The KIA Sorento's anti-theft system may not stop thieves, but it sure stopped its owners (us) from driving it tonight.
Since we had bought it used we only had one key fob.
Tash calls me from work tonight that her fob is not working and when she opens the door with the key, the car's alarm goes off and the engine will not start.
Never-mind that they keys are specially cut and you can only get them from a dealer. if you've locked your KIA with the Fob and the fob goes off to fobbit heaven, your car will not start with your key.
This is really, really, stupid.
So I drove over to her work and after buying new batteries and opening the fob it appears to be broken inside, so things got progressively worse.
I check online and the manual for a solution and the proposed one of insert key, turn to the "ON" position, wait 30 seconds and try the engine results in nothing, zip, zero, nada -- except the blaring of the alarm followed by no engagement of the starter.
Did I mention this system is really, really, stupid?
So we left the car at work, drove her home in mine and we're going to have to call a KIA dealer in the morning to sort this stupidity out. How fun.
The only upside to this waste of time and frustration? - It turned out the drug store where I bought batteries carries Buffalo Trace, a darn nice bourbon introduced to me by DaddyBear during the Louisville NRAAM. Since I've been unable to find it till tonight I'll call that a win, especially as I sip it while composing this post.
4 comments:
Unless the dealer knows some "back doors", that's going to be an expensive repair.
Tow to dealer...
New fob, probably a couple of hundred $$...
Program the new fob and car to "pair" with each other...
When I bought my 2006 Grand Cherokee I was told that "you can only buy keys at the dealer".
Not so. Look on the fob for the FCC ID number, and then search Amazon and eBay for matching key fobs.
Any good locksmith shop should be able to cut you a key from the blank.
drjim: You've got that right. It's being towed to the dealer now as we speak.
Thanks for the heads up on the fobs ($28 on Amazon vs $75 at the dealer), we've got good keys, its the fob and security lockout system that is the issue.
The only drawback to getting the fob online is that while we'll save a lot compared to buying a replacement from Amazon, apparently on this model only the dealer can program it to match the car and I'm sure the programming charge will make up for the savings.
Interesting.
My Jeep was supposed to have 'dealer only' programming, but I found how to do it online.
The bad thing was the method REQUIRED you to have a good, fully operational key fob, so that the car could be put into programming mode, and then learn the ID associated with the new key fob.
If your original key fob has somehow failed, I suppose a trip to the dealer is the only way to get it functional again.
A kia? No comment. Not touching that one.
leaperman
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