TRAPPED IN A HOT CAR
On June 15th my old dog was with me in my ID.4. She has cancer and a bad heart. I am 84 and suffer from arthritis which limits motion. It was early in the afternoon in Flagstaff, AZ, at 7,000 feet elevation, ambient temp 90 degrees F. My ‘21 Pro, less than a year old and with 3,000 miles on it, had an SOC in the seventies, so no problem there. We were parked in a shopping center, near Burger King. Since I still think of my car as new, I always try to park in remote areas of parking lots. Also, I get a little exercise that way.
For my dog’s thirteenth birthday we were about to break diet protocol and indulge in a burger, fries and an ice cream cone. We do this every year.
I turned on immediate climate control, holding the temperature at seventy-five, locked the car and went inside to get our treats. Service was fast so I was back in five minutes. To spare my back and enhance the celebration I got in the back seat with my canine companion. The key fob and cell phone were in my pockets as usual. We sat in cool comfort and communed over our snacks. My dog was in heaven. This is the high point of her year.
After a while (thirty minute timer?) the AC shut off so it was time for me to resume the driver’s seat. That’s when I discovered we were locked in. The back doors would not open. I tried pulling the handle twice and pulling it hard. (I have good hand/arm strength and have no trouble handling fifty lb. bags of horse feed). Clicking the key fob three times resulted in solenoid activity inside the rear doors but still they wouldn’t open. The MyVW app didn’t have an unlock function. I wish I had thought of setting the climate control with MyVW but It was getting really hot and I was starting to panic. My old dog was panting hard. Dogs don’t sweat and it doesn’t take much to send a dog, especially an old, compromised dog, into heat stroke.
I didn’t notice whether either of the door lock buttons on the driver’s door was illuminated. But why would they be? I had never touched them. I had been out of the car for five minutes. Doors had opened and closed. The car was stationary.
What were my options? To pound on a window and ask a passer-by to do…what? Call 911? I could do that myself. Besides, I saw nobody around our area. Since I had the fob, could they have opened a front door from outside? I don’t know.
It was getting hotter by the minute. And, remember we were at an altitude of 7,000 ft. The sun always seems more severe at that altitude.
The only reasonable option seemed to be to get to the front seat. I started trying. Head first, feet first. Face up, face down. Arm rests up or down. Driver’s seatback forward or back (I could reach the control for that motorized function, but not the one for moving the seat forward). Between the arm rests, my 200 lb. bulk, severe arthritis, front seats rolled all the way back and a big dog taking up a lot of the back seat, no matter how I struggled I couldn’t get there. I also couldn’t put enough weight on the front seat from my position to activate the switch and turn on the AC or release the rear door locks, in case that might have worked.
My poor dog, beyond panting, was starting to hack and gag. I was feeling weak and a bit faint. My brain felt half asleep. I had the bizarre notion to take off all my sweat-soaked clothes, including bulky new jeans and my work boots, to make it easier to maneuver. Even stripping was difficult, feeling already enervated by the heat and cramped as we were in the back seat. Somehow I managed it and I don’t remember exactly what happened then but I found myself in the driver’s seat, naked. There was nobody around to notice my Adonis-like corpus. The AC was on, the car was cooling rapidly, my dog was back to normal breathing and my head was clearing. The whole emergency had taken about an hour from the time the AC turned off.
After a few minutes of recovery time and getting dressed, as soon I tried to drive home and got “key not detected” and “brake boost limited” messages. I could not shift out of Park. After ten minutes everything cleared and we drove home with no further problem then or since.
Fob problem? Not likely as the car has only 3,000 miles on it and there have been no further incidents. I don’t see how the fob could have been in a blind spot because I had moved it around plenty when I was trying to click open the doors.
Yeah, I can think—now—of things I should have done. Call the dealer? Call VW? Find out where is the magic place to put the fob? Couldn’t find a reference to it in the dreadful manual.
No harm, no foul? Well, maybe.
My conclusion: no matter what else I should or should not have known or done, no matter how bad VW’s software is, no matter how urgent it was for VW to get these cars to market prematurely, this incident should never have been possible and should never have happened. To anyone. Ever.
The experience really shook me. What if we had spent another hour in that car as the temperature increased even more? Will I ever trust the car again? At the moment I don’t. Every time I look at it, I hear “I’m sorry, HAL, I’m afraid I can’t do that…”
The service manager at my dealership, who is ID.4 certified, is taking the incident quite seriously. He is making inquiries by phone and email. The sales manager has already offered me $40,000 for the car, which means breaking the lease, paying the remaining taxes and rebating me $9,000 cash. It also means I can do better elsewhere by buying out the lease and selling the car myself.
I plan to wait a few weeks to see what answers the service manager comes up with and give myself some time to calm down.
Meanwhile, has anyone been similarly locked in?Does anyone know what went wrong or have suggestions about what else I should have done? Other than not getting in the back seat, of course.
