I’m not. As I said, there’s no way I’d leave the car unlocked or the keys in the ignition in L.A. Up here, people are like ‘Dude. We’re not in L.A.’ I still lock my car (or take the keys, if I’m on the bike) if I can’t see my vehicle from whereever I am; but if I’m at the corner market or the Post Office I’ll not lock it. I do leave the keys in the ignition when I’m at the gas station – although I always thing that a gas station is the most risky place to do that.
I lock the the car with the keys in it.
There’s a reason other than theft not to leave your car running “just for a minute”. My mom left her car running once at a gas station, but she locked the car when she did it :smack: She had to make a rather embarrassing phone call to my dad to come and rescue her ASAP…
This was one thing I loved about my Plymouth Breeze - if the keys were in the ignition, the doors refused to lock. I tried several methods of defeating it, just to see how foolproof it was. If you pushed down on the power lock switch, you would hear the mechanism, but it would stay unlocked. If you manually pushed the lock itself down, it would pop back up as soon as the doors closed. It was great.
(Readers Digest anecdote I read once: A woman comes out of the store to realize she has locked her keys in the car. She calls her husband from inside (this is before the age of cell phones) and asks him to come unlock the car. She does a little shopping around, and goes back out to her car. Sheepishly, she realizes that the passenger door was unlocked. Knowing that she’d look silly, and her husband would probably be irritated, she locks the door. A while goes by, and still no husband. So she goes back in to call him. “When are you coming to unlock the car?” she asks him.
“What do you mean? I was out there 20 minutes ago and unlocked the passenger door for you.”)
My Passat does that stuff too–the only way I can lock the doors with the key in the ignition is to stick a second key in the door and lock it with that.
Y’see, that’s why I carry a Slim Jim under the back seat. Just in case I lock the keys in the car. 
I grew up in a small town, so my parents never locked thier house or cars, thiough took the keys with them, so I inherited this trait. It also helped that if I locekd the doors to my first car (1986 Nissan pickup) I would be locked out and have to get in through the sliding read window. Apparantly, in the course of it’s lifetime, both doors were replaced from junkyards, so the ignition key (the only one I had) wouldn’t unlock them.
When I went to college and got a different car my sophomore year, I lokced it, because I was in Troy, NY. Anyone who has been there can tell you why you need to lock your doors.
At my current location, I only lock them at work, though I don’t need to. It’s a rural area, and I doubt my car will get stolen. As to why get into the ghabit of nto locking it if it’s less safe? Well, for one, it’s an annoyance, and two, I’ve noticed my lock is sticky, and I fear one day it breaking and not being able to get into my car.
Dude, I lock the door when I’m pumping gas! The rest of y’all is nuts!
Which after doing the above three times, convinced me to keep a spare key in my wallet…until I left my wallet in the car :smack:
I always leave my keys in the car, normally under the driver seat. But I lock the doors. My car has one of those keypads on the driver side door that allows me to unlock the car.
Once I left my emergency blinkers on for about, 48 hours…(got the car towed and forgot to turn the blinkers off) My keys were in the car and I didn’t think the keypad would work because the battery was dead. There was just enough juice in the battery to unlock the doors.
I never leave my keys in the car. Ever. I don’t always lock the doors, though. If I’m popping in a gas station or convenience store for just a moment, or if I’m anywhere I feel reasonably confident, I don’t bother. Besides, I have nothing worthwhile to steal from the inside of my car…unless the thief wants a factory stereo with a non-functioning cassette player, or perhaps half a can of tobacco.
I used to also leave my car doors unlocked overnight when living in Evanston. While it does have its fair share of crime, it seems much more peaceful than Chicago, especially in the university area where I was living. Well, I was certainly tempting fate with that logic and, sure enough, my car was broken into and my car stereo (at that time, a decent Sony CD player) was stolen.
The funny twist of this story is that I learned my lesson and always locked my car after that. I bought a shitty $40 Radio Shack tape player and installed it myself. THREE DAYS LATER (after the first theft), I popped into Logan Square with my girlfriend for dinner. All doors were locked, I was gone not one hour, and some idiots broke my front passengerside window to get to a freakin piece of shit Radio Shack stereo. Two car stereo gone in 3 days. How about that?
Didn’t buy a car stereo for that car after that.
While I still had my 88 Tbird, I never locked it or took the keys out.
I got a new car last fall, though, and I usually lock this one (and remember to take the keys with me almost as often…).
I lock the front door of my house, but the back door is wide open, so I’m not sure exactly why I do.
What always makes me smile is when I pick up my kids from school every day. They go to a small, private school in a decent neighborhood with its own private parking right in front of the front door. This is the one place remaining I always leave the keys in the car/door unlocked, yet most the other parents are out there with their key fobs, locking up their rides and setting the car alarm while they go in to get their kids. 
If I thought the area was that dangerous, I would have picked a different school!
I grew up in a very, very small town on an island. Nobody in that town ever locked their house or their car, and virtually everyone left their keys in the ignition (although not generally with the car actually on). The reason for this being: If someone steals a car, where, precisely, were they planning to go with it? No bridges. Everyone knew everyone else’s car on sight (and had a solid idea of who might have permission to drive said car). Same deal with breaking and entering. No pawn shop, no way to get off the island before the burglary was detected (or if you could manage the trick, it would be BLAZINGLY obvious who the thief was), and it was childishly easy for the police to basically quarantine the island until the thief fessed up.
