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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

#271

Post by pwinnski »

schiffern wrote: post #240

>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 c…

Weird. With my 2014 Prius, I pull into a parking spot, brake, and hit the power button. It shifts into Park for me.

At least I think that's what I do. Now I'm doubting myself and will check later today. But I'm pretty sure.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#272

Post by WorldMaker »

monkeynotes wrote: post #239
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 infrastr…

Most nations still have peak demand infrastructure setup for daytime industrial power demand, most of which already requires high capacity delivery. That demand hugely drops off in the evenings as factories shut down for the day and workers return home.

Most new EV power demand happens in the evenings, "filling in the bathtub" (because the average demand graph looks like a bathtub) that the industrial demand curve leaves behind. The difference between industrial (daytime/peak) and consumer (evening/off-peak) demands is a big enough bathtub that estimates are that it would be a while before EV cars get even close to filling in the bathtub.

One estimate I saw was that if every car on the road switched to an EV car tomorrow and charged only at off-peak times, it would almost fill the bathtub, and thus require no actual generation increase.

That doesn't deal with the infrastructure chicken-and-egg issues of street-level and parking structure access to car charging, of course.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#274

Post by pwinnski »

sokoloff wrote: post #261
dx034 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alarm would still be fine though? Maybe with an option to deactivate it. I'd want to know when the key gets removed from the car, not having any notification appears wrong.

Mine gives an alarm when you take the key out of the car already. "key not detected" or some such.

My car displays something on the screen, but I don't recall it making a noise.

I've left the car running while stepping into a store because someone was in the passenger seat. If I get too far, my bluetooth music stops, but the air-conditioning keeps going without the key.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#275

Post by pwinnski »

ygra wrote: post #194
kss238 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Forbidden how?

I'm not sure why remote-start exists if it's forbidden to use it.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#276

Post by singingboyo »

mrguyorama wrote: post #270
schiffern wrote: post #240

>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 c…

Are you saying it's impossible to shut off the car while not in park? I find that odd, and will certainly have to try it on my mother's Toyota when I get the chance

Yeah, that seems odd to me. I drive a Nissan, not a Toyota, but it will shut off if I hit the button before going into park, then beep like there's no tomorrow until it's in park.

Though it occurs to me that the old Dodge Caravan I drove before may have required being in park to turn off, though it used the key for ignition, so that made sense.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#277

Post by jessaustin »

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…

No, I've lived in, remodeled, repaired, and torn down houses with attached garages. It's possible to build them so that the house in general will have problems before the garage starts causing its own problems. It's common not to build them so.

Also I never had an attached garage when I lived in Boston, Denver, and in the Colorado Rockies, so I'm not so sympathetic to this "oh, it's cold!" argument.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#278

Post by romwell »

chrismcb wrote: post #129
romwell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

>Stopping the engine when one exits the car is NOT consistent ...

Attention to details: stopping the engine when one exits the car with the fob is consistent with what happens when you exit the car with the key you used to start it.

Before, you had to remove the key.

Now, you have to remove the keyfob and press the off button.

That is not consistent.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#279

Post by IshKebab »

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?

30 minutes seems a little extreme. I guess it would sensibly turn itself off.

If you really want that you could have a special "warming" mode.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#280

Post by tomatotomato37 »

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…

Some more math, adding a 1 cent component (not counting one time costs of R&D and tooling) to every new car sold in the u.s. (~17.5 million) would equal out to 175,000; which equates to a spending of $87500 per death prevented, a reasonable amount.

On a counterpoint, 15 times more people die from lightning strikes per year than this, so are kinda going after extreme edge cases here

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