Smart Key, but About the Driver…
I can’t resist this story from one of my favorite blogs, “Tales of a Traffic Cop,” which I would urge the legions of people out there who seem to think the highway patrol exists solely to extract revenue from beleaguered American drivers to peruse. And there’s definitely some design and usability lessons in here.
I knew from the start of the day it was going to be a crazy day. The first call I get is from a driver on the highway. Here’s the crazy story, but trust me, I am not imaginative enough to dream this one up. The owner was warming her car up in her driveway.
Sidenote, don’t leave your keys in an unlocked to “warm it up” in the morning. It’s the best way to give your car away. Especially if you live near a high school! I can’t tell you how many recovered stolen autos we’ve found in parking lots of our high schools. Anyway…
This lady was smart enough NOT to leave her keys in the car. But, she had a smart key, one of those keys that you just leave in your pocket and press a button to start it. So, as she’s warming it up, she decides to leave the key on her hood near her windshield wipers. Car gets all warmed up, so she drives away.
The problem is, she doesn’t grab the smart key. She noticed that she forgot as she’s driving 60 down the highway, during a snowfall. BUT, instead of pulling over calmly and retrieving her smart key, she decided to roll the window down, turn on the wipers and try to grab the key that way. Needless to say, it doesn’t work, and now her smart key is traveling AWAY from her car at 60 mph. For those of you that don’t have smart keys for their cars, this is not an ideal situation to keep the car powered.
She’s able to get stopped, and wants me to shut down a 3 lane highway in order for her to try and find her key. Mind you, it’s a 3″ square box on a three lane highway that snow plows are clearing. Obviously, that’s not gonna happen. I convince her that we can just go to her house and get the spare.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 11:13 am and is filed under Cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 12th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Awesome blog Tom, thanks for sharing.
February 23rd, 2010 at 2:01 am
Great read!
Why on earth did she leave it on the hood though? Why not keep it in her pocket/purse? What was to stop a kid on his way to high school grabbing the smart key and driving off?
Of course i understand the important part of the story – trying to recover key while driving at speed and then expecting highway to be shut down.
Story really makes me appreciate my lovely, smart, wife!