Call them what you want: digital keys the shape of a credit
card, keyless start pods, keyless push-button start devices, intelligent keys,
or smart or “smartphone” keys. They’re the way we open and start cars now — and
more — and it’s unlikely the primitive keys of the past are coming back.
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At an upstate New York gathering of the International Motor
Press Association before the pandemic, members spent a day tooling about roads
near Bear Mountain in lots of new cars. I took turns in an Alfa Romeo, two
BMWs, a Volvo, two Volkswagens, a Lexus, an Acura … and I forget the others.
Not once did I touch an ignition key.
Certainly, the shift from cranks and solenoids and bits of small
metal to remote, wireless contraptions isn’t only about science and technology.
There are elements of convenience, design, ecology and fashion. But mostly it’s
about science and technology.
Sometimes, however, one might wish for a real key; the
alternatives are not bulletproof. Tesla drivers recently punched up the
smartphone app they use to unlock and start their cars. The app was not
responding, as a server had gone down. The Tesla key “card” would work —
Tesla’s version of a fob — but drivers who depended on their phones were stuck.
The problem was sorted out fairly quickly, and Elon Musk, the company’s CEO,
tweeted apologies.
“It was Chrysler in 1949 that introduced the key that operated
the combined ignition and starter switch,” said Brandt Rosenbusch, manager of
historical services for the former Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (now called
Stellantis). “Prior to this,” he added, “cars were started by turning a key to
power the ignition, and drivers then pushed a starter button either on the
floor or instrument panel.” Before the 1960s, most vehicles required a separate
coded key to switch on the ignition and one to open the doors or trunk.
Many years ago, after I was newly licensed, I’d regularly ask
Dad, “Can I have the keys?” That meant just one thing: Can I take the car?
Usually he’d toss them over — one key for the ignition, one for the doors of
the Oldsmobile. “Be careful,” he’d say.
Do teenagers today ask, “Dad, can I have the fob?”
It took decades for the fob — believed to be related to the
German word “fuppe,”
meaning “pocket” — to acquire remote capabilities and send coded radio signals
to a receiver in the vehicle. Often the first “fob function” was allowing
drivers to lock and unlock the doors. Advancements in technology granted it the
ability to open the trunk, activate an alarm system and eventually develop
“smarts”: simply carry it into the cockpit and push the “start” button on or
near the dash. The new technologies also help to foil the best efforts of the
gone-in-60-seconds bandits.
Several vehicle-operating functions have already been outsourced
to smartphones. For example, an app for some BMWs can remotely start the auto;
it will run for 15 minutes, heating or cooling the cabin, before automatically
shutting off. But some type of hardware — a wireless fob, round or square, with
tiny buttons to open and close doors, hatches, windows and sunroofs, and
perhaps a “panic” function to set off the car’s alarm system — will most likely
remain until mobile devices “eliminate the need for a physical piece of
hardware altogether,” said Todd Parker, director of global design for General
Motors.
The march of key fob progress is assuredly unstoppable, and the
ultimate recipient — the car buyer — is in its crosshairs. At the Volvo of
Queens dealership in New York, Peter Fearon, a salesperson, said the migration
from metal key to electronic controller was a fait accompli. “Everything
in the car is computer-controlled,” he said. “Everybody’s happy.”
Not everybody, said John Albanese, who works at Bayside
Volkswagen next door to Volvo.
“Usually, older people, they don’t like the push button to start
the car,” he said. “They’re afraid they’ll forget to shut off the car. They
think it’ll somehow fail. A young person just wants to talk to the car. ‘Start
the car; drive me home.’ It’s a totally different mindset.”
Albanese, who has been selling automobiles of assorted brands
for 43 years, also suggests that modern fob devices complicate the delivery process.
“We explain the functions, but half the time, what we tell customers goes in
one ear and out the other,” he said. “And the owner’s manual … well, that’s
never touched, never opened.”
There’s also the question of replacing a lost modern fob. Figure
more than $200, Albanese warns, “and then each key has to be programmed,
because each car is different.” (I recall surreptitiously copying the ignition
key for Dad’s Oldsmobile: $1.75.)
Whatever. Parker of GM believes that the modern key “is enabling
us to completely redefine the vehicle ownership experience.”
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