Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Moral of the story, never run a car inside the garage with the door closed and always have CO detectors throughout the house. Nest probably saved my life that night from my own mistake.
If we want a more general solution, we should look beyond the keyless fob and just make CO detectors a requirement. You don’t need fancy ones like Nest. Cheaper ones that cost 20 dollars still works.
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.
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.
Speaking from experience here.
Also, as of 2011-ish, CO detectors are required by law in CA if you have an attached garage, a fireplace, or gas heat.
Secondly, it's about a 50/50 chance in our neighborhood that the garage will be used to store vehicles. The other half of the time I've seen garages used for general storage, or for a workshop of some kind (my girlfriend has a ton of wood working equipment in the garage).
...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 think garage doors open directly onto the living room.
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.
You could have saved a lot of time if you'd said that in the first place.
Even harder to get right (and very likely to increase the current, extremely low accidental CO death toll), it definitely shouldn’t trip if the car is stuck in stop-and-go traffic in a tunnel full of idling cars.
And if the car has not moved in say, 15 minutes, then shut it off (but allow it to be restarted - no lockout).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTQvIdG-Vo
The craziness starts about 30 seconds in.
Are you implying this is not common knowledge?
No plan is perfect. But opening the door a few seconds before is essentially equal in danger to opening it a few seconds after.
I grew up in Florida's coastal area where houses are built on stilts (this is to spare the house in case of hurricanes and flooding). People live upstairs and the downstairs areas are largely empty. The empty space underneath the house is where people park their cars. This means when I was growing up and learning how to drive garages aren't a thing. No one told me about running a car in a garage. Later on, all the places I lived in did not have garages either. It's only in the last few years that I actually had a garage.
Did I know about running cars in a garage is a bad idea? I had a vague notion from pop culture and stories of people gassing themselves as a form of suicide (hello "Office Space"!). I had no idea how long is "too long".
More over, I've been parking my car inside the garage and then shutting the car off as my garage door comes down or slightly after (I sort of have to because the car's built-in garage door opener doesn't work when the car is off). I did this for a couple of years and nothing has happened. This lulled me into a false sense of security.
Maybe this is a more ingrained into the majority of people's heads because they grew up with garages but that's never the case where I grew up.
5 minutes is a long time!
Dumb for sure but thankfully I did know enough about gas water heaters and gas stoves to have CO detectors installed throughout my house.
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.
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 vehicles.[1] These accidental deaths are tragic, but it's actually impressive how infrequently they occur.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...
"Dozens of others have been injured, some left with brain damage."
So deaths are not the whole story.
While one is certainly far more likely to die in a automobile collision, of heart disease, or cancer, I don't think it helps anyone to ignore the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Incidentally, other sources of carbon monoxide can also exist in the home, so it's a good idea to have a carbon monoxide detector there. Perhaps cars too can be outfitted with them.
[1] https://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Someone-drowns-in...
I guess that sort of death goes under the “drowning” category, since the bath mitigation can kill shower-takers.
How could it be? Do you plug your drain when you shower? Are the investigators in your area too lazy to find head trauma?
Sometimes I have a slow drain and I don't fix the until it becomes slow enough to fill up substantially during my shower. If I were unconscious in the sub with the shower running, it could have enough time to fill up. This would be especially true if my fall caused the water to switch to tub mode, which sends a lot more water into the tub.
I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
> I had a friend in college who liked to take showers while pass-out drunk. He flooded the adjoining rooms several times when his unconscious body blocked the drain. Luckily this shower was not a tub or he may not have survived these incidents.
Jesus Christ, I wouldn't know about college, but that seem crazy. I hope your friend got the help he needed.
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 device", you have to use it like it or not.
Old people have the mental muscle to think "I have the car keys with me, therefore the engine is off" built after decades. It's a serious design flaw to not offer at least an opt-out for these people (like key not IN the car, engine shuts off).
In colder climates (e.g., further North in this State), people may leave diesel vehicles idling for hours while at work, etc., because it can be so difficult to restart them outdoors in the cold.
There's a reason people start their cars and leave them running for a while.
The deaths and injuries are utterly avoidable with decent design. Also, this is a feature that isn't prominent yet. The number of deaths is only going to get higher until the cars are built to turn the engine off under the right conditions.
