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On 25 September I grumbled about the crumbling keys for my RAV4, a problem I understand other people have had with other makes of car keys.
A couple of days later as requested, I took my logbook and driving licence to the local dealership who checked that I was the owner of the car (which was fair enough) and coughed up £70 for a new key (which I assumed was likely to be gold-plated). It will be here in two or three days the man said.
A week and a day later I called to see what was happening, and was told that the key had arrived just the day before (yeah, right!) and that I needed to book the car in so that they could programme the key. The cost of this would be another £45 and the ‘work’ would take about an hour and a half.
Why would programming a car key take an hour and a half I naively enquired and why so expensive? Well, the chap said, it’s expensive because we have to link your car to Toyota’s computer system (yeah, right!) but - wait for it - we do give your car a courtesy examination to see if everything is OK. That explained to me the £45 right enough!
So the car (or rather, it’s key) got booked in for one week later. In the meantime, I had the car serviced and given its MOT by a much less expensive service station. I happened to mention to the mechanic the business about my car key and the extortionate cost of its replacement and programming.
And then he saved me £45 with a piece of advice that was so simple, I almost kicked myself for not thinking of it.
Go get the key he said and take it apart. Put the innards from your old key into the new one and, hey presto, you’re fit to go! So I did exactly that.
I cancelled the appointment, got the key from the dealership (discovering that it was not, as I had thought, gold-plated), swapped the innards over and saved myself £45. When the battery from the ‘old’ innards gives up, then I can replace it with the one out of the unused ‘new’ innards.
So you too can share in this simple piece of advice, and save yourself some money when you car key starts crumbling!
Of course, it would make life simpler if Toyota and other car manufacturers would make modern car keys in such a way that they don’t crumble with wear!
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On 25 September I grumbled about the crumbling keys for my RAV4, a problem I understand other people have had with other makes of car keys.
A couple of days later as requested, I took my logbook and driving licence to the local dealership who checked that I was the owner of the car (which was fair enough) and coughed up £70 for a new key (which I assumed was likely to be gold-plated). It will be here in two or three days the man said.
A week and a day later I called to see what was happening, and was told that the key had arrived just the day before (yeah, right!) and that I needed to book the car in so that they could programme the key. The cost of this would be another £45 and the ‘work’ would take about an hour and a half.
Why would programming a car key take an hour and a half I naively enquired and why so expensive? Well, the chap said, it’s expensive because we have to link your car to Toyota’s computer system (yeah, right!) but - wait for it - we do give your car a courtesy examination to see if everything is OK. That explained to me the £45 right enough!
So the car (or rather, it’s key) got booked in for one week later. In the meantime, I had the car serviced and given its MOT by a much less expensive service station. I happened to mention to the mechanic the business about my car key and the extortionate cost of its replacement and programming.
And then he saved me £45 with a piece of advice that was so simple, I almost kicked myself for not thinking of it.
Go get the key he said and take it apart. Put the innards from your old key into the new one and, hey presto, you’re fit to go! So I did exactly that.
I cancelled the appointment, got the key from the dealership (discovering that it was not, as I had thought, gold-plated), swapped the innards over and saved myself £45. When the battery from the ‘old’ innards gives up, then I can replace it with the one out of the unused ‘new’ innards.
So you too can share in this simple piece of advice, and save yourself some money when you car key starts crumbling!
Of course, it would make life simpler if Toyota and other car manufacturers would make modern car keys in such a way that they don’t crumble with wear!
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