ignitions make you wait -- when you put it in gear, it's in gear!

Toyota's system has hidden state that's related, but separate from the physical movements of the shift lever and the start button (unlike a conventional key and shifter).

So if you want to reliably shut off the car, here are the actual steps to shutting down a Prius / Camry:

1. Shift the car into Park.

2. Wait a beat (for the vehicle to realize it's in Park).

3. Press the ignition button.

4. Exit the vehicle.

The proper way for Toyota to do it would have been to buffer the inputs in order, so the same sequence of actions always results in the same result, and the mere act of speeding up one's muscle memory doesn't result in unexpected operation (ie, acting just like the old, more-easily-predictable physical controls).