My grandparents by coincidence bought another Oldsmobile in the late '70s I think that had exactly the same door keys as their other Olds. So they had four door keys.
My grandparents by coincidence bought another Oldsmobile in the late '70s I think that had exactly the same door keys as their other Olds. So they had four door keys.
“I don’t have any definite info on this, but I don’t think there have been many cars made in the last decade that could be opened this way.”
I have a 1998 Ford Escort sedan. The ignition and door lock use the same key, and my car alarm has only one useable remote (the downside of code shifting!), so my car key and alarm remote are on one loop. Since I always take this out of the car, it’s VERY hard for me to lock myself out.
That said, I managed to lock my self out at a car wash. I had to leave the car in neutral, and thus I left the keys in the ignition. Stupidly, I also locked the doors from the driver’s switch as I got out of the car, and didn’t realize it until the car was all the way through the wash.
When I went to ask the car wash manager to borrow her phone book to call a locksmith, she immediately pulled a “slim jim” out from under her desk and gave it to one of the workers to open my door. It worked almost immediately. I was happy to get into my car so easily, but I was also a bit concerned that it was TOO easy.
[hijack]
I’ve never, EVER locked my keys in my car… Can’t understand how that happens. When I turn off the ignition, I pull the keys…
[/hijack]
My VW Fox has the can’t-lock-your-keys-in feature, although as weirddave said, you can easily lock the keys in when taking something from the passenger side! My Suburban will sound a loud, shrill tone if you open the driver’s side door while the keys are in the ignition, which helps remind you to take them out.
I’ve not locked my keys in a vehicle in several years, but I’ve also taken steps to prevent being locked out. I make an extra copy of whichever key opens the door (the VW only has one key) and keep it in my purse. I’m not likely to leave both my keys AND my purse in the vehicle, so I have an extra key if needed. This would probably work even better for the guys, who could put an extra in their wallet, and so have one right there in their pocket.
How many people have locked their keys in the trunk?
Jeez, what a bunch of losers! Nice to be in such good company.
Huh?
a) A lock gun can be owned by people other than the Police. I’ve owned one. Many locksmiths swear by them. Others think they stink and that picks are much more efficient. I’m in the second camp. I gave mine to my brother.
b) A lock gun doesn’t work by ‘brute force searching of lock combinations’. It works by flinging all of the pins up at the same time in the hope that a space will appear for a short time between each of the pins. It’s a random process, like raking (a picking technique).
c) New cars do have plates in the door designed to make slim jims less effective, but they can still be used, and typically are by locksmiths. There are different shapes and sizes of slim jims, and other tools to help the process, such as very thin flashlights, and wedges to spread the opening for easier access.
d) Kwikset is spelled ‘Kwikset’.
e) zut is on the money about the math, but just slightly off:
(I’m going to throw out some numbers here. While I’m very familiar with the numbers for house door locks, I’m not as familiar with the numbers for car door locks. I’m going to talk in terms of the very-common Schlage SC1 keyway, but the numbers won’t be that far off from any other lock, house or car.)
A Schlage SC1 has five pins. Each pin has 10 possible lengths. So in theory, there are 10^5 possible keys. In reality, it’s fewer because:
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The difference of a single pin length (say the difference between a 5 pin and a 6 pin) is extremely slight. Locks are not perfect, and it’s very likely that a 22456 key will open a 22556 door. In fact, they don’t even make #1 master pins; the smallest you can get is a #2, because a #1 would be so thin that it would come out of the cylinder and bind (and break) the lock.
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You can’t have a very high pin next to a very low pin, because the key won’t physically fit into the lock. You can’t have too steep a slope between pins. I don’t know of a hard and fast rule here, but I think it’s fair to say you shouldn’t go greater than 5 pin steps from pin to pin.
If anyone’s interested, I can post a description of how locks work, how mastering works, etc.
BTW, mathematically, the odds should be very slight that a random car key opens a random door. However, I have no idea what keys are actually cut by car makers.
I went jome last night and tried to find the locksmithing reference I alluded to above. I found the book in which I thought I read the discussion of lock complexity, but it’s not the right book. Dangit! I’ll look more tonight, but I’m probably not gonna find anything, so you’ll hafta put my statements in the “asserted as true, but with no real proof” category.
Except, of course, billiehunt lends a supporting voice. To round out my previous post, there’s a couple items I recall, but didn’t mention before (to be honest, this is because my memory is a little shakier here, and I was hoping to find the actual text to confirm). As I recall, some older car keys have fewer than five pins (four or three), and there are fewer than ten different pin lengths, so that limits the number of combinations to begin with. Limiting farther are the two points I alluded to that billie labels 1 and 2 in the post above. Finally, there are a number of “stupid” combinations of pins that manufacturers avoid because they are easy to pick (for example, a Schlage lock wouldn’t be manufactured with a 22222 pin combination).
I thought the book I can’t find mentioned only 20-30 distinct combinations for the least secure car keys (thus, my “far less than a hundred” cite), but I’m willing to be wrong here. Given that billie throws in some real numbers for the Schlage house lock, which has something less than 100,000 possible combinations (and, I’ll bet, something less than 5000 truly unique key combinations when all is said and done), I still look askance at the claim of “1,480,576 key combinations” in the original article.
My husband and I have saturns one model year apart, '95 and '96. He can drive my car with his keys but I can only open his doors with mine. The only time I have ever locked my keys in the car was once while driving a rental. I had to get some equipment out of the back and apparently the keys slipped from my grasp as I lifted the equipment out. Someone helpfully shut the trunk for me and the keys were locked in. Fortunately someone was able to jimmy the lock.
Once someone not only locked her keys in the van, but also left the damn thing in drive. It was smack up against my car (facing it in the parking space opposit of me) so I could not leave the parking lot until someone jimmied her door open and shut the thing off. I did not notice until i started to back out of my space and the thing lunged at me.