I assume implicit to this statement, is that some heuristic algorithm needs to be created to turn the car off. This seems like a grossly over-complicated (and failure prone) solution in comparison to just using a key for the ignition instead. If you can do something easily with a strictly mechanical simple solution, why reinvent the wheel?
If you say so. I'm pretty sure just turning the car off if there's nobody sitting in any of the seats and the key is not in the car would be a good start.
I'm not sure why remote-start exists if it's forbidden to use it.
With the remote start system I have a passing familiarity with, if you remotely start the car and warm it up with no person and no key in the car, the car automatically shuts off fifteen minutes after it has started if someone doesn't get in with a key. Seems to be compatible the simple guidelines I mentioned.
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 key is just one of many things in your pockets.
For animals that's different of course. But wouldn't an override be enough?
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.
It also breaks the backup mechanism for no-battery situation where you can tap the fob on where the ignition lock would be for key cars to start it up.
* Rising Carbonmonoxide levels * No weight on driver seat for 3 minutes * No driving activity for 3 minutes
The first factor alone should already prompt a shutdown though. It wouldn't even matter if the key was in the car, that might happen by accident and isn't a terribly good indicator.
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 deserted location, shut down, enjoy the day, get back in to find a dead car key battery. You want to be able to get home rather than stay at the trailhead.)
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.
The incident rate per keyless vehicle is likely an order, possibly two, of magnitude higher.
The net befit is also minimal, so if they became popular you would expect a ~hundred deaths per year for what? Do save 20$ per car because they lack CO detectors?
I suspect keyless entry systems have prevented multiple deaths of children in parking lots, but there’s no way to track that.
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?
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 fob should be the default, as it is consistent with the old, physical key behavior - and will prevent someone from driving off with your car while you have the key (as happened to someone in the thread).
The great thing about the free market is that information spurs innovation. News stories like these make consumers aware of risks they couldn't recognize before. Now we, as informed buyers, can seek out these safety features in the products we buy.
The bottom line calculation should be total $ / death prevented. And then compare that to any of the myriad other changes or improvements possible. Like the early warning crash systems (more expensive, but probably more lives saved). Or more airbags. Or backup cameras (to prevent people getting run over). Or drowsy/alertness sensors. Or more $$ for self-driving tech that could take over if a driver becomes incapacitated (long shot and long-term but huge payoff).
One other point on the auto-shutoff is that this could lead to the deaths of children in overheated cars where the parents had no clue the car would turn off by itself. The car should either turn off immediately or not at all, imo.
Finally, why not install CO detectors on the cars and shutoff the car then? It couldn't be too sensitive, but surely could tell the difference between an enclosed space and bumper-to-bumper traffic.
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.
Ah, but that's not quite how it works, either. There is a certain, small risk involved with being in the world, we can't offload responsibility for any small accident on to the shoulders of manufacturers. Yes, if you can show negligence, there's a case to be made, but you can't.
If you add a special switch, that increases costs. Why should car buyers bear extra expenses for less than 100 deaths a year?
Should we require special bathtub sensors that beep when they detects still water because hundreds of people drown in bathtubs each year?
Would've saved this guy's life. That's different.
> If you add a special switch, that increases costs. Why should car buyers bear extra expenses for less than 100 deaths a year?
How much do you think a switch costs?
If you told me that, for less than a dollar, I could save 50 lives, I'd do it in an instant. It's weird to me that you wouldn't.
If you really want that you could have a special "warming" mode.
On a counterpoint, 15 times more people die from lightning strikes per year than this, so are kinda going after extreme edge cases here
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).
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.
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.
At least I think that's what I do. Now I'm doubting myself and will check later today. But I'm pretty sure.
Just checked, and the Camry doesn't do it. My mistake.
the number of deaths and injuries per year from carbon monoxide poisoning by car is roughly on par with lightning strikes. we address that particular danger with a relatively straightforward technology, the lightning rod.
so i'd expect the response here would be of similar magnitude (rather than some convoluted rube goldbergian contraption). the auto-shutoff mechanism seems to fit the bill and some cars are already fitted with it.
so all in all, it's worth being aware of this danger and the solution, but not worth spending much more time thinking about it. it's much more fruitful to focus on reducing one's heart disease vectors, cancer risks and distracted driving.
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.
- Be very profitable for people we don't like.
- Employ carpenters building prefab housing in Maine rather than carpenters who live in the city.
- Fail to destroy capitalism.
- Destroy the character of the neighbourhood by casting shadows.
