Locked keys in car?

[Bazf]

Locked Out of Your Car ? Try this - it only applies to cars that can be
unlocked by that remote button on your key ring. Should you lock your keys
in the car and the spare keys are home, and you don't have "OnStar",
here's your answer to the problem!
If someone has access to the spare remote at your home, call them on your
cell phone (or borrow one from someone if the cell phone is locked in the
car too!)
Hold your (or anyone's) cell phone about a foot from your car door and
have the other person at your home press the unlock button while holding
it near the phone.

Your car will unlock - - and it works. Saves someone from having to drive
your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles
away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote"
for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk, or have the "horn"
signal go off, or whatever!)
It works........

[simon]

Fantastic... who was the clever sod that tried that first

But SSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH...... I am a locksmith an you could lose me money

[MUMMIBOO]

well i wish id known that before my daughter locked our keys in the car at asda, we had to call someone to come drive us home the house keys were in the car we had to borrow some ladders climb in through the window get the spare fob and then go back to asda!

[entwisi]

I would guess this depends on whether the alarm is Infra red or radio. The former has no chance(You can't transmitt light over a phone), the latter, maybe depending on the frequency of the transmission and the range of the microphone of the sending phone and the speaker of the receiving phone. I persoanlly doubt it will work, Anyone care to do some trials?

[simon]

Just tried it between two mobiles...... Missus in manchester, me near blackburn.












..No it did not work.... Radio transmitter I think on VW Passat....
I was really excited as well... Wife kept asking me what i was trying to do!!!! While she stood in a public car park in manny holding the phone out To the car so I could have a little chat with it
I don't think she will try again.... Or cook my tea

[vorlon24]

Sounds like one of those urban legends

I'll go and check it out...

[vorlon24]

Here you go:

A familiar form of jape applied especially to newcomers in a social group is something known as a "fool's errand": a prank in which the victim is lured into attempting to complete a ridiculous task that to the uninitiated sounds just plausible enough to be valid.

The message quoted above might be considered a type of fool's errand, a joke created to see how many people are gullible enough to call friends and try opening their car doors with cell phones.

Many new cars now come equipped with "Remote Keyless Entry" (or "Keyless Remote" or "Keyless Entry" or "Remote Entry") systems (also known as RKE systems), a mechanism which allows automobile owners to lock and unlock their car doors remotely (from up to about 300 feet away) by pressing buttons on transmitting devices small enough to be carried on keychains.


But what if you accidentally lock your remote entry device in your car along with your keys? (A plausible scenario, as many people carry them together on the same keyring.) If you own a car equipped with a system such as OnStar you can contact an operator and have OnStar unlock your vehicle remotely through a signal sent via a cellular network, but otherwise you have to call a locksmith or get a friend or relative to bring an extra set of keys out to you.

Enter the idea of the poor man's OnStar. No need to pay for a fancy car-unlocking service: just use a cell phone to call someone who has access to your spare RKE device and tell him to point it at the phone and press the "UNLOCK" button. You simultaneously point the cell phone at your car door, and voilà — you're in! A nifty solution . . . at least it would be if it weren't completely implausible, the equivalent of a fool's errand for our modern technological age.

Relaying remote entry system signals via telephone might work if the signals were sound-based, but they're not. An RKE system transmits an encrypted data stream to a receiver inside the automobile via an RF (radio frequency) signal, a signal that can't be effectively relayed via cell phone. (In any event, RKE systems and cell phones typically operate on completely different frequencies; the former in the 300 MHz range and the latter in the 800 MHz range.)

We don't know whether whoever created this message was deliberately joking or earnestly mistaken, but the vision of stranded motorists vainly holding cell phones up to their cars in the hopes of unlocking them is an amusing one. One might as well suggest that a spare piano key could be used to gain entry to a locked automobile.