I surprised myself by getting into my car and realizing that it had been running all night. Seems fine, but I feel so stupid. It’s one of those keyless models, and I realized exactly what I did last night. It was raining when I arrived home, so I determined to get out of the car and into my house quickly, so I made sure the headlights were off, I had gathered all my stuff and I made a run for it, forgetting, oh yeah, to turn the engine off.
When you do something dumb like this, how long before you stop calling yourself names? Idiot, dummy, moron, though there seems to be no harm done. I supposed anyone could have made off with my car, and I cost myself a few bucks worth of gas, but namecalling is not necessary. For me, it usually lasts a day or two and then I forget about it completely.
Wow. I’m so OCD about things I don’t think I’d leave the car running.
I’ve left the oven on for awhile.
Put something on the stove. Say, boiling eggs and boiled the pan dry. The weird smell alerted me.
I have a long tale of how I locked myself inside my own laundry room.
The keyless start has always bothered me about cars. Makes me feel out of control of the whole thing.
Don’t call yourself names. It was an honest mistake. We’ve all had them.
One more reason to have a carbon monoxide detector or two in the house.
If your phone is Bluetoothed to your car, it would be nice if the car pinged you at ten-minute intervals while it’s idling to ask you whether you intended to leave the car running that long. Or to obviate the need for any hardware other than the car itself, it could be designed to beep the horn every ten minutes unless you’re actually there to preempt the beep by pressing an “I’m still here” button on the dashboard.
Don’t blame yourself - this is an example of backwards progress in engineering. We’ve talked about this before on the boards.
There have been quite a few instances of people not realizing their car was running, and it’s often due to key fobs. We no longer physically insert a key into the car, which is what allows this sort of problem. If you worked for a car company and were tasked with preventing this kind of issue, you’d invent the f***ing car key again.
My car will beep incessantly if it detects that the key is no longer there while it’s running. I’m surprised other cars don’t do that. Of course that assumes you have the key in your pocket or otherwise take it with you. If you leave the key on the console then all bets are off.
My car, which has a keyless entry, has the opposite problem. If I open the driver’s door and exit the vehicle with the fob in my pocket, it shuts off the ignition after ten seconds or so. Even if I leave the fob in the vehicle, if the driver’s door is opened the ignition will eventually be turned off. It makes it challenging when trying to keep the car running to warmup while scraping snow and ice from the windshield. My car won’t run by itself overnight.
My (keyless ignition) car does too. It’s incredibly annoying as on particularly frosty winter mornings I often want to start the engine several minutes before leaving and let the heated seats warm up and the windshield defrost before actually driving it. However if I close the door after the engine has been started and the key fob is not in the car, it just beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps and beeps until I get back in the car. Since I park in the driveway and leave at 6am, this is a very effective way to ensure all my neighbors – and my wife, as our bedroom is adjacent to the driveway – stay royally pissed off at me. The only way to stop it or prevent the noise it is to not shut the door completely.
Like I said, I get it but it is annoying.
OP, how much gas did the car use idling all night?
I don’t call my self names at all. It’s just a learning experience, not a self-abuse trigger.
OTOH, you could have done what my bro did back when fob cars were new. He left it running in the airport parking lot. Came back 3 days later and it would not start. Cranked fine, but no fire. Eventually he noticed the gas gauge was “E”, rather than the 3/4th tank he’d left home with.
Yep, it had sat there idling for 3 days and finally ran out of gas. It is … inconvenient to get a couple gallons of gas delivered to an airport parking lot.
Exactly. We all have brain farts and moments like these. I do stupid shit all the time. I don’t beat myself up over it. What would the point be? Nobody was hurt, nothing was damaged, not a big deal. Chalk it up to experience and try not to do it again
And yes in the CO detectors in the house. We have one on every floor in our house (basement, first, second) plus regular smoke detectors in each bedroom. (I believe that was code when I looked it up.)
Should I bring up the two times that I returned from mountain biking trips – hours from home – and pulled into the garage without remembering that the bikes were still up on the roof rack??
The best news is that the bike shops that fixed the bikes each time … both copped … that every single one of them had done the exact same thing at least once, themselves.
A simpler solution would be to just have a sensor in the driver’s seat. Most cars already have such sensors in the passenger seat so it’s not even something new that would have to be developed.
Agree with both points. I cannot imagine what possible benefit keyless ignition provides other than a “cool” factor. Any putative security it offers pretty much already existed in newer keyed ignition systems, which required a security chip in the ignition key for it to work, but it was otherwise just a regular key used in the regular way, without all the downsides of the keyless systems.
I’m glad my car doesn’t have this newfangled abomination. Turning off the ignition and removing the keys is a reflex action – and the keys can’t even be removed unless the ignition is off. It’s essentially impossible to inadvertently leave the car running. If I happen to park outside, I couldn’t even get in the house because the house key is on the keychain in the car. Of course, that wouldn’t be an issue if the house also had newfangled “keyless entry”!
Yeah, so they create keyless entry with all its problems, and then partially solve one of the problems by creating another one. Whereas all the problems go away with traditional keyed ignition. The security chip on the ignition key was a worthwhile advance. Keyless ignition was not.
I absolutely love the fact that I never have to take my keys out of my pocket. And because my keys never leave my pocket, it’s virtually impossible to lock them in the car versus when they were hanging from the ignition.
I thought the same about keyless as wolfpup until I got my first keyless car. Also coincided around the time my kids were born. It is an absolute godsend and I could not imagine going back.
Pulled into the garage some time last year and saw that a car was idling with nobody near it. Went upstairs and told one of the staff that someone left an Audi running in the garage. She went down and discovered it was her own car. Never one to just let things lie, the next day I stuck my head into her office, where she and her boss were talking and said “Hey, I just wanted to tell you that your car is not running!”
As for myself, more than once I’ve started to get out of the car and suddenly realized it was still running. Yeah, it does feel stupid.
It’s not even anything that has to be added or installed, since every car sold in the US since 1972 has had to detect whether the driver’s seat is occupied so that it can give a warning tone or visual indicator if the driver’s seat belt isn’t buckled.
Detecting an occupied driver’s seat is a solved problem.
That said, every car I’ve ever owned with keyless entry and pushbutton engine start/stop would eventually shut down the engine if the fob wasn’t within the car and the driver’s seat was unoccupied, usually in 10 minutes.
Sure, but the important question remains: what should the car do if the driver gets out while it’s still idling? If I’m stepping out to deliver a pizza to someone’s front door, I don’t particularly want my car to shut down - but in the OP’s case, where the car has been abandoned to idle for hours, how should the car respond?
This. In the best case, the cars are equipped with prox sensors in the exterior door handles: you grab the handle, and if the key is with you, the door unlocks. To lock, just push the button on/near the door handle. You don’t have to dig through your pocket or purse to find your key.
I don’t even have to do that – if I just walk away with the key the car locks itself (this is a setting somewhere in the car’s infotainment screen). So I no longer obsess over whether or not I remembered to lock it.
ETA: And many minivans and crossovers have a nifty feature where you can open the rear hatch simply by waving your foot under the rear bumper. If the key is with you, the hatch opens. That has to be a godsend to parents trying to load groceries while carrying a small child.