- Let the wrong sort of people into people's neighbourhoods.
And where would everyone park?
/s
Pretty much all of those 35000 deaths involve mistakes, faults or cases of pure bad luck whose individual contribution to fatalities is comparatively small; pretty much all of them get investigated to see what went wrong and whether it's something that's likely to be repeated or something which can be avoided in future without disproportionate cost.
Personally I think there's more value in fixing the dumbshit accessories nobody needs which are a recurring cause of relatively small numbers of injuries and death than focusing on many accidents attributable to discrete random errors and deciding we're all powerless to change a thing, and I think dumbshit accessories nobody needs are a more easily corrected problem than need for motorised transport or humans (and AI) are not infallible. Evidently your mileage varies.
Austin PD put CO detectors in their vehicles and found enough issues to pull them all off the street. http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/14/autos/ford-carbon-monoxide/i...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/01/25/feds-pr...
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 fob thing, and like the ICE cars, they beep if you leave with the car on. It seems like manufacturers just can't come up with a sensible and intuitive way for the keyless fob and car state to interact. Maybe the idea of putting a physical key into the ignition was a better paradigm.
Used to be free to use the phone app to do these things. Better yet GM now will collect data from usage and send it to affiliates.
Now I know other manufactures charge for navigation and such after a trial period but GM is going to charge just to use a phone app to unlock/lock/start your car. They have plans with data that go up to 60 a month
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.
So in places like France or Ontario what will happen is that the cars will automatically charge when rates are low (at night) and may even help the grid by acting as remote batteries. For example, you could keep your car at a 70% minimum charge as a configuration then allow the power grid to pull from you as needed. This would passively reduce your overall power bill as you're selling at peak demand and buying at peak supply.
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 growing pains as they take over the cities. (though thats still far off)
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.
Personally, I think that if there is a transition coming from car ownership to "mobility services", it's going to be a slow one, especially in America where personal vehicle ownership is seen so much as a rite of passage and requisite "freedom".
This extends easily to ICE cars, especially newer ones that can auto-restart from 0 RPM idle. When the car is in Park for more than a few seconds, turn off the engine. When the key goes away, turn the rest of the way off. And get rid of the on/off button: it’s unnecessary and annoying.
My car does this. As soon as it detects the key is not inside the car it will beep and remind you the car is on. The other problem this solves is that you don't want to be driving somewhere without the key either, eg when you're dropping off your wife and she happens to have the key.
I'm fairly sure this might be true for older models though.
Well, you can't have the car shutting off if the key is suddenly not detected. The battery might be low, or the key gets dropped behind some metal. But it does mean that after you've turned it off you are stuck there.
Check out the GM Ignition issues where the cars lose electrical power because the key ignition moves out of the "on" position. The owners own key ring adding additional weight increasing the chance of this happening. This literally created the opposite problem... Keyed ignitions causing accidents.
We are so used to vehicles that it's so easy to forget that they are large and heavy machines. Just driving the car to work every day puts you at risk.
The article reads like... complaining about the rain while a tornado is heading your way.
Anyhow. Don't get me wrong... getting out of your car with your keys should certainly make the car yell at you and then automatically shut itself off after a period of time. With the option for the user to manually turn these things off of course. (I am a firm believer that one should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot if they explicitly go out of their way to make it possible). I am just a bit irritated at the article. :)
A simple, silly, trvially fixable design oversight caused a number of deaths when the product became common enough. The only way to nudge the manufacturers to fix it is by raising awareness, which is what the article does - which would, hopefully, lead to proper regulation.
Additionally, we can only expect the number of accidents like this to rise as the number of newer cars increases. This article is also a PSA.
While a lot of people die in car accidents, I see it as an orthogonal issue. Using your analogy, it's like complaining about floods in TX while there's a tornado in KS heading North.
There's indubitably a bunch of reasons not to do it that way...
But if keyless start isn't available (and gives a warning message) when the ambient CO levels are borderline hazardous ... isn't that a feature, not a bug?
Now that you mention it, it would be nice to get a warning light during driving as well. Or better yet a PPM reading.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...
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 households ("occupied units") having a working CO detectors[1], and 40% of "working" detectors failed to alarm in hazardous levels[2]. So overall, just 20% of households have adequate CO protection.
FTA:
> From news reports, lawsuits, police and fire records and incidents tracked by advocacy groups, The Times has identified 28 deaths and 45 injuries since 2006, but the figures could be higher.