On June 15th my old dog was with me in my ID.4. She has cancer and a bad heart. I am 84 and suffer from arthritis which limits motion. It was early in the afternoon in Flagstaff, AZ, at 7,000 feet elevation, ambient temp 90 degrees F. My ‘21 Pro, less than a year old and with 3,000 miles on it, had an SOC in the seventies, so no problem there. We were parked in a shopping center, near Burger King. Since I still think of my car as new, I always try to park in remote areas of parking lots. Also, I get a little exercise that way.
For my dog’s thirteenth birthday we were about to break diet protocol and indulge in a burger, fries and an ice cream cone. We do this every year.
I turned on immediate climate control, holding the temperature at seventy-five, locked the car and went inside to get our treats. Service was fast so I was back in five minutes. To spare my back and enhance the celebration I got in the back seat with my canine companion. The key fob and cell phone were in my pockets as usual. We sat in cool comfort and communed over our snacks. My dog was in heaven. This is the high point of her year.
After a while (thirty minute timer?) the AC shut off so it was time for me to resume the driver’s seat. That’s when I discovered we were locked in. The back doors would not open. I tried pulling the handle twice and pulling it hard. (I have good hand/arm strength and have no trouble handling fifty lb. bags of horse feed). Clicking the key fob three times resulted in solenoid activity inside the rear doors but still they wouldn’t open. The MyVW app didn’t have an unlock function. I wish I had thought of setting the climate control with MyVW but It was getting really hot and I was starting to panic. My old dog was panting hard. Dogs don’t sweat and it doesn’t take much to send a dog, especially an old, compromised dog, into heat stroke.
I didn’t notice whether either of the door lock buttons on the driver’s door was illuminated. But why would they be? I had never touched them. I had been out of the car for five minutes. Doors had opened and closed. The car was stationary.
What were my options? To pound on a window and ask a passer-by to do…what? Call 911? I could do that myself. Besides, I saw nobody around our area. Since I had the fob, could they have opened a front door from outside? I don’t know.
It was getting hotter by the minute. And, remember we were at an altitude of 7,000 ft. The sun always seems more severe at that altitude.
The only reasonable option seemed to be to get to the front seat. I started trying. Head first, feet first. Face up, face down. Arm rests up or down. Driver’s seatback forward or back (I could reach the control for that motorized function, but not the one for moving the seat forward). Between the arm rests, my 200 lb. bulk, severe arthritis, front seats rolled all the way back and a big dog taking up a lot of the back seat, no matter how I struggled I couldn’t get there. I also couldn’t put enough weight on the front seat from my position to activate the switch and turn on the AC or release the rear door locks, in case that might have worked.
My poor dog, beyond panting, was starting to hack and gag. I was feeling weak and a bit faint. My brain felt half asleep. I had the bizarre notion to take off all my sweat-soaked clothes, including bulky new jeans and my work boots, to make it easier to maneuver. Even stripping was difficult, feeling already enervated by the heat and cramped as we were in the back seat. Somehow I managed it and I don’t remember exactly what happened then but I found myself in the driver’s seat, naked. There was nobody around to notice my Adonis-like corpus. The AC was on, the car was cooling rapidly, my dog was back to normal breathing and my head was clearing. The whole emergency had taken about an hour from the time the AC turned off.
After a few minutes of recovery time and getting dressed, as soon I tried to drive home and got “key not detected” and “brake boost limited” messages. I could not shift out of Park. After ten minutes everything cleared and we drove home with no further problem then or since.
Fob problem? Not likely as the car has only 3,000 miles on it and there have been no further incidents. I don’t see how the fob could have been in a blind spot because I had moved it around plenty when I was trying to click open the doors.
Yeah, I can think—now—of things I should have done. Call the dealer? Call VW? Find out where is the magic place to put the fob? Couldn’t find a reference to it in the dreadful manual.
No harm, no foul? Well, maybe.
My conclusion: no matter what else I should or should not have known or done, no matter how bad VW’s software is, no matter how urgent it was for VW to get these cars to market prematurely, this incident should never have been possible and should never have happened. To anyone. Ever.
The experience really shook me. What if we had spent another hour in that car as the temperature increased even more? Will I ever trust the car again? At the moment I don’t. Every time I look at it, I hear “I’m sorry, HAL, I’m afraid I can’t do that…”
The service manager at my dealership, who is ID.4 certified, is taking the incident quite seriously. He is making inquiries by phone and email. The sales manager has already offered me $40,000 for the car, which means breaking the lease, paying the remaining taxes and rebating me $9,000 cash. It also means I can do better elsewhere by buying out the lease and selling the car myself.
I plan to wait a few weeks to see what answers the service manager comes up with and give myself some time to calm down.
Meanwhile, has anyone been similarly locked in?Does anyone know what went wrong or have suggestions about what else I should have done? Other than not getting in the back seat, of course.
