The wonderful world of transponder car keys

So I got a new car. It's actually an old car but it's the first time I've had to deal with transponder keys. The seller only had 1 of these transponder keys. If you don't know what a transponder key is, it has a radio chip that talks to the engine and the engine won't run unless it gets the correct id from the key.

If you only have 1 key and you lose it, you are in trouble because you can't start the car and it will need to be towed to the dealership. So make that copy as soon as possible!

With my particular car, if you don't have 2 transponder keys with the car, you can't easily program another key to add to the system. My cunning plan of buying cheap transponder keys off ebay and having them cut won't work because I don't have that second key to do the programming.

Dealers and locksmiths have special equipment to program the car to initialize and add the coded keys.

There is a workaround: You can have clone keys made of one of your transponder keys. I went to Lowe's hardware and they have this little box called the Ez-clonethat will duplicate the transponder chip id onto a "blank" transponder. So for $75 I have a perfect clone of my original key.

The only disadvantage is that I still can't add more "unique" keys (that have unique transponder ids) to my car myself but it doesn't really matter as long as the clone keys that I have work.



Here's an article from Consumer Reports about these newer car keys. These keys can really get expensive in a hurry.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2013/07/car-key-replacement-for-less/index.htm

Car key replacement for less
A dealer replacement and programming will cost $200 or more