Locked Your Keys in the Car in Mississauga?

The method has not changed in principle for decades, but the tools have. An inflatable air wedge is worked into the top corner of the door frame and inflated slowly, creating a gap of a few millimetres. A long reach tool goes through that gap and presses the interior unlock button, pulls the interior handle, or lifts a lock post, depending on the vehicle.

The door skin flexes within its designed range, the weatherseal returns to shape, and nothing is bent. This is why the wedge is inflated slowly and why the gap is kept small: forcing a large opening is what creases a door frame, and a creased frame is a body shop repair.

Some vehicles are not opened this way at all. Frameless window designs, certain European models and vehicles with hard wired door modules are approached differently, sometimes through the lock cylinder itself where one exists. The technician chooses the method after seeing the car, which is why the make, model and year matter when you call.

Almost every improvised method costs more than the callout it was meant to avoid, and two of them are genuinely dangerous.

A rising share of lockout calls now involve a car that locked with the key inside, which for years was supposed to be impossible.

Proximity systems keep the doors unlockable while the fob is detected inside the cabin, and the interlock works well until the fob signal is weak. A fob with a dying battery, a fob inside a bag with a metal frame, a fob in a foil lined pocket, or a fob left in the boot behind the metal parcel shelf can all drop out of detection long enough for the car to auto lock.

There is also a specific failure worth knowing about. If a proximity fob is left in a car for a long period, some vehicles put the fob into a low power sleep state to prevent it draining the car's battery. The fob then stops answering until it is moved, and the car behaves as if there is no key present.

The practical prevention is simple: replace the fob battery when the dash warns you rather than months later, and get into the habit of carrying the fob on your person rather than in a bag that gets set down.

You will be asked, and it protects you as much as anyone. Ownership or authority is confirmed before the vehicle is opened, and the checks are ones most people can satisfy standing beside the car.

A driver's licence plus the vehicle permit is the cleanest. If the permit is inside the car, and it usually is, then a licence matching the registered address, an insurance slip on a phone, the vehicle in your name on an app, or a spare fob in your pocket all help. For a lease or a company vehicle, the leasing company or the employer confirming by phone settles it.

For a rental, the rental agreement is what matters, and most rental companies would rather you called them first because the lockout may be covered under the agreement.

These are two different jobs at two very different prices, and being clear on the phone about which one you have saves a wasted visit.

If you can see the key inside the car, it is a lockout. The technician opens the door, you pick your key up, and the job is done in minutes with nothing programmed.

If the key is genuinely gone, opening the door is only the first half. The vehicle then needs a new key cut to its code and, on anything built since roughly the late 1990s, the transponder in that key programmed to the immobiliser before the engine will start. That is a longer visit, it needs the vehicle identification number, and it needs proof of ownership rather than just proof of access. Our car key replacement page covers what that involves.

The awkward middle case is a key locked in the boot of a car with no boot release from the cabin, or a key locked in a car whose battery has since gone flat. Say so when you call, because both change the approach.