Let's estimate they found 1/3 of all cases, for a total of 56 deaths and 135 injuries. Estimating $6m per statistical life and $3m per injury (some injuries, like brain injuries, can be more than $6m for lifetime medical care and lost productivity, but this estimate is intentionally conservative). That's $61.75m annually, compared to the average of 13,532,750 annual vehicles sold in that time period[3], so about $4.5 of harm reduced per vehicle.
So economically it seems like a wash, and it prevents awful tragedies. Sounds like a good idea to me.
[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf, pp14
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222366/
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/199983/us-vehicle-sales-...
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.
It's a trade-off, like everything else.
That those $5/$10/$50/$100 components add 10x their cost to the vehicle in terms of R&D, testing, supply chain, warrenty claims, etc. All that gets passed down to consumers. Increasing cost increases replacement interval and increases the age of the average vehicle. The result is that incremental progress that improves safety takes longer to trickle down through the market.
I'd recommend having one in the garage if you have a gas water heater. But you should definitely have them in the house no matter what.
Source: Old heater in a caravan broke, bit too much fuel in it during ignition caused a small explosion that blew the chimney (?) pipe off. We got away with a collective headache at least.
No they are not. Most smoke detectors do not have carbon monoxide detection built in. You can buy combination units but you should not assume a smoke detector has carbon monoxide detection just because it’s new. Verify that the unit you purchase provides detection of both of you want both in one.
And replace your detectors if they’re 10 years old (or don’t have a date, in which case they’re way older than 10 years).
The car then automatically wakes up as you approach it. Sit in, put on your seatbelt, and put it into drive to go.
It's certainly VERY easy to leave an internal combustion car running (even a keyed one) if you are used to that!
Found it:
... only to automatically restart 15 minutes later when the engine sensors detect the oil temp is dropping.
- pull up, shift to neutral, engine stops - wait - car worries about battery, restarts engine
to
- pull up, shift to neutral, engine stops - open door and get out - wait - get back in, engage clutch, car tells me I have to manually restart the car
Ah, interesting - I've never tested that, but it would make sense.
Why the car industry would oppose such a minor fix is beyond me. If it does not even hurt the bottom line, why not make that change.
I’m sure there’s others.
If you try and lock the car while it is on (using the keyless entry), it will just produce a continuous audible noise and won’t lock - again pretty hard to miss. The same thing happens if you try and lock a key in the vehicle.
I have a key less ignition car, and if I leave it running... I want it to stay running. With or without the key. However, the audible alert seems like it would be valuable. What about having the Fob vibrate periodically when outside the car and the car is running ?
I have to get a Faraday cage now.
My car beeps at me pretty loudly when I get out with the engine running.
LOL! What kind of car is it?
Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state the car is in? With a key you can reach under the wheel and verify what state the car's in, in under a second. I haven't seen a keyless car system that was anywhere near that intuitive. Engine noise is usually the best indicator but as you've mentioned, cars are quiet now.
With the rental car it took me a good half hour to figure out all the nuances of the keyless ignition. Compare that to seconds, occasionally minutes, of getting used to "normal" cars with keys/fobs.
Glance at the tachometer, if it’s at zero, engine isn’t running.
In California at least, all new homes and all rentals are required to have CO detectors. It seems like that would be a good regulation to have nationwide, which would help with this problem as well as other CO related issues.
At the rate of 2 per 100’s of millions of people per year, these scenarios become plausible.
Maybe that should only be available with the "remote engine start / preheat / precool" option, which would include interior and exterior CO detectors.
It's true you wouldn't want to do it while the car is moving - but the ECU knows if you're moving or not. The rule would instead be "turn off engine if card is out of range, not in gear, stationary for 60 seconds or more, and user hasn't disabled this feature"
That would be very dangerous. For example, think about the following scenario:the co-driver has the key within his pocket, he leaves the car and the driver wants to drive around the corner to find a parking spot. So the driver accelerates and after a few meters the engine would turn off and his breaks would be completely manual.
That could cause some serious accidents.
Seems like an easier solution would be to turn off the car if it hasn't moved for 10 minutes.
Running a car on idle for a long time basically slowly degrades it. It's just sitting there getting hot and wasting gas. Without adequate cooling, the engine will overheat. And if you have multiple catalytic converters, the car can explode from built up gases. Many manuals explicitly state not to idle the car for more than 10-20 minutes.
