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Comment by rdiddly | Hacker News Reader

35,000 people are being killed in the US every year by cars, but now suddenly it's "Deadly Convenience," now that 2 people a year are dying from CO poisoning?

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Ford has had issues with some models sold to law enforcement due to CO leaks - some people believe it's endemic to all Explorers - and no one has died as far as I know yet.

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...

any time human lives are involved it's worth moderating one's outrage at such distortions, but the point you make is worthy of consideration: the number of deaths per year (21 in some unspecified time period is quoted in the article) seems to be relatively small compared to other addressable hazards.

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.

Looks like, in the last 10 years in the US, lightning has claimed less than 50 lives per year [0]. I'm not sure how that would compare to carbon monoxide deaths from cars when making the proper adjustments, but I suspect lightning is a bigger threat. The male to female ratio (221 to 62) is interesting, and I suspect that it's because males tend to work outside more than females (anedoctal).

[0] https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-fatalities

If lightning strikes would really only kill two people a year and not cause property damage, we should not be adding lightning rods to buildings. That's probably fewer than the number of people who die while fitting lightning rods.

This. LIghtning rods are a very cheap insurance policy against the enormous property damage that lightning does to your building (think fire + widespread electrical damage).

Thats 2 per year that were totally avoidable though.

All of them are totally avoidable, except a lot of people thought it was a good idea to increase out reliance on cars.

Not sure why are you downvoted this much, this is such an obvious case of elephant in the room.

You can't just "not use cars". No matter what you need some form of transportation, and people will die on it.

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.

You could reduce your car time by half.

But in order to decrease our reliance on cars, we would have to let builders replace the single-family housing in cities with taller multi-unit buildings. This would:

- 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?

If we can save lives by installing a simple alarm that goes off when the key is out of range, why shouldn't it be done? The cost per vehicle are negligible, no new hardware needed, just updated software.

We live in the sort of weird world where people would rather look into ways of stopping those people dying from CO poisoning than snarkily dismiss their deaths as statistically irrelevant.

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.

Your comment is the snarky one, and you attempt to dismiss 35,000 deaths rather than 2. In every single one of those 35,000 cases, someone decided to drive that day, on purpose. You almost got it right: In this crazy wacky weird world we live in, people would rather talk about 2 CO deaths caused by some dumbshit accessory nobody needs, than the 35,000 caused by their own complicity and laziness. Nobody asked whether those deaths were intentional, but you answered anyway, so that's interesting.

Way to totally disregard my point that pretty much all the 35000 deaths consisted of one or two individual deaths, some of which see junctions redesigned or products recalled as a result without anybody haughtily dismissing their interest in seeing a fix with "how can you consider this to be deadly when many more people die from many other things related to vehicles?"

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.

That seems like a misreading.

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