No question about it, provided that by “old” you mean cars made sometime in the previous century, especially if you go as far back as the 70s and 80s or earlier. Go back far enough and most cars were basically rolling junkyards.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if the reliability curve hit a peak sometime perhaps in the first decade of this century, and then started going down again because of all the fancy gadgetry. Cars today may be less likely than ever to actually leave you stranded on the highway, but I’m pretty sure that maintenance costs are rising out of proportion to inflation.
Or, IOW, for any given level of quality of materials, workmanship, and engineering/design, the simpler system will tend to be more reliable.
I’ve left my car running unintentionally twice that I can think of: once with a key and once with a fob (tossed into the center console so no dinging alert). On balance though, the keyless ignition is way more convenient and my easy preference. Plus my last two cars have been Hyundais so the keyless thing meant they weren’t susceptible to the whole TikTok USB car theft thing (which involved busting open the lock mechanism and using a USB plug as a ‘key’ to turn the starter inside).
Fair. But almost nobody wants the super-reliable car with no features. I think there’s an element of risk homeostasis at work here, in that as manufacturers have gotten better at making very reliable components and subsystems, buyers are willing to accept a particular level of reliability (i.e. risk of failure) in exchange for having a car with more features instead of having a car with the same features it used to have (but with higher reliability). Transmissions are a good example of this. Decades ago when automatic transmissions had poor long-term reliability, manual transmissions were much more popular. These days, automatics are reliable enough that few people want the hassle of a manual.
And so it goes with any other feature you care to add to a car. If the manufacturer of today can make a car with more features that provides the same overall reliability as the simpler car I used to drive, then why wouldn’t I want those added features?
I may have mentioned this before, but once in Taiwan I took my family to the bus station then went to a coffee shop. I was enjoying my coffee when I looked out and realized the car was missing.
I rushed out and the parking lot was empty. I checked and I didn’t have the fob so I guessed I must have left it in the car and someone drove it away.
That is, until I happened to notice that my motorcycle was there. Some how I had driven home, got the bike and then just spaced it.
In a similar vein, I parked outside the main entrance of my building and put on the emergency blinkers to indicate that it wasn’t just parked there indefinitely. Well, after the second of two trips it took to get all the stuff I bought into my domicile, I got a call that lasted ten minutes. Unfortunately, when the call was over, I had forgotten my car was out front with the blinkers on. When I didn’t find it in its parking space the next morning, I remembered what I did! The battery was, of course, dead. I had to call AAA and was late for work. I cursed my self until AAA arrived and started it right up. After that, it was simmering annoyance until mid-morning.
A very long time ago, I drove my newly acquired car to a nearby town to go to the cinema. I found a parking space in the market square and after the film, went to the pub for a couple of pints and caught a bus home.
I realised what I had done the following morning and caught a bus to fetch the car. It was market day and my car was nowhere to be seen so I thought it must have been either stolen or impounded by the police. I asked a passing policeman who laughed and told me that the market traders had pushed it around a corner and left it in a side street.
I can lock/unlock our car with my phone, which I usually have with me. If I find myself by the car and need to grab something I use my phone. Granted, our car doesn’t lock itself so if I know I’m going to need something from the car in the next few hours I just don’t bother locking it in our driveway.
The new EV we’re picking up tomorrow shuts the car off when you take the key fob outside the car. There’s a button on the infotainment system to turn the car off but it’s not needed. Granted, turning an EV on and off has different meaning than with an ICE vehicle.
I’m politically very liberal, but this is my peephole into understanding conservatism. When it comes to technology, I turn into William F. Buckley and want the progress to stop.
Well… not stop. Just slow down. The problem as I see it is that “features” become necessities all too quickly. Then they become the whole point. For some decades now, if you’re buying a car, a camera, a phone… it’s all about the features. I think it’s long become a wag the dog situation, and people like me who don’t want all the bells and whistles have very few choices.
When it comes to cars, I could be very happy with nothing but old-fashioned cruise control. Put the rest of the development and construction costs into reliability and basic safety. And when I say safety (besides crumple zones and such) I mean things like anti-lock brakes. Not multiple systems to help me drive, like lane assist. I turn all that stuff off in my car because I don’t want it taking un-commanded actions. It’s my job to drive the car. When we have fully automated cars I’ll cede that responsibility gladly, but right now we’re in this weird half-state where we’re kind of in control of the vehicle and kind of not. Especially with Teslas and such.
