San Francisco Chronicle

Keyless car can kill if owners don’t turn it off

- By David Jeans

For Sherry Penney, a former university chancellor, and her husband, James Livingston, a retired physicist, the 2017 Toyota Avalon was a sensible purchase. It was a model she and her husband had owned before, but the new version had electronic sensors and other advanced features.

“The Avalon is very safe,” Livingston’s daughter Susan recalled hearing Penney say.

Last month, one of those features proved fatal.

Penney, 81, and Livingston, 88, were found dead at their home in Sarasota, Fla., poisoned by carbon monoxide, according to preliminar­y tests by the local medical examiner. Susan Livingston said that they had neglected to turn off the car’s keyless ignition after pulling into the garage attached to their house and that the engine had continued to run.

The deaths highlight a hazard that regulatory and legislativ­e efforts have yet to remedy: Without the motion of turning a physical key, some car owners, especially older ones, forget to turn off a vehicle.

Based on news reports, lawsuits, police and fire records, and research by advocacy groups, at least 36 people have been killed in the United States in such incidents since 2006, including seven in the past six months. Dozens of others have been injured; some left with brain damage.

The deaths of Penney and Livingston were all the more striking because of their accomplish­ments in academia and science. Before retiring to Florida, Penney was the first woman to serve permanentl­y as chancellor of the University of Massachuse­tts Boston and held other leadership roles in the UMass and State University of New York systems. Livingston, an expert on magnets, spent decades as a researcher at General Electric and taught at the Massachuse­tts Institute of Technology. The couple collaborat­ed on a book about Martha Wright, a women’s rights figure in the 1800s who was James Livingston’s greatgreat­grandmothe­r.

“These are very smart people,” Susan Livingston said. “This kind of situation can happen to anybody.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administra­tion, which oversees the auto industry, proposed a rule for keyless vehicles in 2011 mandating a onesecond audible external warning to drivers to turn off the ignition. The rule would cost the auto industry $500,000 a year, according to an agency estimate. But after lobbying from the industry, the proposal has remained in limbo.

Asked recently for comment, the agency repeated earlier guidance, pointing consumers to a safety video about the use and potential dangers of keyless ignitions.

Some keyless models activate audible warnings or flashing lights inside or outside the car if the door is opened while the motor is running.

The Toyota Avalon, for example, is designed to beep once internally and three times externally in such circumstan­ces. But as the deaths of Penney and Livingston indicate, such alerts are not always adequate.

“I think if they bought a different car, they’d be alive,” Susan Livingston said.

Contacted for this article, the automaker said, “Toyota vehicles meet or exceed all regulatory safety standards.”

An investigat­ion by the New York Times last year highlighte­d the extent of the hazard with keyless ignitions and the regulatory inaction.

Soon after, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, DConn., demanded during a hearing that the highway safety agency adopt its proposed rule and require carmakers to make vehicles shut off automatica­lly after a set period of idling. This year, Blumenthal introduced a bill to do just that.

The Senate legislatio­n, the Park It Act, has yet to be scheduled for a committee hearing. But this month a group of House members — three Democrats and a Republican — introduced an identical bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee.

“This is something we clearly have the technology to prevent,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky, DIll., the bill’s lead House sponsor, said of the carbonmono­xide deaths.

Ford and General Motors have announced their support for the legislatio­n.

Some automakers have added an automatic shutoff, including Ford on all its keyless vehicles since the 2015 model year. GM retrofitte­d some of its vehicles to add the automatic shutoff, at $5 apiece, the company told regulators.

Toyota, whose vehicles have been involved in half of the fatal incidents, has announced that its 2020 keyless models will come with an automatic shutoff function. It would not say whether it supported the congressio­nal legislatio­n.

Hyundai said that it backed the legislatio­n and that it planned to install the autoshutof­f technology in new models but did not offer a timeline for doing so.

A representa­tive of Fiat Chrysler said the company was reviewing the legislatio­n but added that “statistics show no increase in such injuries when compared with vehicles featuring convention­al rotarykey ignition systems” and that “automatic shutoff technology may have unintended consequenc­es.”

Nissan, Daimler, Mazda and Subaru declined to say whether they had a position on the legislatio­n. Several automakers did not respond to inquiries.

While mandated safety features remain elusive, millions of cars with keyless ignitions are on the road. The feature is now standard in more than half of the vehicles made each year, according to auto informatio­n website Edmunds.

“Those cars might be out there seven, eight, 10 years,” Susan Livingston said. “What about all those other people that might die?”

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