So, another thread inspired this in my paranoid mind (welcome to my mind):
Cars now have keyfobs which will start the engine. A jilted lover, or a sidereal divorcee happens to have the spare fob still. They start the engine of the vehicle via fob from afar, while it is in the ex’s attached garage. Checkmate: dead ex via CO poisoning, perfect crime. OR!!!
Terrorists figure out how to wirelessly start cars and kill millions of people in one night via CO poisoning. Or a psychopathic software engineer “updates” the software of every car with such software nodes to start one night, and millions with attached garages die via CO poisoning one day. Don’t use your attached garages! Or get a CO detector, several when you think about it. Or drain the gas tank every night, and so on in inreasing order of inconvienence. What is your opiniom of these possibilities? I started parking my car outside from day 1, thinking: gas engine in an attached garage, even if “off” = Darwin Award.
Or they could un-start cars on the interstate causing widespread wreckage and mayhem.
I just can’t figure out why a car that won’t start without the fob being present keeps running after the fob goes away. My computer doesn’t keep running that long after I walk away from it; this is not rocket science.
Does it turn off when the same keyfob that started it gets out of range? Or when *all *keyfobs? Because the if it is all, then the jilted ex could use their fob to start the car and then disappear while the victim’s fob still might be within range to keep it running…
Remote car starters have been around for decades, I’ve never heard of one being used this way but it’s certainly possible.
If a car is running, suddenly turning it off can lead to bad things. A passenger walking away with the key shouldn’t leave you stranded. That’s happened to me with my wife’s car several times.
Carbon Monoxide poisoning can be a problem with a car with keyless ignition, but it’s fairly rare. It’s happened near my parent’s house in FL, which is in a retirement community and not all the drivers have great hearing and/or are forgetful. I have lots of younger friends with such cars up here and they’ve never had a problem of leaving their car running in a closed garage.
If you really want to cause chaos, update the software so that at a specific time on a specific day, every car affected accelerates and turns left.
Remote start vehicles have a timeout period where they shut off if someone doesn’t actually get in and drive.
I rented a car recently which had a remote fob. I drove three hours to my destination and went to lock the car and only then realized I couldn’t find the fob anywhere. Not in the glovebox, not on the console, hadn’t slid under a seat; I searched high and low for that damn thing, but couldn’t find it. I was in a panic, because surely I would now be stranded in the barren wastes of Connecticut.
But it was in there somewhere, because when I had to go home the car started just fine. I took it back and was like “I don’t know where the thingy is, but it’s in there somewhere because the car started.” And the guy was like, “yeah, that happens a lot.”
And that’s my exciting keyless ignition story.
Also, once you get in the car and insert the key, the remote shutoff ability is disabled as well, so you can’t stop a car that someone is already driving.
Yeah, it looks like some of those automatic safety off/no-off features would thwart the run of the mill murder. Although an ex not realizing they would certainly get caught might sit outside restarting the car over and over, still killing the victim. But those features guarantee no safety against hacking or deliberate malicious software “updates”. Just park the thing outside. The attached garage has been ruined by technological progress.
LOL. I once put the parking break on when I returned a rental car. The guy said “no one has ever done that before”.
One minor problem with this scenario - the key fob just allows the engine to start, but does not start it. In my car you have to press a Start button while holding down the brake.
Before I bought my Prius I rented one a few times, and once it started just fine, because I automatically put my foot on the brake. But other times when I neglected to do it I couldn’t get the car started. Then I decided to RTFM (or the helpful starting hints) and no trouble after that. When I returned it the woman I checked it in with said that happens all the time too.
Oh, I thought some cars had the option of remotely starting it up for warmup or something via fob. That renders some of this thread moot.
There have been situations where someone got out of their car in the garage and went into the house, carrying the key fob, but with the engine still running. In some of these cases, the people realized what happened before being killed by the CO fumes, although sometimes there was permanent brain damage. In other cases, of course, people died. Some stories are told in this recent article.
Many vehicles have a remote start option. Mine does.
So if my car has a traditional key start, if I start the car and get out of it (say, to run back in the house to grab something) it should shut off? I started the car and left it running. don’t know why you think it should act differently just because of the lack of a physical key.
:rolleyes:
life has taught me that when someone says “this isn’t rocket science,” what they really mean is “I don’t understand it, but it doesn’t work like I want so whoever designed it must be an idiot.”
Upon re-reading I think we’re actually talking about two different features:
- Remote starting, where you press a button on the remote and it actually starts the engine, and
- Keyless ignition, where you press a button in the car instead of inserting a key, which requires a wireless fob to be present.
Oh no, make it random. Some accelerate, some brake suddenly, some turn left, some turn right. That would cause much more chaos, not to mention casualties.
Did they charge you for the damage?
My computer has never shutoff when I simply walked away. All I get is a screensaver.