Office parks and outlet lots
Weekday calls here often end in a business-park lot. The campuses off Palomar Airport Road, El Camino Real and Faraday Avenue, home to Viasat, GIA, Callaway and many smaller firms, are easy places to work, and the car stays in its space while you get back to your desk.
On weekends it is the shopping lots: the Premium Outlets on Paseo del Norte, the mall where El Camino Real meets the 78, The Forum in La Costa, the Bressi Ranch village center, and the Legoland lots, where a family down for the day finds the only key missing after the last ride.
Before you drive to Paseo del Norte
Toyota, Lexus, Honda, Ford, BMW and Mercedes all have stores at Car Country, so nearly every owner here has a dealer a short drive away. That closeness helps only while a key still works. Once no working key is left, the car has to arrive on a flatbed before the service desk can start, and the fob may still need to be ordered.
Side by side at typical dealer pricing: a Honda smart key is $480 there and from $239 with us, a Ford smart key $450 against $239, and a Toyota chip key $250 against $129. Model year moves the number a little, and you hear yours on the call first.
European keys, told straight
Plenty of driveways here hold a BMW, Audi or Volkswagen. For BMW, the remote key on 2001 to 2013 cars is $349 against a dealer's $650 or so, and the smart key on 2010 to 2018 cars is $399 against $750. Audi smart keys start at $349 and Volkswagen smart keys at $309. These take dealer-level tools and longer programming, which is why they cost more than a Toyota.
Mercedes is the honest limit. On 2013 and older models our keys start at $329, against roughly $620 from the dealer. For model year 2014 on, only a Mercedes dealer can supply the key, and we say that when you first call, so no one waits on a van that could not finish the job. More on the Mercedes-Benz key page.