This happened just today, while my wife was using the car.
She parked it at church, turned it off and locked it per the usual routine.
When she returned to it, a few hours later, all windows were open, including the moon roof. No other abnormalities noted, nothing missing, etc. Trunk was closed.
It’s got a bit over 140K miles on it, and I’ve never had this problem with it myself. I don’t even know how I’d make all the windows plus the moon roof open with a single switch or button.
I had a 1996 Mercedes a while back. If I held down one of the buttons on the remote fob (can’t remember if it was the lock or unlock) it would lower the windows. No idea if this could be a similar thing.
What jz78817 said. If the button gets held down, everything opens. If I remember correctly, first the windows, then the moonroof. My guess would be something was against the right button in her pocket or handbag.
My last few Hondas have done that as well. Holding down the unlock button opens all (5) windows. Totally useless and somewhat unsafe feature, in my opinion. Oddly, the the lock button doesn’t raise them, I’m not sure why, but IIRC, you can close all the windows at once, at least on my Hondas by putting the physical key into the door and holding in the unlock position.
This. My last car and current car have this feature. My dealer told me of another customer who was sat in his office, fiddling with his key fob, and ended up unknowingly opening the windows/sunroof on his car which was parked just outside.
That’s one of the reasons that I don’t like it. On most (all?) cars, if you unlock your car with your fob and don’t open a door within a certain amount of time, usually something like 30 seconds, the car relocks. It would be nice if they did it for this too. Even if they used a longer time period since people may activate it well before they go out to their car so something like 5-10 minutes would be understandable, but you don’t want to find out your windows have been open all day/night. I think if they did this, however, they’d also have to add another layer of protection. I think they’d have to only allow them to cycle X amount of times and then turn the feature off until the car is started that way you don’t kill your battery if the button is being held down by accident.
My convertible goes one better. If you hold the unlock button long enough it unlocks the doors, lowers all the windows, then opens & stows the top in the trunk.
Not a good thing to butt-dial when you live in thunderstorm country.
At least on my car the remote’s unlock behavior is a programmable feature. You can choose between doors only, doors + windows, or doors + windows + top. And the setting can be different for each remote.
This may be the sort of setting that’s exposed in the computerized UI if the car’s new enough. If not it would programmable by the dealer. For my (non-Lexus) car I bought an aftermarket Bluetooth OBD dongle and some Android software that lets me access all those dealer-diddleable setting from my phone. Such fun.
Good bet there’s similar tooling out there for Lexus. You might be amazed at how many quirks of the car you can iron out (or in :)) for $75 worth of new toys. If you care to. Otherwise the dealer can enlighten you about available settings while en-lightening your wallet at $200/hr.
ETA @Joey P: One of the risks of any auto-locking feature is that it sets up locking the keys/fob in the car. Which is something that really pisses off owners. Not that they should be leaving their keys/fob in the car, but it happens.
As annoyed as I’d be to have had my fob fall out of my pocket and wedge itself beside my seat unnoticed, I’d be far more pissed to come back and discover the car had helpfully locked itself while I was away. With my fob inside and no way for me to get in.
I thought about that too, but I expect no car manufacturer wants to bear liability for your windows rolling up on some unsuspecting child/thief. If the windows are going to go up, they insist that you bear responsibility by pressing the windows-up button yourself (and that you also be physically present to observe, and respond to, anyone getting caught in the closing windows).
I have to admit, I’d not thought of either of those possibilities. @LSL, the newer cars that have Smart Keys, that allow you to start them without the key, you typically can’t lock the key in your car. I don’t know the exact mechanism (proximity, boundary etc), but if the key is in the vehicle the only way to lock it is with the doors closed. Similarly, if key is in the trunk, the trunk won’t latch, it just pops right back open.
I also haven’t found a way to walk away from it, while it’s running, and lock it. The key is in my pocket, I should be able to lock the doors.
While I’m on the subject of the Smart Key and my car, the steering column (not the shifter) electronically locks when the car is turned off. There’s no way to unlock it if the battery is dead. If the battery is dead, you can use the key blade to unlock the car door, the steering wheel will still be locked in place.
Even without remote-start, my car won’t let me lock the car from the outside with the key inside. Also, if I close an already-locked door with the key inside, it will unlock the door as soon as it’s closed.
Yes, I’m sure that’s just a feature of the key fob’s wireless (bluetooth, from what I understand) technology. But, just so were on the same page in case the thread gets sidelined, I was speaking of a Smart Key (or whatever it’s called in other cars) where you push a button on the dash to start the car. Not remote start where you can start the car from a hundred or so feet away.
But, in any case, what you described is exactly what my car does. But I’d still like to be able to get out of my running car and lock it. The key is coming with me, let me lock it. The only reason I can think of, in light of the last few posts, is that they don’t want to encourage people to leave kids in cars since they can lock the doors with the heat/AC on and run the risk the the car stalling…which is pretty much what I want to be able to do since I’m not all that interested in dragging my kid into the gas station (ie a place where I can see her the entire time) or running into my house to grab something.
I hate the the options are car running/doors unlocked or car off/doors locked.
There’s as many combos of capabilities as there are brands of cars and model years. There was also the early days of push button start back in the early/mid 2000s when the engineers were still discovering all the novel ways customers could misuse the newfound freedom to start the car without inserting the key. The OP’s car is a 10-year old model.
According to our local police, a hefty fraction of people around here just leave the fob in the glove box & push the go button when they hop in. Which doesn’t quite make sense versus locking the doors.
I agree the eningeers have tried to make the newest-fangled stuff as foolproof as possible. The problem is we keep breeding better fools.
A day late, but Mazda’s do this too. Either double & long press the unlock button, or put the key in the door turn & hold it turned & both front windows & the sunroof open.
When I got my first smart key car that’s the first thing I thought of. I have no idea what I was think, but what stopped me, honestly, was that I couldn’t lock the door. I think, before I gave it any real thought, was that other people wouldn’t/couldn’t unlock it. Again, I couldn’t even lock it and that was that. It wasn’t until later that I even thought about that fact that anyone who touched the door handle couldn’t have gotten in and driven away. Duh.
The first cars I saw that had this feature were a Jeep Grand Cherokee and a some thing or other high end SUV (Acura or Audi maybe) probably at least 10 years ago. In both of them you had to take the key fob and place it into the dash and either turn (like a key) or push it. I noticed right away that they were all plastic and when I mentioned it to them, both people showed me that there was a way (a button IIRC) to start the car without the fob in the dash (just like you can now).
Clearly, the engineers knew people weren’t quite ready to leave the key in their pocket/purse yet, so they gave them a way to start it like they were using a key.
I believe my mom still uses the door unlock/lock button even though this is at least her second car that will unlock just by touching the handle. But at least I think I may have gotten her to stop pumping the gas pedal when she starts cars.
