The removable steering wheel is for security - just take it with you when you park

Patent already pending by Mr Bean.

Works for Formula 1.

So, you unlock your car / house with your phone. What happens when you run out of charge and the charger is inside?

"So, you unlock your car / house with your phone. What happens when you run out of charge and the charger is inside?"

You just slip the back off your phone and use the key hidden inside...oh wait...

But that's exactly the situation on my Audi. It is a smart key that lets me just open the door and it will automatically unlock if the key is within a few feet of the door, but in case the battery dies there is a key hidden inside that can be slipped out to unlock the door.

Not sure how that key allows starting the car but I assume that's doable as well.

I'm afraid you'll have to do something unusual: read the manual :).

For models with keyless start (i.e. a start/stop button), there is a place where you have to place the key so its RFID circuit can be picked up by the car, usually somewhere in the middle console. Once you've done that you will find it will start.

You also need that location to resync the key in case it has lost battery power for too long, so worth looking up before you need it :).

On my Volvo it's quite obvious - they still have the slot where you'd insert the non-keyless key,

> I'm afraid you'll have to do something unusual: read the manual :).

I'm afraid they've solved that problem too, modern cars don't come with a manual, they have an app

The app will tell you millions of things about the car you can't imagine why anyone in their right minds would want, but bugger all about things you might need to know.

Least ways that's my experience with a recent Merc. loaner car.

That'll be the app that's on the same phone as the key software that's just run out of batteries

.... oh wait my car has the manual available on the computer inside the car ... if only I could open it to learn how to open it ....

NEVER give a Merc app your real data - give it an account you can wipe later and where possible fake personal data. I unavoidably had a Merc some 5 years ago and I still get spam. All efforts to have Mercedes delete my details have failed so it's about to hit the regulator when I find some time (note to self: read less El Reg so you actually have the time).

That sounds like fun. Merc are German, IIRC from the crap I had to do about GDPR the punishments for mishandling data of a German citizen are fairly draconian. :-)

This is why you have your own domain so you can hand out individual email addresses and cancel them when they're finished with.

You find someone else with a Tesla to unlock your car for you.

Did you even read the article?

;)

Though for added security, it needs to be the same color.

"You find someone else with a Tesla to unlock your car for you."

You certainly won't be phoning a friend

Especially in the digital age. Check out Deviant Olam on youtube.

Keys can be copied from pictures of keys, any lock can be defeated.

The illusion of security keeps insurers and sheep happy, but not the wise.

Did you read the article? What you describe is somebody who is intending to break in. It's known that keys can be copied. I've seen a locksmith open a door because of a lost physical key, took 5 minutes with a battery drill, none of the neighbors noticed.

But here, the driver broke in the wrong Tesla without intending to, without even noticing. It's a whole new level of crap lock.

"I've seen a locksmith open a door because of a lost physical key, took 5 minutes with a battery drill,"

That person had no business describing himself as a locksmith.

Or, check out TheLockpickingLawyer's channel.

Back in the early '70s I owned a '67 Chevy Cop Car that had a special ignition key.... it would unlock the doors and fit the ignition of almost any GM product back to ~'64. I only tried it on peeps cars I knew and had permission from but still, it was pretty surprising!

Back at the end of the 70s a school friend was given his dad's old Ford Capri, I had a special key that would open it and almost any Ford of that period. It was called a screw driver. To be fair it wasn't just Fords you could often open with a screw driver.

Electronic keys can never be secure. Ever.

I send the key.

You see the key and unlock,

You change the key,

The key changes.

In theory by a five year old this is perfect but anyone with half a brain asks the following of what would happen if.

You send the key.

It doesn't get the key.

Someone else then sends that key.

They get the new key.

Their key is now the key and your key won't work.

No amount of encryption is ever going to fix that.

Add to that whatever lazy arse programming (or avoiding customer issues and associated costs) was put into this and it's a recipe for disaster.

At the end of the day even physical keys are pretty useless but they take time. This is one of the basic tenets of life. If you can design something then someone can look at that design and break it. Look at Windows ME. Nearly every single device manufacturer managed to break that with simple device drivers and they weren't even trying to.

... that remote keys can be defeated, rolling key codes are a thing, and it's not quite as simple as your "anyone with half a brain" scenario suggests.

If someone has a previous capture of your keyfob transmission, there is usually a limited time window in which they can use it (provided they defeated your vehicle from receiving it, and rolling to the next code). And even if they use it in that window, it's often a one-time thing - they don't have "the new key" without a bit more work. They could, for instance, very well find they have opened the car but can't drive it off.

I presume you’ve never used a proximity card to enter an office building, data centre or some other facility then?

The rolling key algorithm is a bit like 2FA, it needs a shared secret to work. That's why criminals tend to longline the radio signal of the actual owner's key, it's much harder to break the code. This is also why a new key needs to be synched against the vehicle's system - that is when the key exchange takes place.

Not all of these systems are perfect so there have been some rather embarassing problems but overall it seems to work because otherwise you would no longer be able to insure a car against theft. Heaven forbid an insurance would actually have to pay out - trust them to be pretty much immediately on the manufacturer's case.

