Old people and keyless cars

In reply to Keith Tanner :

True enough they can fail, sometimes spectacularly (Studebaker, Ford) but do they ever self start? Not that I know of.

TurnerX19 said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

True enough they can fail, sometimes spectacularly (Studebaker, Ford) but do they ever self start? Not that I know of.

It was a problem for a Plymouth that one time.

mtn said:

Really would love that one—just leave it in my wallet and forget about it. But as it is I get a clunky fob that takes up too much space. 

Enh, my wallet already has too much crap in it.  While it'd be nice not to have a big key fob, a wallet card (which is noticably thicker than a normal credit card) makes the "too much stuff in too small a space" problem worse.

With 6 cars and trailer, I crossed the rubicon of having too many keys to carry them all around at the same time a long time ago.  So now I have just a house key (and a leatherman micra) on my keychain and a separate keychain for each car.  Pick up whichever one I'm driving that day and the others stay at home in a safe place.  Problem solved.

In reply to codrus :

As a bonus, you won't wear out your ignition lock cylinder from having a 10 pound keychain swinging from it for every mile you drive.

When I noticed the connection between people with heavy keychains and people with ignition lock cylinder problems, I have a a ring with important keys... and car keys stay separate and individual.

In reply to codrus :

Same here. 5 cars means no way am I carrying even simple keys all on the same ring. Plus my wife drives them all except the 1970 ford truck so we’re always swapping key rings around. A single fob isn’t that much more unwieldy than a single key on a chain. I tried keys with no ring and they are too hard to keep track of. 

Woody said:

oldopelguy said:

I can't believe anyone on this site would want one of those keys with the giant fob built in.  How do you put more than one car key on a ring?

That's the point...you don't need to.

 

Huh? I don't understand. Does the Super Fob render all your other vehicles (to which the other said keys belong to) irrelevant and unworthy of being started?

In reply to Appleseed :

I only carry one car key and one house key at a time.

Many years ago, my sister's father-in-law went into insulin shock while driving home from the gym. He hit a pole and his keys went through his right knee cap. Never walked right again.

I have never driven with a big mass of keys hanging from the dash of my car.

Appleseed said:

Woody said:

oldopelguy said:

I can't believe anyone on this site would want one of those keys with the giant fob built in.  How do you put more than one car key on a ring?

That's the point...you don't need to.

 

Huh? I don't understand. Does the Super Fob render all your other vehicles (to which the other said keys belong to) irrelevant and unworthy of being started?

The proximity sensor fobs don't need to be on a key ring at all.  You just put it in your pocket and leave it there until you're done driving the car.

So this happened today...

A bunch of our kids were getting together to watch the World Cup soccer game, and a corresponding bunch of dads decided to hang out with the kids to watch the game. Midway through the second half, one of the guys gets a phone call from his wife, starts looking pretty agitated and then apologizes because he has to leave.

When he came home from work today, his wife and two of the kids were already in the driveway. They hopped into the car and drove to New York City. When his wife parked the car and went to hand the keys to the guy at the parking garage, she realized that they were still in her husband's pocket. In Connecticut.

The car was still running when she got in, and she had left her set of keys on the kitchen table.

Guess where her husband was headed at 4:30 in the afternoon...

In reply to Woody :

That is much less amusing than the time Driver A stalled a keyless car on a rallycross course, and the key fob was in Driver B's pocket 100 yards away.

In reply to Woody :

We’ve had several people hand a running car to their relief and head home and the car going on to get stuck in a bad spot.

We actually discussed the option of Ubering the key to her.

I love the keyless fob system in our Mazda 6. It sounds like Mazda solved most of the problems that you guys are complaining about other than the obvious electronic failure point. 

If the car is running and you put it in Park then walk away with the key, it wont come out of park. So the wife wouldn't have made it to Jersey or wherever. 

Car locks automatically when the key fob goes out of range, or after a set number of minutes. If the fob is detected in the car when it time locks, it beeps like crazy and unlocks. After a couple minutes it locks up and disables the present key fob until the car is started with another fob, then they all work again.

There are a whole bunch of cause and event diagrams for odd situations, and 100k miles I've never been displeased with the result.

In reply to Woody :

My Focus beeps at you and displays a message that the key fobs are not in the car if it’s running, and you leave the car. I can’t believe every manufacturer doesn’t have something similar.

I need to do some experimenting with my FiST to see what happens when the fob is out of range.

The V kicks up a message on the dash when the fob is out of range. I would think most(?) all(?) other keyless cars do this too?

This was a BMW, so it probably just yelled at her in German, but only once because it would naturally assume that she had immediately learned her lesson.