The deadly dangers of push-button ignitions

Dying to have a new car with all the techno-wow features you see endlessly advertised? The manufacturers are surely glad to provide you with them. Just make sure they’ve perfected them before they cause injury — or worse.

The news has been alight in recent days of a New York Times investigation into keyless vehicles being unwittingly left running by their owners, who subsequently die or suffer injury due to carbon monoxide seeping into their homes. I wrote about this three years ago; the NYT reveals not nearly enough has been done in that time to stop the fatalities. Without the familiar process of removing a key from an ignition, some presume their car is shut off and exit it, leaving the engine running. With the use of now-ubiquitous key fobs, there’s a chance your key never left your pocket, let alone needing to be removed from the ignition.

People are fallible. Accidental carbon monoxide poisonings from cars left running in a garage are hardly new. For decades, specialists in the field, like Dr. Neil Hampson from Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, Wash., have advocated the importance of properly functioning carbon monoxide detectors to save lives. He’s right.

But advances in automotive technology are now highlighting the ever-changing role played by the automakers. Older reports, especially in colder climates, used to highlight the dangers of warming up your car in a garage whether you’d opened the door or not. Sometimes, people would start a car and forget it was running. The results read like a tragic roll call of unintended consequences with entire families swallowed by the deadly gas. Now, with the advent of quieter engines and keyless cars, the tragedies are arising from drivers unaware they’ve left their car running at all.

Statistics have traditionally reflected that carbon monoxide poisoning causing death can involve many sources, from faulty furnaces to improperly used barbecues. Trying to track consistent reporting from state to state, or province to province, of carbon monoxide deaths and hospitalizations due to a vehicle emission of the deadly gas is elusive, and many studies use news stories looking to trap that very data. Canada reports more than 50 carbon monoxide related deaths a year; I can’t tell you how many are due to an idling vehicle. Other studies put an asterisk beside the word, “accidental,” to further delineate the fact some unfortunately choose their own demise.

As accidental deaths started to pile up in the U.S., however, industry giants like NHTSA and the Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE) started calling on manufacturers to address the Edsel in the room: Their very technology — keyless vehicles — is killing some consumers.

Studies into all manner of carbon monoxide poisoning has always been in search of a solution. Carbon monoxide detectors should be standard in all homes, and in the past couple of decades, the push has been to make them as regular as smoke detectors. But investigations such as the New York Times’ points out a shifting school of thought: If you make a product too easy to misuse with dangerous results, you are obligated to fix it to stop killing your customers.

If you think it could never happen to you, consider that some new features that make it into cars long before they should. We’ve seen totally useless touchscreens in some cars until they got it right — sorry for all of you early adopters stuck with the untested and untrue — plus electronic shifters that have led to numerous rollaways, subsequent recalls and lawsuits, and the frustrating evolution of key fobs.

I’ve driven 100 cars with an electronic shifter, and I’ve hated the feature in every single one. I’ve driven hundreds more with key fobs, and I long for a normal key. Manufacturers started putting in chimes and warnings to remind drivers they’d left a key fob behind, or that the car was running, but only after years of experimenting with effective means — if a chime goes off inside the car after a driver has left, does it really go off at all? — to get a driver’s attention. And that’s the problem: So much is competing for a driver’s attention, some very important things are being missed.

Those who perish for mistakenly believing their car is turned off are not idiots. Those injured in rollaways believing their car was in park are not idiots. I’m the first on board for accepting driver error, but if you’re going to cram a ton of technology into the cars you offer, it had better be close to bulletproof before it hits the market.