But at least on a chevy (don't remember the model) you can lock the car with the engine running and no one inside. How do I know this? three years back I rented a car (with key) in Los Vegas to get over to Front Sight with two friends .... got to the Best Western in Pahrump late afternoon and unloaded our gear and went inside.... dern car was so quiet running you could not hear it... not a hybrid either... one of the buddies came out later in the night to smoke a cigar and realized the car was not locked and so he opened the driver's door and hit the lock button and the car would not lock and so finally he just pushed the lock tab at the window down and closed the door.. that's when he realized the dash lights were still on.... and then could tell the engine was still running. damn! cost us an hour or more of panic and ultimately $65.

Loud pipes save lives

I don't understand this. I looked at the article, but I don't get it. Do I understand correctly that people are closing their garage doors instead of starting their car? Huh?? Do not get this at all.

I don’t understand this either but then again I don’t understand stupid people. They are leaving their cars running with the agarage door closed. Engines and exhausts make noise, maybe they are deaf? If so, the dash will be illuminated. Keyless fobs are not the problem, stupidity is. You can’t fix stupid.

Natural selection in action

quote:

Los Vegas to get over to Front Sight with two friends .... got to the Best Western in Pahrump

To hump, to hump, you go to Pahrump.....

It costs a lot more to get your button pressed in Pahrump.....

You can fix stupidity...with death.

Dead = No more stupidity at least coming out that low wattage brain.

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
I don’t understand this either but then again I don’t understand stupid people. They are leaving their cars running with the agarage door closed. Engines and exhausts make noise, maybe they are deaf? If so, the dash will be illuminated. Keyless fobs are not the problem, stupidity is. You can’t fix stupid.

Cars are pretty quiet these days. I almost got hit by a Prius backing up yesterday because I didn't realize it was even running, never mind about to back up.

In any case there have been times I've left the car running as I started to exit. The alarm when the door opened always stopped me. When this happens it's usually some other distraction, getting groceries from the back seat, on the phone or some such crap like that. I would imagine the door alarms when it's opened on these cars. In that case I guess it is stupidity. I did forget to check what my girlfriend's car does in this situation.

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:
Put an override on the engine off feature. Don't leave your dog in the car like that anyway.

That is standard procedure for K9 officers with all kinds of agencies around here. Engine running, AC on, lock car, take care of whatever business you need to take care of, then come back, unlock car, hop in, drive off.

Different folks have different situations and use their vehicles in different ways. They aren’t necessarily wrong.

Modern cars have more and more gadgets built in and are frankly rolling computers. The problem with computers is that they have software and software is written by programmers who have to make decisions on what to do in a given situation. Often what one customer thinks is right in that situation another thinks is wrong. I hate my wife’s X5 (but she loves it and yes, I know that is all that matters), but it is *way* better than her last X5, I really loathed that one. Apparently I was not the only one who hated some of their programming decisions and let them know and they actually fixed some of them.

The convenience gadgets built into modern cars make them more and more different. In the old days it was pretty easy to hop in any car and go. If the car was freakish weird, the window cranks turned backwards, but it wasn’t that hard to deal with. Now with so much automation, navigation, entertainment systems (no more AM radios with four or five mechanical buttons that you pull out to set), a fair bit of study is needed to learn how to safely operate a modern car.

It isn’t so different from next gen airplanes. Unlike the old birds with a VOR receiver or two where if you can run one you can run any of them, the new avionics systems take a fair bit of study to understand and different companies produce different products that don’t all operate the same. There days being competent with one particular system means you are competent with one particular system. Some of that knowledge may transfer to another system, some may not.

New car operating systems may require new habits of their users. Convenience comes at a cost.

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
I don’t understand this either but then again I don’t understand stupid people. They are leaving their cars running with the agarage door closed. Engines and exhausts make noise, maybe they are deaf? If so, the dash will be illuminated. Keyless fobs are not the problem, stupidity is. You can’t fix stupid.

People want to make excuses but the reality is a large portion of the population go through life totally distracted. Face buried in their phone like they’re doing something important.

quote:

Originally posted by rburg:
I believe it was Shakespere who had the answer "first, kill all lawyers" Almost all people can come up with some phony heart wretching story where the 'po folkes should be allowed to sue the mega corporation. I even agree with the concept, just not to the perverted length its been taken to. Maybe we should allow the corporations to sue stupid people for damaging their reputations.

Yes, (and as Dallas239 pointed out, it was the bad guys saying that), but the ambulance chasing lawyers just reflect a sickness in society. If, every time a lawyer approached people saying he could get them money for their misfortune at someone else’s expense, they responded with “Eat feces and die scumbag!” then said ambulance chasers would either starve to death or go find honest work (or at least less dishonest work).

The ambulance chasers are just a tool that allows people with no scruples another avenue to go for “free shit.”

Lest I be misunderstood, there are a lot of lawyers who are not ambulance chasers and there are some cases where a legitimate wrong is only corrected by an “ambulance chaser” bringing a wrongdoing individual or corporation to justice. It is just that there are a whole lot of bogus cases too, and that is as much on us as a society as it is on “those awful lawyers.”