It seems as if car keys follow the inverse of Moore’s Law: for every passing day a bigger fob handles less features.
Also, all the buttons are squished to the edge of one of the sides, which makes it a bit of a pain to sort out when you’re trying to open you car without looking at it, I know there’s an engorged end where the lock key is, but it’s hard to notice unless you’re looking at it, and you end up fishing for the buttons unnecessarily. Volvo did something similar with their key which is still bulky enough to be annoying to have in the pocket: where it’s going to spend most of it’s life anyway.
I also only use the key to open the car because the keyless entry system is kind of dumb; the same button on the front doors locks and unlocks the car. Other systems like the one in my seven year old jeep handle it with much more grace with a sensor behind the handle.
But why do we even have keys anymore? I mean... my car only has one spot for a physical key and it is the emergency door release in case the battery goes flat. That emergency release could be handled by a small physical key inside a credit card shaped fob I could keep in my wallet and just use the dumb keyless entry system, like Mazda figured out years ago. Sure, that fob had it’s own issues, but years of technological advancements could probably address the majority of those.
It doesn’t even do complex features, it’s only a small transponder, if it were like BMW’s displaykey fob that has a screen on it, well it’d be another story, one that is equally unnecessary.
About that story, anyone whose seen Doug’s Model 3 video would’ve noticed that the functions of the bulky,BMW key can be handled by the user’s smartphone in the Tesla. Which renders the huge, expensive BMW fob a bit pointless, and alike the Kia’s fob, all the buttons are squished to the top and the sides, making access a bit more uncomfortable. Plus, if the key is meant to stay in your pocket, how are you going to charge that huge, battery depleting screen? You’d have to take the key out of your pocket and put it in a tab in the car, which sort of goes against the normal thinking with fobs nowadays that they must stay in the pockets of the users.
Just look at how much space the BMW, Kia, and Volvo keys waste for aesthetic purposes too. It’s bewildering! In my honest opinion we should either go Tesla’s way and make your smartphone the key, or revert to the simple Mazda design that was more convenient for most folk.
OR: if aesthetics is what matters, why not switch to keys that have a small transistor within them for the Keyless entry system while also maintaining a slim, almost beautiful profile and the emergency physical key?
