Ford police SUV heats its interior to 133 degrees to kill COVID-19

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/ford-police-suv-heats-its-inte.html

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I don’t see this being misused…

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So how long until they give a cute name to cooking prisoners “accidentally”?

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Take ‘n’ Bake?

Misused or misfiring; oops! Software glitch.

Hopefully there are kill switches installed in both the front and back seats where this process can’t be started if there’s any weight on them. But I doubt it.

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Fortunately everything will be recorded for our viral entertainment accountability purposes.

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This perpetuates the coronavirus hoax, but on the other hand it’s rolling coal in the name of Blue Lives Matter, so as a deplorable I don’t know what to feel.

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This is the same technique used to kill Bed Bugs. It’s an idea that should be implemented in any vehicle that regularly transports people.

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Interesting. I had the impression that Sars-CoV-2 was relatively resistant to high heat: https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-heat-kill-virus-1498074

If popping things in a warm oven for 15 minutes could sterilize them, that would be helpful.

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They could already do this on a sunny summer day, by leaving the air conditioning off and the windows up.

http://heatkills.org/how-hot/

“When temperatures outside range from 80 degrees to 100 degrees, the temperature inside a car parked in direct sunlight can quickly climb to between 130 to 172.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Or you can manually spray with a disinfecting solution and wait a few minutes. Going through a 15 minute disinfection cycle every time there is a new person in the car will really slow things down.

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“Sterile handling procedures”

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I give it a week, maximum, in any jurisdiction that puts it into service.

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I really can’t wait for some poor person somewhere on the planet not to get the memo that the US of A refuse to use SI units and program a software update which tries to heat the interior to 133°C.

Ok, well, I can wait for that.

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Robocop was supposed to be satire:

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I know that there’s a joke in here somewhere about “Hot Fuzz”

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PS. peeps can generally survive being in 60°C heat for an hour or so, provided it’s a dry heat. At relative humidity > 20%, 50°C will do for you in 10 minutes. In any case, at 56°C, touching metal or other conductive media will scald you almost immediately, and sitting on vehicle upholstery at that temperature is probably not great. (AIUI the relevant Air Force experiments involved the “volunteer” standing in an oven not touching anything)

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You really don’t want to leave snacks in the vehicle when it’s doing that, especially chocolate bars.

Too bad it doesn’t get hot enough to pop popcorn.

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If they throw in birch branches, I’d be fine with being left in the vehicle:

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Ideally, this happens when nobody is inside the car.

“Ideally” and “police” are words that go together only in the context of, “doesn’t work the way it’s ideally supposed to.”

I had been thinking lately about post-pandemic shared transportation issues, and the future of ride-shares and shared autonomous cars, and what kind of sterilization would be used. I’m not sure this is it, but at least car makers are thinking about it.

Not necessarily for a police car - I could see there being at least 15 minutes where the car sits empty after taking someone in to the station.

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That’s a good point. We’ve been autoclaving our masks in the pressure cooker on the understanding that 100C isn’t hot enough but 120C is.

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