Last year the brakes on my cheap bicycle failed as I was riding down the steep ramp off of a pedestrian bridge. I went out and bought a new bicycle the same day (the old one wasn’t worth repairing). I chained the new bicycle to my front porch and left the broken old bike, with the seat removed, unlocked next to it. Two nights later, somebody stole the old bike. I hope they didn’t find out the hard way (or maybe I do) that it had no brakes.
Two weeks ago, I got out of bed and came downstairs, and my roommate asked me if I was doing some work on my bike. “Um, no …” I replied. I looked out on the front porch where my bike is chained up, and discovered that somebody had stolen the front wheel and the seat off of it. Sigh. I guess those two items will be useful to somebody.
You know, I saw a two-person play on PBS about 10 or 12 years ago that almost perfectly told this story (long before it happened in real life, obviously). A young Hispanic man broke into an elderly woman’s apartment, and she started a conversation with him that eventually resulted in him surrendering to the police. The Hispanic character’s name was Juan, too. I remember because at one point in the play, the old lady pronounced it “Wan”, and the young man delivered a lecture about how “you Anglos” don’t even care about pronouncing people’s names right and then explained that it’s pronounced “Hwan”.
When I lived in an apartment complex, someone stole my gas cap off my old car. It was the kind that had a plastic tether to the car to avoid incidents where you lose it. (And surprisingly, gas hadn’t been siphoned - in any noticeable amount at least.) I replaced it for something like $5, and within a relatively short time I took my car in for emissions testing. When the tester saw the new gas cap, he asked if I’d failed a previous test, explaining that many times that a poorly-fitting gas cap can be a cause. I said no, someone had stolen it, and he speculated that someone else had an emissions test to get to and they had no gas cap.
Well, I have actually ordered two. And yes, the problem is that they have to be specially made, and they have to be ordered from France. Not to mention the cost - £140 for one, £240 for two. That’s about $450 if you care to convert…
When my wife lost her keys(two of them, both with electronic signatures) we were able to take my key in, have the signature “read” and another made ina about twenty minutes. If we had lost our only key we would have had to go through a process like you are to have them look up what signature they assigned to our VIN, which is slow and expensive. But cloning an existing key is generally cheaper and faster. Is there a chance you could order just one and then see what it costs to clone it versus having two go through the full process?
Holy Shit! Pretty much when you swing a deal for an auto, you’re really buying a key and they throw in the car for free!
What is the point to all this? Do you know? What purpose is served by making keys so dear? A clever thief can steal a car simply by hotwiring it. Across the pond we can get duplicates made for about $1.50. I don’t know the conversion tables for Euros.
Mtgman’s post prior to yours should shed a little light on the factors that make getting a replacement ignition key somewhat more cumbersome than sauntering down to the local Home Depot and saying “Here. Grind me one of these.”
Is it an anti-theft process? The basic concept of a key turning a cylinder is fairly simple. Are cars harder to hotwire now? Is that why the techno-keys are needed?