This could be public enemy number one on the ever-expanding list of utterly hopeless and infuriating automotive technologies that nobody asked for. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you keyless operation.
Passive keyless entry (PKE) is how it’s known in the industry. It invites you to leave your keys in your pocket and unlocks the car automatically as you approach. Apparently it was pioneered on a Chevrolet Corvette in 1993.
But in that case, as a little preview of the industry-wide absurdity to follow, once inside the car you had to take the keys from your pocket or bag anyway to start the key using the ignition barrel.
My first experience with a PKE system was on the third-generation (K12) Nissan Micra of 2002. Autocar’s long-term test car was driven to Bedford Autodrome as a support car one day when I was on work experience.
On occasions such as those, keys for parked test cars would commonly be chucked onto the cowl (the exterior join of bonnet and windscreen) so that they wouldn’t somehow be inexplicably locked inside or disappear into someone’s pocket.
You can guess what happened. The key wasn’t needed to open the car, so the door opened at the first tug of the handle and the tester in question assumed that the Micra had been left open and the key must be inside.
The car duly started. He never noticed that the key was actually where it should have been – on the cowl – to begin with, nor when it quietly slid off while he was exiting the Bedford pit lane to drive 50 miles home.
And on arriving, he gained an immobile Micra for as long as it took to get a spare key sent from Nissan.
Today, quite possibly thanks to idiots like us, cars with PKE usually sound an alarm if they’re running but suddenly aren’t in the presence of the key. But things have got worse in so many more respects as other largely pointless peripheral ‘aids’ have been added.
I’ve just tested a Polestar 3, which has a Tesla-style credit-card-thin key card with no buttons at all.
This ‘key’ needs to be put into an ugly, bulky case in order to be fixed to your key ring – but I will forgive that much, because why not just slip it into your wallet or purse instead?
The trouble is, the card has no buttons at all, so if you’re crossing a car park and your passengers reach the car before you do, you can’t unlock it for them or open the boot until you get close enough to trigger the sensors automatically.