Deadly Convenience: Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll

I'll admit, this is appealing on paper, but for me the dream ends once you meet the actual key fob. They're enormous and heavy compared to the plain steel keys of just 15 years ago. The bulk and weight are enough that I don't want the thing in my pocket in the first place, so it generally leads to the annoyances of finding someplace to stash the key and then remembering to bring it along later, every single time.

A Prius I rented a few years ago had one of the smaller smart keys I've seen, but the thing was still bigger than a Zippo lighter.

When they can get it down to the mass and volume of a plain steel key I'll be a lot more interested.

On the safety side, I love the simplicity of a cut key. If it isn't in the car, the car must be off. That's simple and secure.

 

When I change shirts, I move the fob. Other than that, I never pull it out or press it's buttons.

I have been waiting 9 years for my house to work as well. Still nothing.

 

agreed, i'm not looking forward to the gen 4 fob, mine is small and light.

 

Well at least we've sorted out who's trying to bring cargo pants back into fashion

 

lexus has a credit card fob, that would be ideal.

 

Ha!
It is true, I wear nothing but Guayabera shirts! (Stock photo, lots of pockets) I never use the pant pockets.

 

I simply think technology moves forward.
I doubt we are moving back towards keys. People like the convenience of keyless entry, and push button starts. What once was luxury feature on only high end vehicles has now become more and more common, on more and more vehicles.
The fact that I can even get push button start and keyless entry, on a sub-compact Honda Fit, I think speaks to this truth.

I could foresee a day, where nearly all vehicles sold, come with keyless entries and push button starts.

Also, I disagree about the size of the fob vs. the size of keys. The fobs for both my Prius and now my Honda Fit are NOT enormous in relationship to most automotive keys. Even vehicles with key ignition today, usually come with remote entry, which means a transponder and a push button "fob" to unlock the doors. The size is pretty comparable. I don't find the fob for my Honda, nor did I find the Fob for The Prius to be too big.

And also, I think you're remembering the singular steel key of yesterday a little too fondly. While they were cheaper to replace, you also had the door scratches associated with usage. Simpler locks, simpler ignitions, made theft that much more possible.

And as far as size?
Well I worked for a company that bought a new 1990's Geo Metro as a company vehicle, way before the common remote keyless entry, keyless entry or push button start. And, the entire company use to joke about the size of that key. It was HUGE. The smallest vehicle, with the largest key I have ever seen.
So not all keys were small and lightweight, and that's back when nobody had any choice.

I'm usually not a proponent of "unneeded" luxuries or extra's. But I have to admit, I like the convenience of both keyless entry and push button starts, and with that convenience, I just don't think we are heading or moving back towards the archaic reality of simple mechanical keys.

 

Interesting note on the Metro. I rented a Fiat 500 a couple years ago and was very amused by the ratio of key to car on that one. Would be a good contest for a car blog or mag show.

You're quite right; there were some keys in the middle years that had puffy plastic on the heads and separate electronic fobs and I thought those were inconveniently large as well.

I got quite a lot of utility (and remarkably few scratches) out of plain steel keys in those days. I do not know; I'm an outlier in a lot of other ways- perhaps that one too.

The point is that my wife and I were thrilled to be able to find a car that had a few "tried and true" elements that we prefer (twist ignition, PRNDL on the floor) in combination with the hybrid engineering marvel under the hood. And we got one before they were all gone!

In terms of security, I think I'll just mount a fake start button on my dash. In a few years that will stop more thieves than a clutch pedal. Maybe I'll even wire it to the alarm if I'm really feeling pranky...

 

Hummmm, do I want this? Smart Device Access - Continental

 

I've been tinkering a bit lately with home automation, which is spooling up to take over the whole world.
I've pretty much settled on Home Assistant because of the ability to integrate with the Googles or Alexa if I want to (I don't!) AND because of the backwards comparability with the current 100-year-old light switches, decades-old thermostats, and garage door openers that are already so well known and loved in my house.
The operative phrase in the community seems to be "wife approval rating" or factor, since women have a lot more walking around sense than the male of the species.
It's working out quite well since once the system is validated, she can use all of the switches and buttons that currently make life at home so wonderful, AND I can pull out a call phone or look at a dashboard and tell her definitively that.....yes.....we turned off the iron.

Home Automation is fundamentally different than "remote control" because you can have your system execute instructions using existing sensors and inputs.
Example: send an SMS text if the garage door has been open after a certain time, or when your phone leaves BT range. Turn off bathroom vent fan when the humidity level is <x.....or after 1 hour....etc.
The two biggest problems NOW of course are the same ones that always exist when emerging technology meets human greed:
Privacy and Standards.

