Spare car key. Spare house key.

I wish it only cost $4 to get my car key and house key copied.

The car key would be cheap if I just wanted one without the transponder for the doors, but the house key is still $10+ to copy. That's kind of the upside and the downside to high-security locks.

On a side note, I also pay for Onstar with my truck which, despite the varying opinions on it, is actually kind of nice to have. A buddy of mine needed to get into my truck when I was away, so I called Onstar, gave them my super-secret-squirrel-code, and they unlocked my trucks door over the phone. When I called my buddy back he wanted to know how in the hell I did that.

Jeep keys have a chip in them. $60 for a spare. But, I agree with the OP in principal. It's the best $60 I can spend. I have a spare hidden on the exterior of the Jeep. My spare house key is hidden in the backyard.

I've heard reports of insurance companies being difficult regarding theft claims if a spare key is used by the thief.

My car key costs $100 for a spare, but it came with two keys, so there is a spare. We have a house key hidden on our property.

You should be able to copy a vehicle key without the chip and use it for opening the door. It won't work in the ignition but if all you've done is locked the keys in the car it should do the job.

The other thing to do for this situation is to have one of those push button locks for the door and a spare key hidden INSIDE the vehicle.

Wish I had one when I locked my keys in the vehicle LAST weekend. It cost me $40 to a tow-truck operator to come out for 30 seconds of work!

I refound this website for a hitch receiver safe. Niffy but expensive. http://www.hitchsafe.com/

In the last year, I have been seeing MANY cars with plastic taped over a window.

I am thinking that most of these were done by the owners who locked their key in the car.

So, there seems to be conflicting info: can you get a cheap key cut to just get you inside the car? Or do you have to get the expensive key with the chip just to open the door?

I'll bet most people haven't lost their keys, they're sitting right there on the passenger seat, visible through the window of the locked doors.

Sue

If it has a keyhole, it will let you use a non-transponder key to open a door. The problem though, is that more and more cars are using laser cut and sidewinder cut keys, which your typical key-cutting place can not duplicate. So even if they want a non-transponder key for the doors, it can be difficult and expensive. Sidewinder keys generally look like this:



With that in mind, the average owner doesn't usually get any spares made beyond the 1-3 they get when they buy the car.

Then, to make things more difficult, quite a few cars make using a key somewhat tricky. They might hide the actual key inside the remote fob itself. Then, to use that key, you have to locate the proper key hole, which can be surprisingly difficult on some cars.

The corvette is a great example of this. It uses a completely electronic based locking and unlocking system. While it does have emergency back-ups in place, most owners have no idea how to use them to get in or out of the car. It has actually led to a few calls to police from panic stricken owners who think they're trapped inside their car when the battery dies.

Here's a video of how the back-up lock systems work on a late model corvette. It's good to know, because you're probably going to see a lot of similar systems used in future vehicles:

Have also heard of a few Corvette owners putting the key along with whatever else is in their hands on top of the car and the transponder will "see" the key and allow the car to start. Driving down the road the stuff on the roof blows off with the fob and when you turn off the car at your destination you will not be able to restart it.

I was out with a friend in her new Corvette and she locked the key fob in the trunk, glad she had onstar. But we didn't lock the car it did that on it's own and turned on the alarm system so we couldn't just open the door and reach into the back of the car.

Always have a spare key, one of the last cars i purchased only had one key, i promptly had a spare made, it wasn't a week later my little brother was driving the car and he locked himself out. He did this a couple of more times before he got smart enough to take the key with him while putting gas in the car. Found out later that occasionally the car locks itself for no apparent reason. I guess the car was trying to tell my little brother something, i have told him more than once that the car just likes me better.

Another reason I love my 91 Honda Civic. You'd have to be pretty desperate to want to steal it and spare keys are cheap and easy.

Actually, that era of civic and accord tends to top the list for most stolen vehicles.

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