Car on all night

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I wasn’t suggesting that keyless systems are unreliable, although I do maintain that they have all sorts of disadvantages, as mentioned in this thread (plus, I guess, one advantage that @WildaBeast mentioned that you never have to take your keys out of your pocket). I was referring to the much more elaborate sequence of automated events that @LSLGuy seems to like.

I tend to regard every fancy doodad on a car as another opportunity for something to break, so it’s both an acquisition expense and a potential maintenance expense as well as the usual headache incurred in taking any car in for repairs. I may sound like a cranky old fogey, but fancy doodads and elaborate engineering are the principal reasons that high-end cars like Mercedes and BMW are expensive to maintain and unforgiving with respect to maintenance requirements.

Obviously not everyone agrees that these are major issues, but reliability is my absolute top #1 requirement in a car. As long as the vehicle is safe and solid, I care about almost nothing else besides reliability. Most shops other than dealerships have phased out loaners and courtesy shuttles, and if you don’t have a friend or someone nearby to give you a lift, the cost and hassle of a rental is pretty much the only option.

This also fits with my usual goal of keeping cars as long as possible. If a car is going to be reliable in its old age, it pretty much has to be intrinsically reliable to begin with. As a general rule of thumb, reliability tends to be correlated with simplicity. It’s certainly possible to have complex systems that are also very reliable – e.g.- aircraft and spacecraft – but the tradeoff there is that they’re extraordinarily expensive.

42

My sister did this boiling water in a teflon pan back in the 1980s. By the time she smelled anything amiss, her many lovebirds all died from the toxic fumes.

43

On my Toyota, you just touch the end of the outside handle opposite the thumb button.

44

A couple times at work I was doing something that I couldn’t have my car keys on me but my car was within eye shot so I put my key fob on the rear tire. When I walked up to the car later I absentmindedly pushed the door handle button to unlock the car though the key was on the rear tire and surprisingly unlocked even though it wasn’t on my person.

Stuff like that makes me nervous in such a situation of say a potential mugger or something trying to get in my car at the same time as me or something like maybe they could unlock it if I was just standing nearby. I also really don’t like the idea of my car just unlocking as I walk up to it for the same reason although my car is older and doesn’t do this.

I also dislike that when I turn off the engine my car automatically unlocks the doors, I know they’re shooting for convenience but what if I didn’t want the doors open just cause I turned off the engine?

45

To each their own, but in eight years of having fobbed cars, never once have I noticed a disadvantage to it, and I never want to go back to keys. (Though I drive a van around once a week for a food pantry, and it’s annoying enough having to get the keys out every time to lock and unlock and start the car. I absolutely hate it. And I’m not even tech crazy. I still drive a stick shift.)

46

Did you read the first two posts, and the one by @JohnGalt a little further down? Not everyone finds keyless ignition an unmitigated Godsend with no downsides.

Not pertaining to keyless ignition specifically, but further to my general point in the previous post about the downsides of needless complexity, here’s a couple of stories about people trapped in their Teslas when the 12-volt battery died and all the fancy electronic gadgets suddenly went dead. Some (possibly not all) Teslas have a manual escape latch to open the door but its location is not obvious and apparently many owners don’t even know it exists.

Other stories concern owners who couldn’t get into their Tesla on a cold winter day because the fancy recessed electric door handles wouldn’t operate.

47

Of course I did. Those don’t apply to me or how my system is set up. You can have your keys; I’ll take my fobs. Like I previously said, I had similar reservations to you before I got one, and now I would prefer never to go back. Having a newborn and a toddler at the time made me especially appreciate how much easier they made my life.

48

Well, it’s a truck, so…

But yes, I just showed my wife how it works on her new Mazda CX50 with the rear hatch. That key fob has tiny buttons on the side that are hard to use, but now we know that they are rarely needed. Will need to read the manuals thoroughly for both vehicles.

As for the car unlocking when turned it off, you can most likely turn that off somewhere in the vehicle settings. One of the first things I did was go through the settings menu to set things up like I wanted them.

49

This is really, really annoying to the few of us who live in places where we don’t need to keep the car locked and don’t need to be carrying keys around whenever we step out of the house. I’m really glad to have old vehicles that don’t lock themselves, because I often want to put something into or get something out of the car/work van, but I don’t want to schlep back into the house to get the key.

I will grant that we’re probably way outnumbered by people who do want their cars to lock themselves.

I have extensions on my pedals. But I still can’t put the seat all that far back, because I need to be able to reach controls on the dash. Short people also usually have short arms. And I’m not that short; I’m over 5’1". What we need is smarter air bags. Or smarter air bag designers.

(No, putting the controls all on the steering wheel wouldn’t help; there’s almost too much on the steering wheel to keep track of as it is.)

So if whoever left the car there has gone out of hearing it’s going to infuriate the entire neighborhood?

Oh yeah, I can easily imagine that being a safety issue in some situations.

50

Like I said, on my car this is a feature that can be turned on or off. You don’t have to have it lock itself if you don’t want it to. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s turned off by default from the factory, because I remember the salesman asking me if I wanted him to turn it on for me after I bought the car.

51

There are about 150 settings for my (admittedly fancy) car. However you want it to work, they have a setting for that.

I can turn off all the convenience features and it’ll imitate a 1980s car. With all the annoying 12 steps to start and 12 steps to stop.

