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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/deadly-convenience-keyless-cars-and-their-carbon-monoxide-toll.html
This is the first I’ve heard of this happening, but it has been going on for a while, killing and seriously injuring many — a lot in Florida, in particular. I’m aware of the Why Is My Car Running!?!? problem with “Smart” keys, since it has arisen recently twice around me: once with the sitter’s car mysteriously starting (I gave her my faraday pouch and said, hey, store your key in that and if the car starts itself mysteriously, it isn’t the fob that is the problem. The problem seems to have stopped, so it is probably the fob?), and once with my niece getting ahold of a fob and starting the car from inside the apartment. In both cases, my loved ones were at no risk, because they do not have garages to park their cars in. The Florida deaths seem to be an unlucky combination of cars either being left running OR starting on their own (a possibility not explored in the article, which is unfortunate, and wow is that going to be one hell of a lawsuit if it turns out to be a factor), in a garage, attached to a house where people are at home, and which home does NOT have a carbon monoxide detector. Houses in the Northeast, for example, often have carbon monoxide detectors in case something horrifying happens with the furnace or whatever.
The car manufacturers and people who advise car manufacturers are quite focused on audible warnings directed at the driver upon exiting the vehicle while it is running. Given my recent experience with Why Is My Car Running?!?! I think this is a pretty fucking shortsighted strategy. Given my (limited) knowledge of UX, audible warnings are shit anyway. If there’s a hazard, and you can pre-empt it automatically, you should. Making someone take an action is asinine. I mean, what’s the _risk_ associated with shutting the engine off after 15 minutes or a half hour or whatever? Is there a huge crowd of customers who will mysteriously die if they lose that “feature”? Seems unlikely, but if anyone has a use case, of course I am interested.
When my sister-in-law had to go turn the car off because my niece turned it on by messing with the fob, I laughed, because, Kids! They do the darnedest things. But the more I thought about it, the more I could think of future instances (involving autonomous cars, mostly) of Really Bad Shit that could happen. And yet I didn’t entertain this conflagration of circumstances at all. (I was thinking more along the lines of, you get up, the car isn’t there, you turn on the app to find it, and it is 250 miles away with a dead battery. Hopefully NOT with junior in the car. And not as a result of theft, but some toddler being clever with a button or app or something.)
I’m back to being super grateful that my car is an EV. No carbon monoxide risk there. Oh, wait. It has a Rex. Hmmm. This is why we have carbon monoxide detectors, I guess. I suppose I should be happy that I _always_ plug in my car when it is in the garage. I’m _pretty_ sure it won’t keep running / start while plugged in. In the unlikely event it did / could, you’d presumably be running off of grid power, so I guess the Rex wouldn’t start in the garage. I hope, anyway.
While the carbon monoxide risk associated with smart fobs is real and should be addressed, it does legit seem to be killing fewer people than some of the automotive risks we’ve been going after during the last ten years (some of which were _also_ mostly Toyota’s problem, but then there are also the diesel emissions evasions, which presumably contributed to deaths that are difficult to identify as such). I’m a big believer in priority ordering of things, and how many people something kills is a decent first cut at getting the priorities right. If you have a vehicle which can be remote started AND you park it in a garage, PLEASE get a carbon monoxide detector for your home. No reason to take this particular risk while waiting for a recall to fix it at the source.
This is the first I’ve heard of this happening, but it has been going on for a while, killing and seriously injuring many — a lot in Florida, in particular. I’m aware of the Why Is My Car Running!?!? problem with “Smart” keys, since it has arisen recently twice around me: once with the sitter’s car mysteriously starting (I gave her my faraday pouch and said, hey, store your key in that and if the car starts itself mysteriously, it isn’t the fob that is the problem. The problem seems to have stopped, so it is probably the fob?), and once with my niece getting ahold of a fob and starting the car from inside the apartment. In both cases, my loved ones were at no risk, because they do not have garages to park their cars in. The Florida deaths seem to be an unlucky combination of cars either being left running OR starting on their own (a possibility not explored in the article, which is unfortunate, and wow is that going to be one hell of a lawsuit if it turns out to be a factor), in a garage, attached to a house where people are at home, and which home does NOT have a carbon monoxide detector. Houses in the Northeast, for example, often have carbon monoxide detectors in case something horrifying happens with the furnace or whatever.
The car manufacturers and people who advise car manufacturers are quite focused on audible warnings directed at the driver upon exiting the vehicle while it is running. Given my recent experience with Why Is My Car Running?!?! I think this is a pretty fucking shortsighted strategy. Given my (limited) knowledge of UX, audible warnings are shit anyway. If there’s a hazard, and you can pre-empt it automatically, you should. Making someone take an action is asinine. I mean, what’s the _risk_ associated with shutting the engine off after 15 minutes or a half hour or whatever? Is there a huge crowd of customers who will mysteriously die if they lose that “feature”? Seems unlikely, but if anyone has a use case, of course I am interested.
When my sister-in-law had to go turn the car off because my niece turned it on by messing with the fob, I laughed, because, Kids! They do the darnedest things. But the more I thought about it, the more I could think of future instances (involving autonomous cars, mostly) of Really Bad Shit that could happen. And yet I didn’t entertain this conflagration of circumstances at all. (I was thinking more along the lines of, you get up, the car isn’t there, you turn on the app to find it, and it is 250 miles away with a dead battery. Hopefully NOT with junior in the car. And not as a result of theft, but some toddler being clever with a button or app or something.)
I’m back to being super grateful that my car is an EV. No carbon monoxide risk there. Oh, wait. It has a Rex. Hmmm. This is why we have carbon monoxide detectors, I guess. I suppose I should be happy that I _always_ plug in my car when it is in the garage. I’m _pretty_ sure it won’t keep running / start while plugged in. In the unlikely event it did / could, you’d presumably be running off of grid power, so I guess the Rex wouldn’t start in the garage. I hope, anyway.
While the carbon monoxide risk associated with smart fobs is real and should be addressed, it does legit seem to be killing fewer people than some of the automotive risks we’ve been going after during the last ten years (some of which were _also_ mostly Toyota’s problem, but then there are also the diesel emissions evasions, which presumably contributed to deaths that are difficult to identify as such). I’m a big believer in priority ordering of things, and how many people something kills is a decent first cut at getting the priorities right. If you have a vehicle which can be remote started AND you park it in a garage, PLEASE get a carbon monoxide detector for your home. No reason to take this particular risk while waiting for a recall to fix it at the source.