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Comment by ClarityJones | Hacker News Reader

When someone is believed to have "committed suicide" or "accidentally" left their car running in the garage, is it routine for investigators to audit the manufacturer's remote-start logs? Do those logs even exist?

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Are you suggesting you could kill someone by remotely starting their car? Is the person sleeping in their car in the garage?

I don't personally know whether it's possible, but the NYT has reported that every year a couple of people die from leaving a running car in the garage:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/deadly-convenien...

If it is possible to do accidentally, then it's also possible to do on purpose.

With that said, I would expect more 28 false positives 12 years. Those very low numbers may indicate that - contrary to their reporting - it is not actually possible (barring weird circumstances).

My garage is right below my kids' room so leaving the car on would definitely be dangerous. Most remote starters automatically turn after 10 minutes so I'd like to think that mitigates that particular threat. Also we have carbon monoxide detectors in every room (after one of my neighbors' HVAC exhaust got blocked by snow after a particularly bad storm).

It's a thing - more accidents these days with hybrid and keyless, so if you get distracted it's not immediately obvious that you've left the car on and the engine might kick in randomly later.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/deadly-convenien...

It's actually more or less impossible with modern cars.

Hell, in a lot of cities what comes out of the tailpipe is cleaner than what goes in the intake.

You can still die from carbon dioxide exposure/oxygen inefficiency. It will just take longer, now that carbon monoxide emissions are down because of catalytic converters eliminating a lot of them. And yet, a lot of people still die or get seriously injured, particularly because their "keyless" crap acts up [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/deadly-convenien...

I agree that carbon dioxide exposure is dangerous, but it is probably less dangerous because (TIL) there's a specific brain mechanism that wakes you up when your blood has elevated CO2[0].

On the other hand, carbon monoxide poisoning will only wake you up if its symptoms (among which headache, nausea/vomiting, elevated heart rate, and cardiac arrest seem likely) do so.

[0] https://medicine.uiowa.edu/content/specific-neurons-trigger-...

Cleaner on noxious chemicals but not on carbon dioxide which is what gets humans.

I’m kind of surprised garage doors don’t have co2 monitors built in but I suppose it could be used as a security bypass.

Carbon Monoxide alarms are being required in more and more places, though typically only enforced in situations where you are getting a building inspection (new construction, extensive remodels, etc.) or where it's a rental property.

You can pick one up at the hardware/big box store.

I'm thinking more of something that causes the garage opener to open if it detects a running car in the garage or CO2 limits approaching unhealthy.

I do have a very nice CO alarm that I keep in the kitchen (portable pilot very sensitive one from CO Experts).

[citation needed]

But until you find one, let's do some math:

Let's only look at CO2 and disregard the even nastier NO gasses emitted by a gasoline engine. EPA data suggests a car produces 2,345 grams CO2 for every liter gas. And a modern, but without shut-at-stop, idling car burns about 0.75 l/hour.

So 1758 g/hour CO2 for an idling car in your garage, which is roughly 63 m^3, and CO2 is 44.01 g/mol, so after an hour idling in a closed garage, you'd have 14,440 PPM CO2. That is enough to cause drowsiness in most, and some illness in sensitive populations. The OHSA standard for allowed exposure is 5,000ppm averaged over 8-hour workday.

.. and assumes an airtight garage.

My back-of-envelope calculation must've few mistakes in it (I was multiplying numbers from the internets, ffs), but none as big as the above comment nonsense.

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