Losing the only key is not a door problem. There is nothing left to recover, so a key has to be made: a blade cut to your vehicle's profile and a chip coded into its immobilizer, both done beside the car while it stays parked where it is. Year, make and model gets you a price first.
Shutting your keys in the car and losing them outright are two different problems wearing the same panic. One is a door to open and it is over in minutes. The other is manufacturing: cutting metal, then writing a chip into the vehicle so the engine will answer to it. That second job takes real time at the kerb, which is the part most people do not expect, and it is why a van has to stand next to your car rather than pull up and leave again. On a metered stall along Marine Drive in July, or in a beach lot on a Saturday, that is worth knowing before you ring anybody.
One quote covers the whole list below, agreed before the van leaves.
Key type does most of the work in the price and the vehicle year does the rest. You get the band on the call, before anybody is committed to anything.
| Key type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Laser-cut blade, no chip | $80 – $120 |
| Transponder key, no remote | $120 – $200 |
| Remote key, blade and buttons together | $180 – $280 |
| Push-start proximity fob | $250 – $420 |
| No working key survives | $280 – $500 |
| Spare cut at the same appointment | $60 – $150 |
A small number of recent model years will only take a key that an authorized dealer has released, and no amount of equipment in a van gets around that. If yours is one of them, you hear it while you are still on the phone.
Year, make, model, and whether any working key still exists. Read the VIN off the dashboard too if you can get to it. Those four things decide the blank, the cutting method and the programming route, which between them are the entire quote.
A blade cutting machine, a full inventory of blanks, and OBD programming tools for the factory security systems. Nothing has to be fetched afterwards and nothing gets sent away, which is the whole point of doing this at the vehicle rather than at a counter.
The VIN gets checked and ownership confirmed, the blade is cut, the chip is written to the car and any buttons are paired. Then you put the key in yourself and try every lock and the ignition. Payment comes after that, by card, cash or e-transfer.
A lockout leaves the key in the car, where everyone can see it. A lost key has gone somewhere, and on this peninsula the somewhere is almost always reached on foot. The Promenade runs the length of the beach with the pier heading out from the middle of it, and both get walked with a fob in a jacket pocket. The 1001 Steps drop off the Ocean Park bluff down to Crescent Beach and get used as a shortcut between the two, which makes them a very long staircase to search twice. Crescent Beach sits behind the sand spit that separates Mud Bay from the strait, and dry sand is the one surface on this peninsula that takes a dropped key and gives nothing back.
Those searches rarely end well, which is why this page exists separately from the lockout one. Say on the call that the key is gone rather than mislaid, because a replacement and a recovery need different things out of the van. A fob that has been in salt water is not a drying-out project either. It is the remote key row of the table above, or the push-start row if the car is keyless: a new one, cut and paired to your car.
One local note on timing. The BNSF tracks run between Marine Drive and the beach, so a freight train at the crossing is a short wait for the van rather than a closed road. Say where the car is parked when you call and the arrival estimate already allows for it.
Nobody should cut a key for a vehicle on a stranger's say-so, so expect to be asked to show the car is yours: normally the vehicle registration, photo identification, and the VIN readable on the dashboard. White Rock runs into the awkward version of this more often than an inland suburb does. The beach fills with people who drove in for the day, and the crossing at Douglas puts a steady trickle of drivers on this end of the peninsula who are a long way from the address printed on their registration.
That is not automatically an obstacle. What has to be established is lawful authority over the vehicle rather than the address you happen to be standing at, and our terms set out both that check and the right to decline the job where it cannot be confirmed. What does cause delay is discovering the problem beside the car, so if the registration is shut inside the vehicle along with everything else, mention it on the call and the question gets settled before anyone sets off.
Cutting and coding covers Honda, Toyota, Ford, GM, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Nissan, Dodge, Ram and Jeep, along with most other makes ordinary enough to see on a BC road. BMW, Audi and Mercedes vary by model year, so yours gets checked against what the van carries before anything is booked rather than after. Trucks and full-size vans are fine across the major makes, which matters on the acreage side of the coverage area where the vehicle in the yard is often a working one. Motorcycles depend entirely on the brand, so call with the year and model and you will get a straight yes or no.
A modern key is two things pretending to be one. The blade is metal, and a hardware store can copy it for a few dollars. That copy will open your door, slot into the ignition, turn, and then absolutely nothing will happen. The part that actually starts the engine is a transponder chip, and it has to be written into your vehicle's immobilizer before the car will accept it. Canada has required an immobilizer on every new light vehicle since September 2007, and many makes fitted one voluntarily well before that, which is why the plain-blade row at the top of the table above covers a shrinking set of older vehicles rather than the ordinary case. A key that turns without talking to the immobilizer leaves you precisely as stranded as no key at all.
That step is equipment rather than skill you can borrow, and a fair number of mobile locksmiths do not carry it. It is the first question worth putting to anybody you call about a car key, this shop included.
The consequence lands hardest on the waterfront. A car that will not start does not move, so it stays in the metered stall on Marine Drive or the beach lot it was parked in, with the BNSF line between it and the sand, and towing it off the strip means either the climb to North Bluff Road or the run out past the pier. Coding a chip at the kerb is what keeps a dead key from becoming a tow.
All-keys-lost sits at the expensive end of the table for a straightforward reason: with nothing to copy from, the code has to be pulled and the vehicle taught a key from scratch. Every one of those jobs was a one-key car right up until it wasn't. A second key ordered while the van is already at your kerb is the cheapest key anyone will ever sell you, and it demotes the whole situation from a crisis to an errand. If the old key is genuinely gone, have it deleted at the same visit, so whoever eventually turns it up in the sand is holding a souvenir.
Keys cut and coded at the vehicle, wherever on the peninsula it is standing.
Locked out, moving in, or changing the locks after a sale. Same crew, same number.