You don't even need to idle it. Many cars today have automatic engine shut off and start when the car is stopped at a red light. New cars could easily add this to prevent idling.
Now consider the non-technical reasons not to let it idle. One, someone can steal it. Two, it's wasting gas. Three, it's pumping harmful gases into the atmosphere and creating smog. Four, someone could die from carbon monoxide.
The solution is simple. The default should be to turn off the car if the keys are gone after idling for 10 minutes, with an override switch to let it idle for, let's say an hour. After an hour you have to flip the switch again.
Regardless of whether you think this is necessary, there are hundreds of such modifications already that add up to make cars safer and more reliable. You can't switch into or out of park or reverse without depressing the brake. You can't remove the keys without being in park. Your can't operate Bluetooth controls while the car is in motion.
So it's not like these changes are new or difficult. Automakers add them over time as they see the need. But when they don't act, it's up to us to pass legislation to require them.
Do you have a citation for any of this? I think letting an engine idle for extended periods of time does run up the hours on the engine (if you've got the sort of engine where you would even think about adding an hour meter, anyways), but especially if not under a load, I would very, _very_ surprised if you incurred actual damage letting the engine just run. The cooling system on every car I've ever encountered is more the sufficient to keep the engine at the correct operating temperature indefinitely, even if it's real hot out.
Now, obviously I'm not claiming idling your car is going to ruin your engine, cars idle all the time with no problem. It's just not at all what the car was designed to do most of the time, and it will cause undue wear in various conditions over time. At the very least an hour of idle is equivalent to driving 25 miles (according to Ford Fleet) and your gas mileage will be worse.
So the real issue here, is that some cars do not seem to have such an alarm (probably should become mandatory) and that many owners don't know how to properly use their cars. After all, there is a reason why you need a license to drive those things.
Cheap petrol in the USA means that people are in the habit of doing things like starting their car remotely to 'warm up' or 'cool down' before they then have a shower, brekkie and what not before finally getting in their car. Usually the car is on the driveway and not the garage in these scenarios, however, that is something that would not happen in the rest of the world, where petrol costs real money in part because a U.S. dollar has to be bought in order to buy the oil that is always priced in petro-dollars.
Given that people do suicide themselves by connecting some hosepipe from the exhaust to the interior of a car I am actually surprised that there are not rules regarding CO detectors already. CO can not just kill the occupants, you could have a big pile-up on a motorway due to CO poisoning. This happened a few times with police cars last year and 3/4 of all CO deaths are due to vehicles, not central heating or other sources.
Do you have a source for this? I would be interested in reading about it.
This contributes nothing to European gas prices. You can convert all the dollars you want with fees of 1% or less. European gas costs more than double the price of American gas. You're paying high prices because your gas is taxed heavily, not because oil is denominated in dollars.
As it happens, I also have a 2016 car with a manual transmission and it is keyless - I haven't had any problems with it.
The latter solution requires an energy source. Perhaps a hybrid car's batteries are it - not an option until recently, but hybrids are now relatively common - and the energy could be used efficiently: Ambient air heaters, of course; plus heaters directly in seats and steering wheel to warm them more efficiently than the ambient air would; plus of course sensors to shut down heaters when things are sufficiently warm.
OT: Did the NY Times change their layout recently? For the first time, IMHO, it's gone from functional to appealing.
I've got a petrol car now, a later model of the same line, and the designers clearly decided that there was no need for any trickery, and they could just use the heat from the engine. Big mistake! It's absolutely rubbish by comparison.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. I think it's unreasonable to count on computers to warn and protect us about every possible mistake people might make.
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.
Requires that every building for which a building permit is issued for new construction on or after July 1, 2008, and having a fossil-fuel-burning heater or appliance, a fireplace, or an attached garage shall have an approved operational carbon monoxide alarm installed within 10 feet of each room used for sleeping purposes.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...
I also really like the convenience they provide in being able to lock, unlock, and start my car without needing to take anything out of my pocket. If I can help it, I'll never buy another car without a keyless system.
Vehicles kill 3000 people a day, that's before the pollution they cause.
[1] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/02...
Also, obviously not nearly as dangerous given that it shuts off the engine when it is idle, on or not.
There have been cases where government intervention to help may have actually been worse than that original problem, such as the rise in cases of forgetting children in rear seats on warm days after laws were written forbidding car seats in the front where parents find it harder to forget their child.