With my car, as soon as you touch the door handle (with the keyfob in your pocket, or within a couple feet of the door) it unlocks, and to start the car you push a button. It doesn't work from even 4' away (eg, someone else touches the door handle while you're close) and it doesn't work from the other side (eg, when the keyfob close enough to driver's side door, the passenger side won't unlock).
The really nice feature is when you walk away (a few seconds after you're out of range), the doors automatically lock. However, the downside of this feature is my wife's car does not have it -- and so at least half of the time when I am driving it I forget and leave it unlocked in parking lots.
> the downside of this feature is my wife's car does not have it -- and so at least half of the time when I am driving it I forget and leave it unlocked in parking lots.
My brother in law did this on a ski trip with a borrowed Range Rover. It was only at the end of the week he realised he'd left his keys in a jacket pocket in the car the entire time and it had been sitting unlocked in the car park half a mile down the road from the apartment. Thankfully it was fine but stealing it would've been a case of getting in, pressing the start button and driving away.
>so at least half of the time when I am driving it I forget and leave it unlocked in parking lots
This is the problem with a lot of the newer tech in cars like backup alarms. You become used to various features in your own car and when you rent a car you need to consciously remember that the vehicle doesn't have $FEATURE. Effectively, cars are becoming a lot less standardized. A car I rented a few weeks ago beeped at me a couple times and it took a while before I realized it was the lane departure warning triggering on a couple turns.
It's a problem going the other way too. I drive an older vehicle and rented a car. I nearly had to ask the attendant how to start the car. Then I was entirely surprised when I stopped at a light and the engine turned off.
And don't get me started on center consoles. At least my last rental supported CarPlay and I was pleased to discover that it pretty much just worked. Other systems I've had seemed far more intent on downloading all my contacts rather than doing something useful from an entertainment or navigation perspective.
Heh, that reminds me of my last rental, where, not half an hour off the lot, the touchscreen sound/navigation/??? system got stuck in some sort of reboot loop. Cursory online research suggested the problem was a known firmware bug that was unfixable without a service appointment.
A reasonable person would probably have turned around and exchanged the car with the rental company at this point.
I am not a reasonable person.
Instead, I headed directly to a truck stop and purchased a heavy-duty power inverter, dropped the back seat, and crammed my portable PA speaker into the trunk, connected to the car's trunk-mounted battery through the inverter and to my iPhone through a shielded audio cable run from the trunk to the front seat.
The result sounded far better than it should have, and what it lacked in convenience (I had to pop the trunk to power it down) and channel separation (one speaker = mono), it more than made up for in dB SPL.
(for the record, I've also repaired eBay purchases that arrived in worse-than-advertised condition rather than returning them, for no other reason than that learning how to fix things is more fun than going through the hassle of returning them)
This is also the kind of 'hacker' mindset that got me interested into technology. But instead of fixing to see how it worked, I broke it apart to see how it did.
The really nice feature is when you walk away (a few seconds after you're out of range), the doors automatically lock. However, the downside of this feature is my wife's car does not have it -- and so at least half of the time when I am driving it I forget and leave it unlocked in parking lots.