Then I moved to the big city. Now I lock doors reflexively. Which is not always so good, as the first summer after I’d moved I came back to visit and automatically locked up the house, only to discover upon my arrival back from the grocery store that I was unable to let myself back into the house as there were no house keys on the car key ring. So I waited patiently for my mother to return from HER errands, only to discover there were no housekeys on her keyring either. In fact, THERE WERE NO HOUSE KEYS ANYWHERE. They did not exist. Apparently, my mother and father, who had lived there for twenty years at that point, did not possess house keys. I had to shimmy into a bathroom window and let everyone in. :eek:
I am. I am from a town with a population 850. We don’t even have a stoplight. We’re lucky our roads are paved. When I lived there, nobody locked car doors or house doors. Often you could go for weeks with your front door/patio doors wide open. Great in the summertime.
Then I moved to the city. What’s done in small towns is *not done * here, because it is different. Though I’m living in Ballard now, where crime isn’t even in the dictionary. Gentle Swedes and all. However, when we lived in Boulevard Park in South Seattle, I learned for the first time what a “boogie bar” was. It kind of freaked me out. Every night we locked up. Our car was stolen from the parking lot, too, despite being locked and alarmed. A disturbing welcome to the city.
I never used to lock my Saturn. It had manual locks, so it was a complete pain in the ass to lock and unlock all four doors. And, I often left it running to go into the gas station or to run in and pick up my kiddo. There was nothing in that car to steal, and I figured if the thief was desperate enough to steal that piece of crap, then he needed it worse than I.
Now, the Grand Prix GT is a whole different story. I keep cds in there, a whole folder of them. And it’s a beeeyoootiful car with beeeeyoootiful leather interior and an expensive stereo, and I am just not taking any chances with it. And locking is so much easier since I just have to push the little button twice and it locks the car and sets the alarm.
I wuv my new car. 
I’ve done that twice with the engine running, gone off to do whatever business I was doing. The first time I did it, I rang my wife and asked her to catch a bus into town with her keys. The second time, I was with my wife, she didn’t have her keys on her, it was late in the evening, and so we just called AAA to come and help us get into the car.
I just don’t get it - keys are small, car is safer - why not at least take the keys with you? I take & lock.
Susan
I do it all the time, particularly on a winter morning. Leave the car running and go in to grab some breakfast…
Of course, I’d only do that on base. I’d like to meet the person stupid enough to steal a car (a old, ugly, cheap car at that) on a really small airbase.
Off base, it’s always park and lock. Always.
This past winter, on a bitterly cold evening, my ex-wife called and asked me to come over and watch our kids. She said she was getting cabin fever and needed to get out (if I recall, I think she mentioned the fact she had an inch that needed scratching). After my kind and generous offer to take her for a stroll down memory lane was flatly rejected - I agreed to drive over and babysit & told her I’d be there by 8PM.
“Do you have anything for me to drink?” I asked.
“I haven’t kept Tab in the house since I booted yer ass to the curb’” she informed me.
“What about the newspaper, do you have a crossword puzzle laying around for me to do while the kids are sleeping?” I inquired.
“It’s Thursday, and you know I can’t finish them past Tuesday”, she replied. “Oh, one more thing…Jenn and Jess want to know if you can bring the dogs, I’ll put the cat downstairs so bring em along with you” she concluded “see you in a 1/2 hour”.
As I hung up the phone, I belatedly realized the implication of her final request. She wanted me to take 2 high strung animals, who don’t sit still (and make driving an absolutely harrowing experience) for a 20 minute ride. Not only that, my car was still relatively new … and it has black leather seats that were still in near pristine condition. In fact, I bet the FBI would be hard pressed to find even one canine hair in that car. The last time I let either of the dogs in my car was taking the little evil one home from her summer grooming. (That was an experience. Seeing her little black ass & stumpty tail quivering out of the corner of my right eye as she almost stangulated herself standing on the up button whilst holding her head out of the passenger side window).
Anyway, I’m starting to babble on here - so let me get to the end of the story.
I grabbed the leashes, packed up the dogs in the back seat, wedged a cooler full of tab between the bucket seats and headed to Long Beach. About halfway there , I realized I forgot to bring the newspaper, so I pulled into a Store 24. The wind chill had to be below zero that night, so kept the car idling, the heat on & told the dogs to ‘stay in the back’ as I ran in to buy the Times.
The nicest things about convenience stores are usually their in and out speed…provided it’s not a Mega Millions Jackpot night. As luck would have it, I had gotten in line behind a customer reading off his armlong list of ‘50 straight / 50 box numbers’ and didn’t have anything smaller than a $20 bill to pay for the paper. “Thank God this clerk types fast on that Lotto machine”, I thought to myself “I just hope the receipt paper doesnt run out before the last numbers are entered”.
I was back out in the parking lot within 5 minutes. Much to my pleasant surprise, the dogs were still seated in the back. As I approached the car, I saw something completely different: A cooler full of Tab cans and ice knocked over onto my seat - and the passenger and driver side doors I had left unlocked now suddenly locked. Apparently the bigger and dumber one had jumped into the front and hit the power lock with his paw.
I called the 800 directory from a payphone, got in touch with the Ford Lockout Hotline and was informed they could have someone out to me within 90 minutes. “That’s not so long,” I rationalized to myself, “unless you’re a high strung animal sitting in the back seat of a Mustang with the heat cranking at full blast”.
Needless to say, a cop with a slim jim (not the jerkey treat) who had come to the convenience store for a complimentary cup of coffee got there way before the lockout service contractor. Even in the 25-30 minutes the dogs were locked in, the blast of heat - in a wavy gust of air - as we got the door opened almost knocked us on our asses. The melted ice on the front seat didn’t even come close to the puddle of drool on the back seat from two heat exausted and panting dogs.
I’m a locker, and do the same as other posters who want the vehicle to run-use two sets of keys. Growing up just outside of Philly, anything unlocked is likely to grow feet. Folks around where I live now look at me oddly when I set the alarm on my truck. Keys in ignitions and unlocked doors are in the majority out here. 