People who have black tape covering their computer cameras aren't really into the idea of home automation, even though many of them have cell phones always nearby and spend hours and hours posting intimate information on the internet.

it's a curious world we live in!

My two "must haves" are privacy and backwards compatibility, and as much as having Toyota's [sic] "smart key" is a medium-bad idea?
Using a cell phone is worse!!!

We've had Priuses as fleet cars for almost 10 years now, and we've made it a practice to keep a spare key in a key-vault located in the vehicle, which overcomes some of the disadvantages of the [sic] "smart" key system, and most of the rest of the problems are sorting themselves out as the vehicles and technicians age-out and are replaced with more reliable units.
In the case of the company car, they're being replaced with these little Hello-Kitty cargo vans that have been popular overseas lately, and are now making their way to the US.
Fortunately(!!!!!!) all of the units that I've come into contact with come with the 100-year-old switching technology that the lights in my house are similar to.....BUT....they have RFID chips embedded into the keys to help prevent theft, and you can unlock them from across the parking lot IF you can be bothered to press a little button......on the key.
Of course......getting a replacement key can be VERY expensive!!!!
My last one cost me $6 and I had to spend 10 minutes looking up the procedure to program the car to accept the newly programmed key, and they limit me to only four, but I can make 100 door lock keys for less than a buck apiece.

I wish that there was a system for automobiles that, like the Sonoff/HomeAssistant combination would be...........smart, but automakers these days have different.....ah.....priorities.

Maybe if they're forced to make their cars (which kill tens of thousands of people annually) a little more Darwin resistant to save one or two souls, then they will be incentivised to make a system that's a little better.......

Or?
Just go back to the old-school metal keys with a cell phone backup......
YMMV!

 

I like the cell phone as a key, as long as it is reliable.
In my case, it has been.
No fob to carry around.
Lose my phone? Remove it as a key.
Need an additional one? Set it up as a key via software at no cost.

With my familial tremor, owning a car with a mechanical key was a sure way to get the area around the lock looking like a tic-tac-toe board very quickly.

 

bev's solve this whole problem.

 

There is that, but I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole

 

I could really see this becoming the long term reality.
Then all us "old folks" can sit around and talk about the old days when you needed a fob to operate your vehicle. Then as the campfire starts to die down, we can tell all the smart phone carrying kids, about the REAL old days when we carried pieces of metal called keys.

 

That problem is not exclusive to push-button cars. I wasn't the first sibling to catch my dad leaving his traditional keyed car running in the garage, fortunately detached from the house. As the NYT article notes, quieter engines are also a contributor. (Though age related hearing loss will eventually extinguish all engine noises, including diesel truck rattles.) And while the likelihood of doing this with any given keyed car seems significantly lower, this may be offset by the massive inventory of older cars with older, less effective generations of emission controls that pass through far more CO.

Nor is the problem exclusive to unintentional poisoning. I've heard of cases of intentional garage self-poisoning -- a.k.a. suicide -- spill over with collateral damage, killing family members sleeping in the attached dwelling. No-fob shutoffs won't help those cases, they must be addressed by the dwelling itself.

By itself, time without the fob will cause dying fob batteries to strand moving cars in crowded urban traffic, with occasional fatal results. This particular cure is likely deadlier than the disease.

Instead, I'd want at least testing for no-fob for a set time AND no driver AND no vehicle movement for a set time. I'd want the no-driver test to cover cases where the driver is intentionally sitting in Park for whatever reason (e.g. stuck in remote severe weather), and the no-movement test so that cases of lightweight drivers or malfunctioning sensors don't cause sudden vehicle disablement in dense traffic. So that means a minimum of 3 logical tests. Do the Ford and GM systems go this far?

And this criteria is not yet adequate to cover people leaving the car turned on for climate control what sleeping in back, nor people using the Prius as a home generator during power outages.

Push-button-start cars are a very tiny slice of the home CO poisoning issue. There is no good excuse for the NYT to focus exclusively on one very tiny slice and ignore mention of the more general solutions that address the entire field.

And CO isn't the only air quality issue arising from air infiltration from attached garages. Many folks stash a very wide array of volatile toxic substances in there. The approaches I mentioned earlier address those too.

 

Yes I agree it was a little unusual thing to focus on with quite the attitude they had.

Yes (from above) this could be a dump on gaso-vehicle motive article.

 

I've got three "huge and heavy" keyless FOB's on my keychain in one pocket and iPhone 6 plus in the other one. Ladies swoon and lesser men are jealous.

Seriously, the benefits of not fumbling around with a bunch of keys in the dark or trying to find tiny buttons on a regular remote more than outweighs (pun intended) the size of them. I've also changed the door locks on my house for keyless entry too.