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| - The key on my wife's transponder car key broke off from the plastic handle and she needed a new one made. I called this shop and they said they don't carry the key with remote buttons for our particular car model and recommended buying a new blank key online, which we did. My wife called them to arrange a date and time to have the key made, but when she showed up at the appointed time (late morning), the shop was closed. She called their phone and someone showed up 5-10 minutes later, but as it turns out, that person wasn't capable of doing the job and had to call in another person, which took another 10 minutes of waiting. He made the key without problems, but when he put the key together, the buttons were inoperable. He attributed it to the plastic shell being the wrong size (it was actually the exact same size) and he said he would order (and sell us) a new shell. My wife wanted a spare key too; so the tech sold her a new transponder key without remote buttons and cut the key fine. But when he tried programming it, he said the message he got was that there were already 3 programmed keys. So he concluded he couldn't program it, which meant the key was useless (the car won't start unless it is programmed to recognize the transponder in the key). So we were thinking that we might have to go to the dealer to get it programmed.
After my wife brought the keys home, I noticed that the buttons on key #1 had been taken out of the electronics case and the tech has placed them on top of the case instead of back inside it. The buttons worked fine after putting them where they belonged. I would have thought that locksmiths, of all people, would be the ones to know how to put a car key back together properly. When I tried key #2, it turned on the car without difficulty, meaning that the tech had actually programmed it successfully without even knowing it. Both keys work fine now, but only after I had to correct their mistake. The price was better than I had expected, based on online comments I had read (count on about $50 per key), but making duplicates of transponder keys is highway robbery compared with making duplicates of house keys.
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