An avid New York Yankees fan even after he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla., Jerry Zitser wouldn’t have missed a televised game, so his daughter knew something was wrong when she phoned the 86-year-old’s home and he didn’t answer.
The two had a ritual of talking near the beginning of every game, frequently discussing the merits of the pitcher, Suzi Zitser recalled. That, too, was something her father wouldn’t miss. So her next step that summer afternoon in 2012 was to call one of her dad’s neighbors, asking her to fetch one of the gated community’s security guards to check on Jerry Zitser in person.
They found him dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, his body in a recliner in the den, facing a television which was still showing the Yankees game. The smell of exhaust fumes permeated the house, and in the attached garage, his Toyota Avalon equipped with a keyless ignition was still running.
“They found the fob for the automobile in his shirt pocket,” Suzi Zitser told the Washington Examiner.
Unfamiliar with keyless-engine technology at the time, Zitser began researching it and soon found reports of other deaths in similar circumstances. Keyless ignitions allow drivers to start vehicles with the push of a button as long as a fob with a built-in radio transmitter is close enough to transmit an ignition code, like a digital key, to vehicle sensors.
The downside, safety advocates say, is that such systems make it much easier for drivers to leave the vehicle running when they exit, particularly if they’re helping kids or pets get out or if they’re unloading purchases. The latter is what Jerry Zitser had done, coming home from a grocery-store run before the game started.
Since her father was accustomed to mechanical keys that couldn’t be removed unless a vehicle was turned off, having the fob in hand “gave him a reassurance that the car can’t still be running,” Suzi Zitser explained. Taking the fob away from most vehicles, however, doesn’t turn them off.
In the weeks and months after her father’s death, she and her brother and sister discussed what she’d found in her research, realizing that a fix — designing the ignition systems to power down vehicles after a certain amount of idling time — seemed relatively simple.
“We said, ‘Let’s just try to prevent one more senseless death,'” she recalled. Zitser then wrote to a government agency that referred her letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which at the time was weighing new rules for keyless ignitions. It had begun the process in 2011 but still has not finished it.
The agency “knew of this problem two years before my father died, and they did absolutely nothing,” Zitser said.
When she learned that Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., had taken an interest in the issue, she wrote to him, and she and her family supported a bill he proposed in late February that would require the Traffic Safety Administration to finalize a rule mandating auto-shutoff devices.
“This legislation will require NHTSA to do what it should have done nearly eight years ago — protect American drivers and families from injury and death by finalizing some basic safety standards,” said Blumenthal, who represents the state where Jerry Zitser once lived and where his daughter still resides.
The measure already has the backing of automakers Ford and GM as well as safety advocacy groups. Roughly half of the 17 million cars sold in the U.S. each year have keyless ignitions, and more than 90 injuries and fatalities have been linked to them since 2006, including cases where the vehicles rolled after drivers turned them off without putting them into a parking gear.
The numbers, which were compiled by the safety advocacy group Kidsandcars.org, may actually be much higher. No comprehensive figures exist, however, since the federal government hasn’t tracked such cases.
It’s a situation Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., urged the Traffic Safety Administration to correct last year.
The agency’s lack of action has allowed some carmakers “to state publicly that their keyless ignition systems meet or exceed all relevant federal safety standards, despite the known and unaddressed dangers,” he wrote in a July letter to acting administrator Heidi King, whom President Trump has nominated to fill the post permanently.
Ford, which already includes an auto-shutoff feature in some of its models that activates after 15 minutes, “supports the principle” of Blumenthal’s bill, spokeswoman Rachel McCleery told the Washington Examiner.
GM, which has built a similar feature that turns off engines after about an hour into some of its Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC models, said it also backed the proposal.
Without a federal rule requiring such a feature or other safety backstops for keyless ignitions, however, most carmakers haven’t addressed the issue, Blumenthal said.
While many said they supported uniform standards when the Traffic Safety Administration first proposed its rules, they quibbled over details ranging from the questionnaires the government was using to seek input from vehicle owners to the volume of alert beeps that might be mandated to warn drivers their car was running, government records show. The 2011 proposal didn’t require auto-shutoff.
The Auto Alliance, a trade group representing companies behind 70 percent of all U.S. auto sales, said keyless ignitions generally conform to standards set by SAE International, formerly known as the Society of Automotive Engineers. That organization’s guideline for keyless ignitions mentions a timed auto-shutoff feature but doesn’t require it.
The core issue with a keyless ignition is that it “completely upends the traditional relationship we have with our keys,” said Safety Research & Strategies President Sean Kane, who worked with Zitser’s family in their campaign.
“If you have your metal key in your hand and not in your car, you can make two clear statements about the state of that vehicle,” he told the Washington Examiner. “One, the transmission must be in park — it has to be locked in park so it can’t roll away. And two, the engine has to be off; otherwise the key cannot be in your hand.”
While vehicle owners’ manuals refer to the fob as a key, “It has no role in shutting down the car,” he added. “They’re not designed so that when you exit with the fob the car will shut off, as opposed to you have to be in the vehicle with the fob to get it to run.”
Blumenthal’s bill will address the risks from that design, which Kane called counterintuitive. “Somebody needed to step up and do something,” he added. “Too many people have died.”
Zitser hopes the proposal garners the support needed to become law and keep others from suffering her father’s fate.
“All we ever wanted from the day he died was to prevent another senseless death,” she said.
A Navy veteran who served during World War II, Jerry Zitser had purchased his Florida home at the request of Suzi’s mother, Sylvia, who died in 2009. The house had state-of-the-art alarm systems, but its construction predated a Florida requirement that new buildings include carbon monoxide detectors.
“The unfortunate problem was the garage that was attached to the house,” Suzi Zitser said. Next to the garage wall was the den, she said, “where he would watch his games and stuff and had his computer.”
The day of Jerry Zitser’s death, car exhaust fumes seeped into the room through its air conditioning vents. “As he was waiting for the game, essentially, poison was coming into the house,” she added.
Until that time, Zitser had been in good health for his age, she said, a popular figure in his community who played the tenor saxophone with local bands and rode his bicycle every day.
“We, as a family, thought we had many good years left,” she said.
