I will say this. In 2007 I bought a Mazda 3 with mechanical locks and windows and was super proud of myself for saving a little cash with my minimal lifestyle. I mean, generations didn’t need key fobs, why spend money on it?
In 2011, I had a baby, and I regreted that purchasing decision every single day for the next 4 years. Loading a baby, bag, and myself into a car easily required opening three of 4 doors, and sometimes the trunk. And while I know people managed for generations*, it still sucked.
*or did they? Now that I think about it, growing up in a small city in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t always lock the car. Hell, in the country, people would leave the windows open and the keys in the ignition. It may well be that the PITA of manually locking and unlocking wasn’t worth the added security when you didn’t have anything worth stealing in the car.
from Frederick Pohl’s novella “The Midas Plague” : In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class “poor” must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots’ extravagant production, while the upper-class “rich” can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. Trained as an engineer, Morey modifies his robots to enjoy helping to consume his family’s quota. He fears punishment when his idea is discovered, but the Ration Board—which has been looking for a way to abolish itself—quickly implements Morey’s idea across the world.
Partly in response to the electrical gremlin problem, I stopped locking my car doors years ago. Life has improved dramatically since! And I live in an urban-ish neighborhood. It really is pleasant to just walk up to my car and open the door, no key fumbling or fob booping.
I do have to live with the awareness that strangers enter my car regularly, and all of the nickles, dimes and quarters have been cleaned out of the change bin - but the pennies are still there!
With truly modern cars, you just walk up with the fob in your purse or pocket and the car recognizes you / the fob and unlocks the door. Hop in, push [start], and away you go. When you get to your destination you shut off the car, get out, close the door, and walk away. A few feet later the car notices you (your fob actually) is leaving, and locks the doors.
An excellent system when all goes according to plan. My partner prefers that I do the driving, even when we’re in her Prius. When I let her out to go shopping or visit her friend or whatever, we have to figure out who has the fob. Way too often I drive away and she’s got it.
Most modern cars have two fobs. And the car can tell which is which.
When I walk up to the driver’s side carrying “my” fob the car unlocks, moves the seats, mirrors, sets up the HVAC & music, etc., according to my profile. When GF walks up to the driver’s side of the same car with “her” fob, the car sets everything up per her profile. If she’s driving and I jump out to go shopping, the car knows she and her fob are still inside. And behaves accordingly.
There us another question, a more immediate one: “when it siezes up, will it be when I’m cranking the window down, or while I’m trying to crank the window closed?”
And it works marvelously for our vehicle with the same system, but my wife does become a little bit put out when she’s the current driver but I use my fob button to remotely open the powered doors (minivan side doors or back hatch) and the driver’s amenities reconfigure for me.
It takes mere seconds for her to push the button inside the car to restore the Proper Order of Things, so it’s not a meaningful harm. But for her, it’s like invading her prorogatives.
I had a SAAB that was our favorite car that Mrs G and I have ever had. However, it would intermittently about once per week die while driving or not start at all, just abruptly stop. The engine wouldn’t turn over or have the slightest click when starting. After a few dozen tries of the ignition, it would restart happy as a clam for the next week or so. It was of course irreproducible when taken to a mechanic.
The fourth mechanic we took it to finally found that the cause was a magnetic sensor deep in the engine structure that was measuring the position of something deeper inside, like a piston or crank. The magnetic field was so weak that the sensor was always in the ‘barely sensing anything at all’ region, and when the right combination of engine heat, wire resistance, and magnetic field slipped below the line, then the car decided it wasn’t happy and shut down.
Many replacement sensors were tried, some could barely sense, others were useless out of the box, but whatever magnetic field that was sufficient from the factory just wasn’t present enough to be sensed anymore.
Per the topic, it is a ridiculously easy solved problem how to sense a piston/shaft position, a convoluted integrated electronic sensor trying to measure the whims and moods of far away finicky electrons across the continental divide of the steel engine wall is not the way.
Sadly, we waited for the car to be in a “good mood” for a few days, then took it to a dealer for a trade-in on a new car, crossing our fingers that it would stay in its good mood while the dealer was test driving it.
I don’t know a lot about cars, but it seems to me that the auto stop-start feature in newer cars is hard on the car’s starter system. Stopping and starting a car 20 times a day has to create some wear and tear.
I saw an online video where a mechanic says that it’s a useless piece of tech that is hard on cars.
But like I said, what do I know? I always turn mine off.
That’s been done to death around here. The starters are designed for that wear cycle.
In many cases the computer stops the engine with one cylinder fully fueled and fully compressed, just past TDC. To start the engine, the computer fires that spark plug, which fires the one cylinder which has enough oomph to get the warm engine going again. The electric starter doesn’t even get used except as a backup.
You can always find a vid by a curmudgeon who doesn’t understand. These auto stop/start features have been on cars for ~15 years now. And nearly universal for a decade. If there was going to be vast uptick in starter problems, they would have surfaced long long ago. They haven’t.
I had one on my Honda Insight – a hybrid that I bought in ‘97. It was a rare feature at the time, and people who rode in my car for the first time would always comment on it. “Your car just died!” Then, I’d take my foot off the brake, and they’d go “It just started again!”
My auto shutoff/restart is switched off because I too find mildly irritating. But not out of any concern that somehow it’ll wear out my starter. Just feels weird.
I’ve promised myself a couple of times to try switching it back on and see if I can overcome it bugging me. But I’ve never managed to remember that pledge when I jump in the car.