Of course, with Tesla they would either have to tweet to Musk or send a summons to the actual company to get anyone to talk to them, but in general insurance companies like to avoid giving back any of the loot they get off their customers so they'll be knocking on your door pretty quickly if you have a volume problem - which Tesla seems to have. Again.

Simple just like any other smart card (although manufacturers may go the dumb route). Key says "hello" to car, car replies "calculate the answer to X using your private key". Key replies with correctly calculated answer. You can record this, but unless the car asks the same question twice, your recording isn't of any use,

Then there's the relays used for stealing cars when the key is still in the house - it shouldn't be difficult to calculate the latency of the comms to decide how close the actual key is i.e. 1m away or 5m away.

While I'm glad it all ended well for Rajesh and Mahmoud, I wonder what the insurance situation was? In the 10 minutes Rajesh was driving someone else's car without their permission or knowledge he was almost certainly not insured. And on being stopped by the police and asked if it was his car, Rajesh could have been in quite a bit of trouble.

Admittedly the AA does this thing where you can have yourself rather than the car covered for car breakdowns*, so that if you are being given a lift you can call them out to help, but I don't think any insurance companies cover taking someone else's car without their permission, unless you are a police officer requisitioning the vehicle for official business.

BTW I recently had a mechanic come round to repair my car and he was insistent that I should only use the buttons on the key to lock and unlock the car as it can affect the immobiliser if I just turned the key on the lock.

Life is just getting too complicated for a bear of very little brain**, such as myself.

*Just car breakdowns, mental ones are done by the NHS, if you are lucky.

**Now out of copyright.

Wouldn't be a problem in Sweden where rather sensibly the car is insured, not the driver.

...most people opt for the phone. You're going to be taking that out with you come what may, obviating the need to carry around another item to lock the car.

I don't. I sometimes intentionally leave the phone at home because I don't want to be any more disturbed than I already am. Especially after phones expanded to dimensions that exceed most convenient pockets. Once you break the phone anxiety habit, you can relax more without having to check your phone every few minutes in case you missed a beep notifying you that there's an exciting new offer for something you don't want. Or, because for a lot of these unlock services to work, you have to keep location services on. So by the time you've been flooded with, and deleted all the special offers from businesses near you, your battery is flat and you can't unlock your car. Or house.

I guess with a house, there could be a market for adding weatherproof USB or wireless chargers to your door furniture. I guess it might be harder to accidently lock yourself out given the phone won't detect it's outside the threshold. Or it might use it's essential health monitoring functions to detect that you've left it home alone, and lock the door out of spite.

I usually take mine long just in case of a car breakdown. I figure that Murphy will catch up with me if I don't (the one time I don't have phone with me, etc.). I just leave the thing turned off.

I typically don't have it turned on at home either. I keep getting emails from my wireless carrier wondering if I'm having problems with my account...

How the heck can someone drive an apparently identical car for 10/15 minutes without realising it was the wrong car?. As soon as I sit in my car after the garage has done some work on it I know this is not the car I left them with as the seat and steering wheel positions are not the same. It would be an extraordinary coincidence for the mechanic who worked on my car to be the same size and shape as me with the same driving position preferences.

You might not know with a Tesla. It would apparently be a valid assumption that the wheel setting was off because it was just in the process of coming off..

I can't speak for the Teslas, but my car carries the settings for the electric seats and mirrors in the keyfob memory. If I open the car with my keyfob, it recalls my settings. If SWMBO uses her keyfob, then the seat and mirrors are set for her.

It sounds like a gimmick but if you're as sensitive to your seating position being 'just right' as I am then it's a really useful feature, no fiddling about getting back where you left it if 'er indoors uses the car, or indeed if a mechanic's shifted it. It's not an option I'd have chosen to pay for, but I bought mine secondhand, it came with electric seats, and having experienced the convenience I might actual pay for it in the future should the situation arise.

Are you sure it stores that info in the keyfob? These systems usually just remember which settings belong to which key/fob but the storage of the settings is in the car.

Stealing any car made before chipped security keys is trivial. Google the problems with kia boyz.

Once you realize that the key does basically nothing and its the chip and the ignition interlock preventing theft, then you can remove the needless key.

It was also possible to open other people's cars with your car key in the world before chips. That should actually be possible to eliminate with electronic key fobs, but trust Tesla to screw that up.

I’d like my key to be able to open my car. I’d also like it to be _only_ my key which can open my car. Not someone else’s key. I also have little interest in opening someone elses car.

This is unless you drive a HQ Holden which had 7 different keys for the entire production run. A mate locked his keys in the car at a large even one day and was a little lost as a result. A fellow HQ owner walked past and thought he’d talk this other HQ owner having a concern with his car. Explaining that he locked the keys inside, the other bloke said, “I’ve got a HQ too, let’s see if the 1 in 7 chance of us having the same key is in effect here.” Sure enough, the key worked and my mate was able to get inside without having to break in.

>I’d also like it to be _only_ my key which can open my car. Not someone else’s key

There are about 80Million cars made every year. That's quite a lot of active car locks to all require a unique key.

Even then there is LPL's "click on one, some resistance on two ....."

That 80 million is only a problem for physical keys, it's too hard to have both enough key differs to cover that and have big enough mechanical tolerances to be reliable. For active electronic locks it's just a question of using a few more bits, and binary digits aren't in short supply.