A key fob mystery to solve.

[Simply Red]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

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.