Well it’s taken nearly 5 years, but I’ve finally gone and done it… I’ve lost my car key! I have a Renault Laguna II with one of those credit card keys and sometime in the last few days it has dropped out of my pocket. I may have put it down somewhere, but I’ll be jiggered if I know where.
Now, it wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that the spare key is in the car… yes yes, you can stop laughing now… the reason the spare is in the care is quite straight forward and stems back to when I first got the car and the initial unreliability of the keys.
The card has a special hidden emergency key built in, which looks pretty much like a normal key and there is a place on the car that you can use it to unlock the doors. Well early on I had a few problems with a number of the keys losing power and thus not working (design fault I believe), however with the emergency key you could always get in the car and thus with the spare key I could drive my car to the garage to get it fixed!
The keys have since become pretty robust but my habbits haven’t changed. I was only thinking the other day that I should remove the spare from the car and put it back in the house.
So now, the only way to get into the car is for a special emergency key to be cut for me by Renault in France and that takes 5-10 days. Then I can get in the car, get the spare, drive to the garage and have the car reprogrammed for new keys. All at the cost of £150! Not to mention 10 days without my car…
Renault Laguna