I’ve never had a car with either, but they scare me as my new car doesn’t have a key. Am I overly paranoid?
In the case of remote start, I’m concerned that my three year old will find an play with the fob and start the car while it’s in the garage. On the other hand, I’m concerned that anyone might start the car while it’s in the garage without thinking that someone might be in the garage.
Push button start is not quite as bad as one has to depress the brake as well as push the button. While deciding what car to buy, I rented an Accord with push-button start. While my wife was driving, I placed a take-out order. It was raining, so my wife dropped me at the front door and went to find a parking space. As you may have guessed, I had the fob in my pocket. In this case, my wife realized that fact and did not shut off the engine when she found a parking space. My son solves that problem by placing the fob in the console, but he has forgotten to remove it when he exits the car. With an actual key, there is not doubt as to the actual outcome.
It’s as if you read my recent thread “Murder by Keyfob”. Not only could someone murder someone else easily this way, they almost certainly will escape justice, as everyone will assume it was the victim’s mistake. I say don’t park your car in your attached garage. Who knows how any car, especially a more recent computerized one, might start unexpextedly? It is the attached garage that is really the bad idea. Yeah you can get a CO detector, but how do you know it is working properly? Or that you will hear it in time, i.e. you might be asleep and not notice it long enough to become incapacitated, and then die?
On rereading your post, I suspect you assume someone has to be in the garage to die from CO poisoning. But there are plenty of cases where the person was somewhere else in the house the garage is attached to. In my Murder by Keyfob thread, someone mentioned bedrooms above the garage are particularly dangerous in this regard. But I think no room is safe. Just park your car outside. Use your garage for storage, or woodworking, or the proverbial “garage band” practice.
That’s a lot of paranoia to start off a Wednesday morning. There’s a difference between “push button start” and “remote start”. Each car is programmed to one or two fobs. No one else’s fob is going to accidentally start your car. The fob must be “in” the car for the push button start to work. If your car is started and the fob exits the vehicle it will continue to run and it can be driven. Once you stop it, you cannot restart it unless the fob is in the car. I normally keep my fob in my pocket, with my keys. You get into practice of pushing the button to start your car and pushing the button after you park to turn off your car.
Remote start is usually an upgrade for some vehicles. It normally requires you push the lock button and then push the remote start button on your fob from close proximity of your car. Some cars have mobile apps that allow you to remotely start your car from anywhere there is an internet signal. If these features scare you, you can turn them off, in your cars menu. Again there are built in security protocols.
If you feel like someone wants to murder you, there are probably easier ways than trying to figure out how to start your car in your garage while you are sleeping upstairs. And most likely it’s someone you know. So parking your car outside, doesn’t really reduce the risk that they will find some other way to off you.
Also, most, if not all, usually will only run on Remote Start before so long. If you don’t get in the car and actually turn it on, the car will shut off. Nissan for example will only go for 10 minutes.
Built in security protocols? “Oops there was this bug in line 30 of our code. Sorry people died. We have pushed out an update, wirelessley, to correct it.”
The thing about murder by keyfob is the murderer is unlikely to get caught. And also it can create a situation where the murder is so easy it might make someone murder someone that normally wouldn’t. Say someone’s significant other has the spare fob. They break up, and the jilted lover is enraged and realizes they have the fob, and start it. Without the fob they would “cool down” before hatching any plans for murder.
I see a lot of people inventing fantasy risks to justify not having their cheese moved. :rolleyes: This thread is an ongoing demonstration of the principle that people are terrible judges of risk.
Remote start only allows the car to run a few minutes. “Murder by remote start” requires recurring activity by the murderer (punching the start button over and over) from a very short range (yards at most) while not in the vulnerable region (i.e., not in the house). Also, remote start isn’t just “lightly push one button on the fob.” They inevitably require some other button push to “unlock” remote start: on my Dodge, it’s “press the remote start twice”. On my Nissan, it’s “remotely lock the car first”. Both require both button presses to be within a couple of seconds of each other, and both honk the horn with the first button press.
Correctly-implemented (i.e., as on my Nissan) keyless start only allows the car to run a few minutes without the keyfob within the interior of the vehicle. If the keyfob has to remain in the car, it’s no different than a key having to remain in the ignition, so you may as well panic about “murder by keyed ignition start” as well.
Mine has a ignition key position that don’t need a key if the fob is within the car, but does come with a emergency key in the fob which can be used as a chipped key w/o the fob present. I do keep a extra emergency key hidden in the car for the case that the fob holder accidentally leaves the car for the other person to drive (who knows where the emergency key is). This solves one of the issues you brought up. After all if she switched the car off it should be in a safe place, so she just needs to reach to get the key to restart.
“Argh, I really want to murder someone! If only I had a keyfob! Then I could stand outside their garage for hours, hoping no one sees me, repeatedly hitting the remote start (because otherwise the car will turn off). Of course if the CO detector goes off or the victim notices their car repeatedly starting in their garage then my plan will be thwarted, but otherwise it’s a full proof crime!”
As gnoitall alluded to, a remotely-started car, if not soon after is physically activated at the car by a human, will shut down after a few minutes. For my Jeep, the time limit is 5 minutes.
You’ve got it backwards: the carbon monixide will kill any mice in your garage. I guess I am more likely to hurt myself tripping over a wheel of cheddar a mouse has moved. These people were “terrible judges of risk”:
Okay, I’ll add “As long as my victim has a certain model of car that will not automatically turn off the remote start even though it’s a pretty standard feature, it’s a perfect crime!”
It’s something like two people a year. Get some perspective. Go ahead and not park your car in the garage but know that almost everyone is laughing at you behind your back.
In my neighborhood everyone has an attached garage, and no one parks in it. Really, even when it is “scrape ice off the windshield” season. I guess they have junk stored in their garage. So I am part of the gang, having a messy garage. We can laugh at the fastidious neat-nicks, still able to find room to park in their attached garages.
Jim, you could install several CO detectors so if one fails the others work.
Or, even better, you know how modern building codes require linked smoke detectors powered by 120V AC with battery backup, one in every bedroom? There are some combination models that also detect CO.
As I understand it, if CO levels are rising only gradually, the detector will go off ages before you’d be incapacitated.
Of course, if someone snuck in and put a mask on your face and made you inhale pure CO you’d be screwed, be a great way to untraceably murder someone. After you’re dead, wearing gloves, they’d pick up your keyfob and start the car remotely. Then put the keyfob in a spot where it looks like you might have pressed the button by accident. And replace the battery in your CO detector with a dead one. If it looks like an accident, all the detectives are going to do is take a few quick photos and probably close the case.
Are you assuming these homicide detectives are keystone cops? You can measure the temperature of the dead body, and the car that ran out of fuel, and apply Newton’s law of cooling to both. They would see the time of death doesn’t jibe with when the car was started.
Nah. I seriously doubt it’s that accurate. That’s also not how detectives think - think horses, not Zebras. If it’s only a little off they are just going to assume the room the decedent was in was colder last night or something.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect so. I’ve had two aftermarket remote starters and two cars with factory remote starters. All four shut off after about 10 minutes. So, in terms of accidental (or diabolical) death, I don’t see this as a realistic scenario.
As for the push button start, that is very common on a lot of cars over the past 10 years. I’m not hearing widespread stories about cars starting on their own. For some brands at least, you have to have your foot on the gas pedal for the engine to start.