The article is giving automotive companies too much credit. Sophisticated anti-theft technologies don’t translate to high manufacturing cost, especially given that car keys are a very high volume item, typically two are produced per car.

Your iPhone has more sophisticated security measures inside of it along with an entire computer capable of playing relatively recent AAA games and it costs less than some of these keys.

The actual answer is that dealerships make their money on service and demand that the manufacturers throw them bones like this.

One other option not mentioned in the article: Replacing the key shell and moving the guts from the old key.

Obviously not an option if you lost the key, but when my Toyota keyfobs got really worn (button membranes breaking and exposing the underlying microswitch), I discovered that you can avoid the fuss and/or expense of reprogramming the keys by buying replacement key fob shells and moving the circuit board from the old key. Wasn't any harder than changing the key fob battery..

Tesla is all the way on the easy and cheap end of the scale. It's $40 for two new key cards or $175 for a new key fob, and as long as you don't lose all of your existing keys at once, you can program new ones and deactivate lost ones yourself in about a minute with no extra tools or software. And using their phone app as a Bluetooth key is free forever.

I'm so old, I remember having separate ignition and door keys on our ridiculous GM vehicles.

Buying fobs online is a gamble. I got one for an older Kia Rio recently for some $40 plus shipping. Very good fob with a flip key and all the remote buttons. Unfortunately, the shady vendor did not mention that it does not include the transponder, which is some kind of RFID tag type thing that is sensed by the vehicle in order to start the engine, in addition to the key having to be cut correctly to turn the ignition.

I had to pay additional money to the automotive locksmith to put that in, on top of the $120 CAD base rate.

And, less than two months later, the new fob's battery died! I had a bunch of CR2032's around, which I had gotten cheaply; but insult to injury, you know?

Not just a missing transponder, but a shitty old/used battery on its last legs.

A new key for my 2004 Suzuki Grand Vitara costs $685 in Sweden.

Insurance company offers a new key for $100.

I said I lost it and paid $100.

I considered buying a Chinese key programmer on aliexpress for $200, or going to a black market key programmer that would do it for $100 but I was lazy.

Looking forward to having a car that only needs Apple Car Key in the future.

For my Tesla, I don't even have a key, I just use my phone.

But, I can use a credit card style key if I want. They are only $40 for a pair. I can program them in various ways. https://shop.tesla.com/product/key-card

Like others have said it's a revenue stream for the automotive company and the dealerships. The actual software/security side of car keys is "cat & mouse" game because automotive companies either outsourced the design or picked the cheapest/logistically easiest to implement.

The dealerships like making $200+ per fob program and the automotive companies like selling $$$ hardware + software licenses to be able to do so.

It's also likely that a processor that can only do rolling codes but no RNG or AES operations is cheaper and has longer battery life. Car model lifecycles are very long so the choice of components even for ~2018 cars might be using parts form 2013 (my guess). And auto companies are probably only considering parts purpose built for their industry due to supply and price guarantees.

If it wasn't for insurance companies refusing to insure some models with insecure fobs, the issue would likely be much worse today.

> A growing number of manufacturers now offer mobile apps, some of which serve as fully functioning car keys by adding a key to your phone’s digital wallet alongside credit cards and boarding passes.

This was a funny sentence to read. I'm reading this article to kill time while, in another window, I'm on a chat with customer service for my credit card because my credit card stopped working in my digital wallet. I've been trying to resolve the issue for weeks.

So I'm glad my car doesn't require anything like that.

Cynic: because when you need one, you'll pay through the nose for it.

Next car I buy will support UWB Apple car key or whatever. A phone as a fob is just too convenient to pass up.

Not all of them are that expensive. From memory, I paid AU$200 for a genuine Toyota RAV4 key at the dealership (including cutting and reprogramming), which is about US$140.

It was sort of funny in a twisted way when I bought my $20K car from Carmax and they handed me one key. Still haven't managed to get a replacement...

For whatever it's worth, both the common Chinese models and frontier American models are remarkably good at uh...rapidly reversing a lot of electronics and peripheral tools around many or most automobiles on the road, and if you're clever or maybe bad, the uplift from the models has enabled a lot of both good and absurd shit like being able to rapidly reprogram a key with under a $100 in hardware. It's certainly nice not needing to fight VIDA just because Volvo is a company that hates their customers and just generally sucks post Ford, but I presume this also makes everything recent easier to steal.

Interesting topic, boring article

Reprogramming/repairing/recoding the gateway and/or the immobilizer/anti-theft-relevant parts is like... super exclusive?

What grieves me is that, if I don't fancy these fancy fobs, and want an old-school key with a traditional ignition, our purportedly capitalist system doesn't quite have the marketplace to support me.

This is also true for a manual transmission and no-chip design. I basically want a freshly manufactured old-school Jeep.

Capitalist fail!

The programming step seems to be the real cost driver here, more than the fob hardware. Losing all keys at once is the worst case, since there is no working key to copy from. It is worth checking the cost of a spare while you still have one, as part of the total cost of owning a car.

They should be a $5 piece of machined metal. I don’t know how we let car keys turn into computers. Not everything has to be a goddamned computer. If your car requires a computerized remote control to open, it’s defective and should be returned.