When did keyed ignition become common in cars?

[bobthebuilder]

@Snickers

My mom’s 62 Chevy requires the key to start, but once the car is started, you can take the key out and do whatever you’d like with it whilst the car remains running. Mom loved to do that for us - a cheap, entertaining parlor trick.

I still can’t really believe that it works that way, but it does.

I drove a mid nineties Chevey Malibu that did this… I do not think it was supposed to of course.

[Tuckerfan]

@chappachula

don’t ALL military vehicles have no key?.

It depends. I’ve seen ones which had some kind of electronic card for an ignition key.

[Rick]

@iamthewalrus_3

I still think having to put the key in the ignition (or the fob in a slot) is a good idea. It saves people from the problem of the key being in range, but not actually in the car. That’s great, until you get to wherever you’re going and can’t restart the car! Last week my buddy had to leave work to bring his wife her car keys. Her car had happily started up in the garage while her keyring was 10 feet away on the kitchen table.

I find this a bit hard to believe. All of the keyless start systems I have seen, require the key to be inside the car to start, and within seconds of a key being removed from the car, set off a chime and a warning in the driver’s display that the key is missing.
The risk they are trying to avoid is one spouse (with key) being dropped off somewhere. The system is designed to notify the driver that the key is no longer inside the car, and if the ignition is turned off, the car will go into Rebok mode. IOW you will be walking. :smack:

[Baldwin]

Scientific American has a monthly column with exerpts from the magazine issue 50 years, 100 years and 150 years ago. Recently, the exerpt from 1908 was about how people are taking their starting cranks with them to prevent car theft, but some clever thieves are carrying starting cranks of their own; and how some sort of locking mechanism might become necessary.