My wife and I gave our old car to her parents. In the subsequent years, its battery kept dying and we had to go over to their place and jump it. Never happened in the prior 7 years we'd owned the car. The mechanic said nothing wrong with the battery, but suggested there might be a parasitic drain somewhere. A few days later, we were visiting them. I looked at the car and saw the door closed, but not properly latched…
My car beeps loudly and angrily at me if the doors are not 100% closed when I hit the close button on the fob.
My father (a professional auto mechanic) took about 6 months to find a random engine shutoff during harder cornering in his Toyota, the culprit was a damaged inner insulation layer for a few wires within the wrapped wiring harness for the ECU, engine moving on the engine mounts would sometimes cause a slight harness shift and a short would cause a hard reset of the ECU. Another story I have is my computer geek friend…
That's a nightmare and sounds like a really bad software bug... I have one like this even as we speak.
My wife, bless her heart, leaves everything partially open. Not even just open, but she'll screw the lid on jars just enough where if I pick it up by the top they'll drop. It drives me crazy.
My flatmate does this with kitchen cupboard doors, and, most annoyingly, the microwave. She'll open the microwave to stop it, takes her food out and, just ... leaves it open. Then when I close it later it will start up again with nothing inside. Arrrgh!
IMO a good thing, lets them ventilate better. Not cancelling the timer is the wrong thing there.
I've met a lot of women who do stuff like this... I asked one why and she told me it's because they don't want to be a bother. Fully closing the door makes noise, screwing on lids can make it hard for people to open them later. So they don't. They close it just enough and leave the object in that almost there state.
I think this is more an anecdote than anything else. My wife leaves all sorts of stuff open, and it's really because she's not paying attention, i.e. most of the time she's not fully present. I'm glad to have read this, it gives me a little comfort to see that other people deal with same issues. Sometimes I just close the door for her when she's in the restroom. I feel like a lot of these habits come from having live…
My wife leaves the toilet door open when she's in there, which annoys me. One day I asked her why and she told me she used to do it deliberately when the children were little so she could hear what they were up to, and talk to them if they needed it. It's now just a habit. Makes sense now I know.
At a guess it has something to do with needing to withstand 70+ mph winds. There needs to be considerable force holding the door against its seals at all times, and in a mechanical latching system this force must come from a spring, which must be charged with energy via a good slam. However there are minivans with electronically operated sliding doors, which either power the latch allowing you to gently close the doo…
It's not about wind pressure. It's that the door when properly closed becomes an integral, load-bearing part of the car's structure. In the event of a crash or rollover, an incompletely-closed door makes the car much weaker and less protective of the occupants.
It's about wind pressure only for doors that have the hinge at the back (I think those also have safety systems that prevent them from being opened while the car is moving). For the more common ones that have the hinge at the front, wind pressure will actually keep the door closed.
My wife and I gave our old car to her parents. In the subsequent years, its battery kept dying and we had to go over to their place and jump it. Never happened in the prior 7 years we'd owned the car. The mechanic said nothing wrong with the battery, but suggested there might be a parasitic drain somewhere. A few days later, we were visiting them. I looked at the car and saw the door closed, but not properly latched…
My car beeps loudly and angrily at me if the doors are not 100% closed when I hit the close button on the fob.
Mine auto locks/unlocks, and will message me as I leave it if I left it ajar.
A common reason for this (no idea on this specific case) is that the backup battery on the alarm (NiCd) is old/failed. The alarm system then keeps trying to charge it, hence the high (and possibly intermittent) drain.
Tangent, but what's the rationale for car doors requiring slams? They are the only door I know, at least in common, daily life contexts, that require slamming them with the force of Thor to properly close them.
They rarely require a slam. You can soft-close the door, then lean on the outer edge enough to engage the latch. Often, the door just isn't aligned correctly. Either it's sagged on it's hinges over time, or the latch itself needs a minor alignment/adjustment (Note that even on a lot of new cars, this still helps a lot! Not all manufacturing is perfect). Other times the rubbers can be hard and perished and it doesn't…