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A key fob mystery to solve. (https://chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=344462)

I’d like to know what color the Malibu was before choosing my answer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kman34 (Post 16371174)

Were you near Roswell New Mexico??

In galactic terms, I was very close. In earth terms, not close at all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jewish Rabbi (Post 16371175)

I’d like to know what color the Malibu was before choosing my answer.

It was white. Do you think maybe that bothered the Native Americans?

Key fob bad medicine...

Fun fact about Indian reservations. They are not self governed territory subject to Indian laws and Indian law enforcement. It is true that police have no authority. No state cops, no county cops have authority there. That is true.

The FBI has complete law enforcement authority there. The FBI handles all major crimes including murder, which is otherwise a state crime.

Source: redacted.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rain Man (Post 16371177)

It was white. Do you think maybe that bothered the Native Americans?

It certainly didn’t help things.

Streetlights go dark more frequently than I would attribute to coincidence as I pass them. Batteries die in my presence. I seriously can’t keep a watch going if it takes a battery, and I’ve tried several watches. The only one I have had success with is a self-winding Omega.

But I haven’t been near a reservation recently, so it ain’t me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ClevelandBronco (Post 16371183)

I think that goes with being a Browns fan.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rain Man (Post 16371149)

So I had a rental car on a business trip, and the rental car was doing well. It was a newish Chevrolet Malibu. At some point a few days ago, I pulled into a hotel parking lot. I'm not sure if it's relevant, but the hotel was on a Native American reservation.

Boom.

The turnoff was weird, and I got a message on the instrument panel that the car did not detect a key fob. This is problematic for a variety of reasons.

The logical conclusion is that the battery died. I'm not a handy guy, but with the help of youtube I figured out how to change it. I was lucky that the hotel was next door to a grocery store that carried that type of battery.

I went up to my hotel room, switched the battery out, and went downstairs to test it. As I was walking toward the car, the car alarm started going off on the vehicle next to mine, which was a newish Nissan SUV.

A guy got out of the Nissan. "Sorry about the noise," he said. "I pulled in here and parked, and my key fob died, and I can't figure out how to fix it."

At that point I tested mine and it didn't work, either. I was able to pilot it back to the rental car agency by using a secret trick that I learned on youtube. It involved removing a piece of trim from the door and putting the dead fob in a specific spot in the car, and it was black magic.

The rental car woman seemed like a longtime rental veteran, and she was friendly. She noticed that the car had 2,000 miles on it and said there's no way that the battery should have died. I told her about the Nissan next to mine, and we puzzled over what happened, and if the two failures were related. It seems really odd that two key fobs on two adjacent cars would fail as they were both parking.

What are your theories?

i need to think on this one.

Seriously was the area fairly populated? I'm guess heavy radioactivity traffic.

g-g-g-g-g ghooooosts?

I wonder if someone was cruising parking lots trying to spoof fobs.

There's not a lot of technical information on how each system operates, for obvious reasons, but the general sense is there is a range of radio frequencies that cycle and both the car and fob have to stay in sync with.

Thus if you push keys on your fob out of range too many times [maybe a dozen maybe two], your fob gets out of sync with the cycle sequence of the car and the two need to be re-paired.

Maybe someone thinks they have a gadget that can cycle through enough frequencies fast enough around enough cars, they can snag a 'hit' and sync with a car that isn't theirs.

You used to be able to do something similar much easier with garage door openers, that have much less sophisticated cycling algorithms and much less range of cycled frequencies, particularly if bunches of residences all had the same brand opener. Kids would drive down a residential street pushing their own opener to see if any garages opened.

Maybe someone's getting a little more aggressive with this because both Honda and Tesla have had recent problems with potentially having their fob algorithm hacked.

And maybe whatever they're trying failed to give them assess to your vehicle, but succeeded in throwing your vehicle's cycle schedule off of sync with your fob.

I’m gonna wait until BlackOp weighs in on this one and I’ll vote along with him.

I am no help on the issue, just wanted to up my post count.

Was there a Frenchman riding a bike in the parking lot? I would start there.