Which brings me back to the key fobs. I’m fine with a fob to unlock the doors as I’m walking to the car (which I trigger, I don’t want that to happen automatically). But the fact is, without physically putting the key in the ignition as part of the startup / shutdown process, we’ve enabled the problem the OP describes. How about key fobs that have to be inserted somewhere? I seem to recall seeing that before - what happened?
Depends on whether you actually find them an advantage, or find them a nuisance, or find them a major disadvantage.
And I would include having to hunt through instructions about 150 features in order to turn them off as a major disadvantage.
My phone doesn’t do that.
(What it does do is survive a day with me in the field, including the ones when I get soaked through and/or bang into things; and take up minimal space in a pocket.)
I drove a Dodge truck at work that had that. It also had a rotary dial on the dash to select gears for the automatic transmission. And like every Dodge truck I have had the misfortune of driving, it always felt like the wheel bearings were bad. Just sort of an awful vehicle all around. But very low tech.
I usually don’t beat myself up for making most dumb mistakes, but sometimes it’s the egregious, self-inflicted ones that really bother me. I once backed into my parked motorcycle and knocked it over. No damage or major scratches, but I was mad at myself for the rest of the day.
And then I once made a bad mistake that cost me $10,000 dollars, and that was a painful lesson! I was mad at myself for several days.
Hmm, I’ll have to test and see what my Subaru does. I think it beeps but I’m not certain.
I’m not sure if you saw that as a good or bad feature, but it’s the sort of thing that drives me crazy.
Rotary dial for gear shifting? What’s wrong with the lever we’ve had all these years? How about a little standardization instead of making needless tweaks just to stand out? This is what I mean when I say I’m a technological conservative.
There were no good features on that truck. Luckily, it was soon turned back to GSA and replaced with a Ford F-150, which was basic XL trim so nothing fancy, but far better than the Dodge.
I get that this happens, but how common is it really? And is there really no solution other than forcing the driver to use a physical key?
My gut feeling is that it’s pretty rare, and it would only require some minor software changes to allow cars to shut themselves down if they’ve been abandoned with a running engine for more than X minutes.
Drivers voted with their wallets: the vast majority don’t want to have to take that fob out of their pocket.
Not that I think it’s the best design, but it takes up a very small amount of space and doesn’t get in the way like a lever can. When you had a transmission running down the center of the car and mechanical linkage, the lever made perfect sense. For a FWD car, it’s just tradition now. The shifter in our new EV is on a stalk, and that makes perfect sense.
I haven’t researched it carefully, but I can say I’ve read multiple news stories about this issue for some years now. That’s not to to say it never happened with keyed ignitions, but it seems clear our modern cars have greatly increased the chances.
True. Here’s what’s also true: Taken as a group, people are lazy, are known to be terrible drivers and awful at risk assessment.
Car companies have responded to this problem by creating lots of “features” to save us from ourselves. The cost is complexity, 150 settings to go through to customize the car’s actions and… actual cost. Again, I haven’t studied this carefully, but I’m guessing cars are somewhat more expensive proportionally than in the past. If that’s true, I have to believe all the “features” are a contributing factor.
I understand many people (probably most) feel differently. But those of us who don’t want all the extra gadgetry, complexity and cost have little choice. Again, this is the only way I am able to understand the politically conservative mindset, such as it is, or as I perceive it. I feel unrepresented and angry at having to go along with trends I don’t like.
I take that point. My feeling though is that there should be more standardization.
For years in my job, I drove a lot of rental cars. So I was exposed to many, many designs and it was frustrating how little standardization exists in cars. More importantly, I fail to see how those differences contributed to functionality or safety. It’s different when you own one car and get used to whatever ergonomics are installed. But I don’t want substantially different controls.
So we move the gear shifter, or change it to a new kind of control entirely. Why not swap the accelerator and brake pedal positions? That would be ruinous, of course, and is a slippery slope argument. But I just don’t see the necessity of changing the basic controls, even if it saves a little space. There has to be a better reason for such changes, IMHO.
There are more dangerous mistakes than leaving your car on all night.
Leaving the car in gear and getting out kills or injures more people every year than just letting the car idle. My neighbor just barely escaped getting her legs run over when she stepped out of her car while it was in R, not P.