Modern Car Key Fobs Are Missing An Obvious And Incredibly Useful Feature

I have some pretty mixed feelings about modern proximity keys/key fobs/smart keys/whatever. Complex feelings. On the one hand, they’re fantastic; they allow you to just approach your car and it recognizes the key somewhere in your pocket or handbag or underpants, and the door opens, you can get the car started and go without having to dig out at key or anything. For many people, for safety and convenience reasons, this is incredibly important.

On the other hand or flipper, these keys also allow all manner of sort-of-absurd problems and disasters to happen, because the fob doesn’t require a physical connection to the car. This means one can do exciting things like leaving the key on the outside of a car, where it can fall off, which is exactly what our own Mercedes Streeter did this summer, leading to days and days of expensive trouble.

There’s other, easy ways to screw up with proximity keys, of course; switching drivers but not keys, which can allow you to keep driving before the car realizes the key is gone, compounding the trouble, and of course there’s simply losing keys, which of course you can do with any sort of key (or really, any objects, like socks or grapefruit).

But proximity keys and fobs don’t have to be subject to the limitations of crude old metal keys! Our own Pete asked the question that got me thinking, and should get us all thinking:

This is an extremely reasonable question: can you track a lost key fob? And, in keeping with ancient rabbinical traditions of answering questions with questions, the only reasonable response to this is this question: why the hell not?

Doing a little bit of research, it doesn’t seem like any major OEMs are making key fobs that can be tracked like AirTags or similar sorts of Bluetooth-based tracking devices. I mean, there may be some out there that do that, and of course Teslas and some other cars use phones in place of keys, but the fundamental truth is that all modern key fobs should have the electronics built into them so they can be tracked if lost.

I mean, these key fobs are already halfway there; they have wireless radios and some manner of power source and little antennae; really, how much harder would it be to include BlueTooth hardware to make these things trackable via a phone app?

The more I think about this, the more obvious it seems to be. As soon as cheap BlueTooth trackers like AirTags hit the market, you’d think carmakers would be itching to incorporate such tech into their smart keys, right?

I mean, sure, you can get keychains that hold these tracking tags, and many people use those, but, again, this seems like something that should be built into all modern key fobs. Just because.

I suppose there are some security concerns, like there are with any tracker; there would need to be means for the owner to turn off tracking if desired, say if they were loaning their car to a friend, or something like that. But beyond that, it’s your car key; is there any reason to not know where it is at all times?

Are there downsides here? I mean, sure, there’s likely a bit more cost involved, but compared to what modern cars already have built into them, it’s pretty trivial. If we have the technology to allow you to find a misplaced car keys, then that feels like something that you shouldn’t even have to ask for; it should just be part of modern key fobs from the get-go.

So there.