Adele Ridless and Mort Victor went out to dinner and returned home to get ready for their trip to San Francisco. When friends arrived to take them to the airport the following morning, they found the couple dead in the Boca Raton, Fla. home they shared. High levels of carbon monoxide, a deadly colorless and odorless gas, were detected in the house and authorities suspect that a keyless-ignition Mercedes found in the garage may have been left running.
The Danger
Keyless ignition systems allow drivers to keep their key fobs in their pockets or purses when accessing and starting their vehicles. Convenient and designed to make it harder to steal your car, keyless ignitions are showing up in an increasing number of new cars. According to Edmunds.com, there were more than 160 models, from high-end to bargain vehicles, offering this feature in 2011.
The problem is that the very uniqueness of the keyless systems is also a dangerous attribute. Most drivers are accustomed to turning their cars on and off with a key. The repetition of every day acts creates a kind of procedural memory in our brains and as a result we do things without even thinking about them. Keyless systems, however, go against the well established habits of drivers.
“Most drivers have spent years inserting a key and turning it to start the engine, then removing the key to shut the engine off, but keyless start completely does away with this familiar process,” says Edmunds.com Senior Analyst Karl Brauer. “Now that modern engines are so smooth and quiet, people are not surprisingly walking away from their vehicles with the engine still running.”
And I can vouch for how easily it happens. My husband drives a Nissan Altima but I rarely use it. However, on more than one occasion when I have driven it — and despite its warning beep — I’ve gotten out of the car before I realized that the motor was still running.
Given how easy it is to forget to turn off a car with keyless ignition, the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning is real and pressing and the deaths of Adele Ridless and Mort Victor are not isolated cases. The Center for Auto Safety reports it has tracked six fatalities involving push-button starters and has gone so far as to recommend a return to key-starting ignitions.
A Call for Standardization and Better Alerts
In response to complaints about a growing number of keyless ignition-related mishaps, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a proposed rule change in December calling for a standardization of all push-button cars that would address keyless ignition safety concerns, including a way to turn the motor off in an emergency. NHTSA also proposed requiring that all cars with keyless ignitions have a warning signal or alarm that sounds if drivers leave the car with its engine still running.
When asked in an ABC News interview whether drivers were partly to blame for exiting their cars without turning them off, Clarence Ditlow, executive director for the Center for Auto Safety, responded, “Sure, it’s our fault. But this is a device that makes it easy to forget, and the cost of forgetfulness should not be death by carbon monoxide.”
