Regulations

That article seems to suggest it wouldn’t be an issue to have a relatively short cut-off point on new cars.

Many people rely on their car for warmth in the winter. I’m specifically thinking the homeless but sure there are other groups (say, someone taking a quick nap between jobs).

Sure. You are sitting in a sweltering (or freezing) parking lot waiting for your wife and daughters to get out of the beauty supply store. They ran in there to pick up a birthday present for one of the girls’ friends; they knew exactly what they were going to get; it was only going to take two minutes, max. But that’s a lie. They’re liars. It will be not less than twenty minutes before they make it to the cash register and probably ten minutes more as they discuss unfathomable things with the cashier. In the meantime, I need the AC (or heat) running so I don’t die… they’ve forgotten to crack the windows for me.

I’ve left my wife’s car “running” in the garage before. It’s a hybrid and the engine shuts itself off when the car is at rest (say at a stop-light), so it’s tough to tell if you’ve remembered to hit the button or not. But it will theoretically run the gas engine if it doesn’t have the power necessary to run the AC/heat. I think it is smart enough not to do that if the key fob isn’t in the vehicle though.

Most cars I’ve been in don’t need the engine running to run the heat/AC.

LOL, why is this hard? Seriously, put a CO detector in the car. Manufacturers are required to have back-up cameras and levers in the trunk, this is way cheaper than both. Probably $1-$2 for the sensor in bulk and some wiring.

Make sure it doesn’t cut the engine off while traveling at speed to solve the potential problem of getting trolled by people rolling coal.

Then you can leave your car idling all day in a parking lot outside.

PS - I would also advocate for smoke detectors to also detect CO or more regulations about where you have to have CO detectors (like on electricity generators, for example).

They should consider a loud “Car Is On and the Door is Open” alarm, including some flashing lights. That allows the following:

  • If you’re stranded in a winter storm, you can stay in your car and leave it running
  • You can warm up your car in winter
  • You can start the car remotely, then get in and drive away

Yet, you would be far less likely to leave the car running in your garage as you get out and head into the house.

Could the car not measure internal and external temperature and make rules based on that?

People idle cars all the time. Let’s say it’s a warm day and I have the dog with me. I leave her with the AC on in the car while I run inside places all the time, cause even if it’s like only 70 out, the car can easily top 100 if there isn’t any shade (and there’s rarely any shade in parking lots these days).

Er… that’s generally not correct and you’d run the battery down if you happened to have one that worked like that anyway. Not to mention you’d presumably want the car to turn off completely and not drain the battery sitting in the garage running everything while “off”. This is a very situational issue that you’re talking about making vehicles into unreliable pieces of shit no one would want to own to deal with.

One of the under appreciated things about Tesla is how many simple things they got right that rest of the car industry screwed up.

When you approach a Tesla with the key fob in your pocket. It turns on and powers up. When you and all of the passenger leave the car. It waits a few minutes, turns off the AC, the head lights and locks the car.

If you want to do something different. Like have the AC running to keep your grocery or you dog cold while you run a couple of errands. You have phone app that you can remotely turn on the car and turn on the AC (or in the case of ICE vehicle warm up the cars engine).

I pretty much always leave the engine running on rental car at least once, because I just assume that cars will do the right thing and they don’t.

Not calling you out on this, but just as a point of information:

Gas-powered cars typically heat the interior by piping some of the engine coolant through a small radiator (different and separate from the main radiator, usually). Air is then run over the radiator which transfers the heat to the air and thence into the cabin. This is why it takes so damn long for the heat to really kick in on a cold day; you’ve got to wait for all those gallons of coolant to heat up before you will feel the difference. If it was just a coil of wire that the battery heated up, you’d feel the effects much sooner.

Most cars run the coolant pump off the mechanical engine power rather than electrically, so the coolant stops pumping soon after the engine stops. Many cars do run the coolant pump for a minute or so after the engine is turned off, but that’s to make sure the engine isn’t damaged, not to keep the heat going.

The air conditioner works just like a home’s AC: a compressor is run to compress the refrigerant from a gas to a liquid which then expands into gas in the evaporator coils, cooling them. Air is then blown over the coils, transferring heat from the air into the coils and then the cool air is blown into the cabin.

Most gas cars use the serpentine belt to turn the compressor. This is why your car loses power when you turn on the AC – the compressor is siphoning power from the drive-train to work its magic.

So if you have a gas car and the engine is off, you’re not really running the heat or the cooling, you’re just running the fan. Eventually the radiator/coil will reach the ambient temperature and you’ll start to feel the chill or heat.

All-electric cars do it differently of course. I assume that the heater is just a coil like you’d see in a room heater, and presumably the AC is run off the battery as well. Maybe some hybrids do this as well, I’m not sure.

You’re a New York native right? :)

Philly area, so maybe that’s it

I was thinking of Stusser, but close enough.

I lock my car upon opening the door to exit and I’ve spent most of my life in the rural, gentile south…

There are times I feel like I have idled while waiting for a train that long.

For nearly the first 15 years of me driving I rarely locked my car doors. That came to a screeching halt when my car was broken into, finally, in Virginia Beach.

Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.

When I had a shitty car I never locked the doors.

People usually stole my extra change from my ash tray, which I saw as me giving to charity in my way. Then some fucker took the fucking ash tray out of the console and ended that generosity. I mean, shit I was giving you free money, and you take my ashtray too? Killing the golden goose, my man, I parked the same place every day and never locked the doors, but now that money is going into a cup behind a deadbolt instead of your pocket.

Now that my car isn’t shitty I lock the doors even though there is basically no crime at all here and I don’t need to. Ironically, I never lock my apartment door, so I’ve reversed it, though coming in to my place is a lot more involved than it used to be since you have to go through two sets of doors, well lit and up a flight of stairs that I’ll hear you coming up. The old place, if I didn’t lock the door it would blow open since the latch was janky and it was about 3 feet from the sidewalk to inside my place and the area was a hell of a lot sketchier.

So, I think I’ve posted this elsewhere here in the gun thread, but I pulled a gun on a neighbor that walked into my home. Obviously there is more to the story. I didn’t hear her knocking and she was returning my dog, but the short of it is that I only caught the tail end of hearing my back door opened and I came out into the room with gun in hand.

She doesn’t speak to me anymore, which I don’t mention because I’m proud of it or the ordeal. It was messed up all around. But there you go, I -probably- don’t have to worry about locking my door because I’m sure she told everyone. I do anyway.

Sounds like the beginning of a 70s porn film. :)

Best typo ever.

“Hey baby, what do you say you let me stir that martini…”