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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

#281

Post by schiffern »

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

>Are you saying it's impossible to shut off the car while not in park?

Yes! The vehicle faithfully ignores you when you press the Start button, beeps softly, and displays a message: "SHIFT TO P POSITION."[2]

As I said, in my experience there's a ~1s delay between shifting to Park and being permitted to turn the car off. You get the same error message, but it's already in Park. The result? Performing the same sequence of actions at a different speed results in a very different outcome. And the Park button (yes I know) is very close to the Start button, so it's easy to perform the two actions in quick succession. Classic race condition.

Btw, you can't just press Start again. Even though it's now "in Park." It's in some strange, poorly defined, in-between state, not Park but not Not-Park. To recover, you have to press the Park button again, and then press the Start button again. From a software perspective, this makes me uneasy.

It would be easy to miss such the subtle cues indicating an error (soft beep/message/IC doesn't down). Especially for older people who are hard of hearing, and just pulled into the garage from a sunny drive (bright pupil adaptation takes longer to dilate for older people).

From the Prius GenIII manual[1], pp549

> * Stopping the hybrid system

>Set the parking brake, shift the shift position to P and press the “POWER” switch as you normally do when stopping the hybrid system.

Setting the parking brake is optional, but shifting to Park is not.

There's also a confusing chart with all the warning messages that should explain this behavior, but doesn't. It's on pp525, and it seems to have evidence of incomplete revision:

>The driver’s door has been opened with the shift position in a position other than P and without first turning the “POWER” switch is OFF.

There is no power switch, just a button, and the grammar is wrong. Hmmm...

Curiouser and curiouser.

[1] https://priuschat.com/threads/2012-2015-prius-owners-manual-...

[2] Btw, googling for "shift to P position" indicates that both Hyundai and Kia have this interlock. Whether they're subject to the same race condition is unknown.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#282

Post by skellera »

NeutronStar wrote: post #250
y4mi wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while also depleting the battery's lifespan. sounds like a perfect opportunity to get careless car owners to destroy their own property for a company's revenue. especially hilarious if the car owner doesn't use an expensive UPS between the grid and the car. I'm sure the next lightning storm isn't too far off - and some of the plugged in cars won't survive it. I'm not against EV though. There'll however be a lot of gr…

Look at the batteries lifespan, it's like 25 years. Go look at data before spewing nonsense.

You can correct someone while being civil. We don’t need people being jerks to each other.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#283

Post by pwinnski »

pwinnski wrote: post #271
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.

I checked. Indeed, pressing the power-off button shifts my 2014 Prius into park while also powering off.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#284

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #67
schiffern wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A $10 detector would have probably saved the gentleman's life. True, but making the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring the $5 sensor in that $10 detector in every vehicle equipped with keyless start (or perhaps, every vehicle) would lead to nearly 100% deployment as the vehicle fleet is replaced. By comparison, despite decades of passing laws and funding public education campaigns, only 33% of househol…

Note that the scarily high 40% failure is heavily biased by people keeping units long past their design lifespan. If you have a 5 year old Carbon Monoxide detector, buy a new one. The failures prior to 5 years in that test are disturbing, but they're not statistically significant on their own so it's hard to be sure how serious that would be in practice.

[deleted]

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#285

Post by schiffern »

pwinnski wrote: post #283
pwinnski wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I checked. Indeed, pressing the power-off button shifts my 2014 Prius into park while also powering off.

It was a 2010 Prius, but I don't have it anymore.

Just checked, and the Camry doesn't do it. My mistake.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#286

Post by olyjohn »

dx034 wrote: post #184
hanbura wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

Isn't keeping a car running with children inside incredibly dangerous? What if they release the breaks or shift to drive? I'd think taking the child with you should be safer than leaving them in a running car. For animals that's different of course. But wouldn't an override be enough?

When I was a kid, I was at my babysitter's house waiting to be picked up by my parents. Another kid's parent showed up, parked her car, and put one of her kids in the front seat. Her other kid ran in the house, and she ran after him. The first kid let the e-brake off, and the car went rolling down the driveway and hit a tree. It didn't roll very fast, so there was no damage and nobody was hurt. But the mom was freaked out as she came back out 10 seconds later and saw the car rolling away...

This was in the late 80s. The car wasn't running. It was a mechanical e-brake. I know a lot of cars have electronic parking brakes now, but most probably still don't.

On another note, I can't think of a single car that will let you take it out of Park without a foot on the brake, or without using an override.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#287

Post by refurb »

hangonhn wrote: post #268
refurb wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say you took a pretty big risk running a car for 5 minutes in a closed space. I've started a car briefly in a closed garage, but we're talking for maybe 10-15 seconds (post oil-change in the winter). Even then I started to wonder if I was taking too big a risk. 5 minutes is a long time!

Yeah I didn't know better and was lulled into a false sense of security. For a couple of years, I always started my car first and opened the garage door and always shut the car off after the door came down. Why? Because my car's built-in garage door opener doesn't work with the car off. This hasn't been an issue for a long time and after a while I figured "a few minutes is okay". Also, I didn't grow up in a place wit…

Doing rough math -

A 2L engine uses 1L of air every cycle. At 1000 rpm, that's 500L (or .5 m^3) of air every minute.

A single car garage is 4m x 2m x 3m or 24 m^3. Running the car for 5 minutes just exchanged ~10% of the air for exhaust.

I'm sure my math is wrong somewhere and someone will come by to mention it's the CO concentration, not the % of air consumed (which is true), but it's interesting math none the less.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#288

Post by intopieces »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #216
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?

The pennies per vehicle line confuses me, honestly. Building it in to a car should cost zero cents, since it's just a config change, and apparently a retrofit is in the realm of $5. Where do pennies come in?

A config changes requires someone to design the configuration, right? That's at least x hours of coding, testing, and final validation. Nothing is 'free'.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#289

Post by PhasmaFelis »

jessaustin wrote: post #277
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So all of your arguments about attached garages are actually about poorly designed attached garages?

You could have saved a lot of time if you'd said that in the first place.

Re: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

#290

Post by Dylan16807 »

intopieces wrote: post #288
Dylan16807 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pennies per vehicle line confuses me, honestly. Building it in to a car should cost zero cents, since it's just a config change, and apparently a retrofit is in the realm of $5. Where do pennies come in?

A config changes requires someone to design the configuration, right? That's at least x hours of coding, testing, and final validation. Nothing is 'free'.

Config A takes coding, testing, and validation. Config B also takes coding, testing, and validation. Neither one costs more than the alternative.
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