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Comment by jgalt212 | Hacker News Reader

I really do miss physical keys. Replacement cost for an Audi key fob is over $700. And it extends to broader market brands. My mom's Mazda replacement fob cost $500. WTF is going on here?

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That's the cost for integration with the immobilizer. Car keys and fobs have chips that signal to the onboard computer, and may use a variety of techniques such as rolling codes to make the cars harder to steal. Gone are the days when you can easily hotwire a car by yanking and touching random wires together from the steering column.

Kia and Hyundai are among the last brands to be selling cars without them, and that's the reason they've been targeted so heavily by car thieves.

If you have one key and lost one, you can use the one you have to more easily reprogram the other.

However, if you have lost all of your keys, a technician needs physical access to your car to reprogram everything together.

Add on top of that the licensing cost for the software to do the programming (you don't want random people having easy access to reprogramming your locks after all) . Reprogramming keys is a fairly low-volume sale, especially if you need access to the car to do it (hard to scale volume remotely) so the per-key cost is much higher as a result.

Surely the BOM on the fobs is at most tens of dollars. Hard to see a $700 cost justifiable as anything but greed against a captive audience.

Would you rather the keys be $5 from Walmart and pair with the car without needing an OEM programmer?

I'd be fine if they offered the same security as house keys.

You can't put your house intonneutral and roll it onto a trailer silently with a set of housekeys.

fair enough, but I'd argue that

p * (cost of theft via roll onto trailer) << $700

p = probability of roll onto trailer theft

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