52

Continuing my Old Fart Yelling at Clouds theme :wink: the automatic door locking as you walk away is more or less forced by the nature of keyless ignition, where drivers become used to the idea of never having to take keys out of their pocket. Being an old and simple soul, I like the idea of my physical security-chipped ignition key, and the ability to lock all the doors (or not) just by pressing a button on the key fob (a genuinely useful innovation). You may have 150 different settings you can fiddle with, but probably none of them is the option to use a traditional key. And I wonder whether those settings go into non-volatile RAM, or if they get reset whenever the battery is disconnected. On my older car, when the battery is disconnected the radio remembers its presets, but forgets what station it was tuned to, and the ECM forgets everything it ever knew.

Hmmm … I listed the three steps involved in starting my car, one of which involves getting in it, and another involves putting it in gear. At my destination, the process is reversed: I put it in park, turn it off, and get out. Perhaps your car is far more complicated, which was kinda my point. But to each their own. Some folks like fancy cars, and that’s cool. I like reliable cars.

Speaking of fancy, some time ago I had a VW Jetta as a rental car. It had a touch-screen center console, and apparently that thing could do anything and everything. Unfortunately for me, all I wanted it to do was tune to CBC Radio and keep the car at a reasonable temperature. Figuring that out was somewhat akin to getting used to a major new release of Windows, except it was even worse, because even new Windows releases retain older paradigms, and this was some engineer’s fanciful idea of a do-everything automotive UI.

And speaking of those wondrously capable touch screens, a friend of mine had an Infiniti for quite a few years. As an upscale Japanese car, it was sort of intermediate between the most upscale over-engineered German cars and more ordinary ones. It turned out to be pretty reliable, but it shared with other luxury models the need for constant and expensive upkeep. He got rid of it when the maintenance it needed exceeded the value of the car. But the point I wanted to make about the Infiniti was that during one of his maintenance visits to the dealership, they lent him an almost-new Infiniti. One would think it was a nice bit of luck to get a loaner like this. It wasn’t.

He was out shopping and tried to start it in the parking lot and that famous all-purpose touch screen lit up completely blank, and the car wouldn’t start. It had apparently gone totally brain-dead. I believe this was a known problem at the time with the new models. Moral: there really is such a thing as over-engineering.

53

Well if you insist, we’ll put our onions on our belt, pour another drink, and …

The fob has the expected 3 buttons: lock, unlock, and open trunk. So you can do it the semi-old style way. You can disable the walk up/away auto unlock/lock. In which case touching the door handle in specific ways will lock or unlock. There is also a mechanical key embedded in the fob. So you can pull that out, stick it in a hole in the door handle and turn it ~60 degrees to lock or unlock. Feels very 1970s. When I go to the beach, which is often, I leave all the electronic gizmos inside the car so they don’t get wet with salt water & use the mechanical key instead. Feels Antediluvian, but it does work.

All the settings are stored in an NVRAM that will last indefinitely. If the dealer flashes the whole car that’s another story.


Your car takes more than three steps to begin or end a drive unless you skip the parking brake. Which is a very bad idea.

54

I think most newer cars have an auto shut off feature, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. At least, our new Rav4 Prime PHEV does, as well as beeping the heck at you. Of course, it also has features to extend the power provided if you need to use the 1500w power from the traction motor in the event of, you know, city/state wide power outages, and allow the ICE engine to run to recharge.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rav4prime/comments/1fxozu3/my_rav4_prime_has_been_powering_my_fridge_and/

Cool moment I’m sure.

Lastly, I’m pretty sure for most newer cars you can (if you want to) check on your car status including if it’s still on via your dealer’s app. Could make it a habit to check, but granted, it’s one MORE thing to do.

55

I don’t bother with the parking brake on flat surfaces like my own garage or most parking lots. It is, however, a good idea to use it occasionally so it doesn’t seize up. I probably don’t use it often enough.

56

At least the next door neighbors, anyway. But there is no way I could walk to my front door and unlock it without hearing that. In fact, I got out of my car just to take a stretch, and it told me.

57

You can still do that. I can have my car lock automatically as I walk away. Or I can press a button on the door handle if I want to lock it myself, which I do sometimes. Or I could press a button on the key fob as I walk away. I never do that because it’s annoying to have to fish my keys out of my pocket, but if I wanted to I could; the key fob still has the usual buttons on it. Or I could use the physical key. It’s admittedly just there as a backup in case the battery in the key fob dies, but it is there hidden inside the fob. My car gives me options!

My old, basic, manual transmission Saturn once left me stranded because the shift linkage broke. This car has never left me stranded.

58

Seems to be a trade off- “tune ups” are no longer needed, but you have to pay for software updates.

59

Old cars were vastly less reliable than modern ones.

Badly made simplicity is not better than well-made complexity.

60

Except for the fact that you had to study up on all those 150 settings and set them.

However I’m relieved to find out that they can be turned off, even if it’s going to take me a week of time I’d rather do something else with to do it. And if it works. Supposedly you can turn off the car alarm in my now fairly ancient Subaru, but it’s a complicated process that I can’t get to work.

At least that car turns it headlights off when you take the key. I had a car that did that in the mid 1970’s, and then didn’t have another that would do it until quite recently.

What 12 steps? You do know you haven’t had to crank them since long before the 1980’s?

True. But well-made simplicity will usually beat both of them.