I got an email today, one of those chain ones, and usually I don’t pay attention to those. But this one had an interesting story.
Apparently, if you are locked out of your car without the remote, you just need someone who has your remote to “send” it via a mobile phone. You hold your own mobile phone up to the car’s receiver and when that person presses the button, the signal gets transmitted.
Anyone know if this can be done?
I’ve hunted around and couldn’t find the answer to this.
Hmmmmm, I suspect that car remotes are infra-red like most other remote control devices, in which case you would not be able to transmit it via a phone.
Waiting for someone to correct me.
Car remotes are usually RF (not IR), but a cell phone still isn’t going to transmit a signal from one.
First of all, the cell phone you are pointing the remote at will intentionally try and filter off the RF from the remote, since it would cause interference with the cell phone’s operation. If you did manage to couple some of the remote’s signal onto the cell phone’s transmitted RF, the cell tower would either ignore the extra data or, worse, would get confused by it and part of the voice signal from the cell phone would drop out. If any of the remote’s signal managed to get demodulated onto the cell phone’s audio lines, it would come out the other end as audio noise, not as transmitted RF.
In short, it won’t work.
Snopes has an article on it as well.
Thanks. You saved me and my friends from looking like a bunch of jackasses when we tried this in public.
You can use your mobile phone to call OnStar, which is able to open your door locks remotely. If your car has OnStar. And if your account is current.
This reminds me – what stops you from just not getting OnStar, then calling and enrolling when you need it for such a silly circumstance (I mean vs. rolling over)? Assuming the car has the hardware. Also, I didn’t have OnStar on my last GM car, so I don’t know the answer to this: how does OnStar get so many customers? If your car has OnStar, does the dealer bury the subscription into the price of the car somehow?
Snopes says no.
DD
You can do that, but it would be rather expensive. Seventeen dollars/mo to get the service that unlocks the doors.
Most car remotes operate in the area of 200MHz or so.
Your mobile phone is probably capable of reproducing 7 - 15MHz.
Fuhgeddabboudit.
Look at the fine print at the bottom of their print ads. I believe the typical deal is to include one year’s service in the list price of an OnStar-equipped vehicle. After that year, it’s up to you whether to pay to renew it.
Yes, the fact that they work while in your pocket should have tipped me off to that.