Avoid car key replacement rip-off

angrybird42

Hi! My car key fell apart and my first call was the dealership (Volkswagen, Vertu). They could not fix it so had to order a new one. They gave me a MANUAL key for, in total, £240 with labour, 2 visits to the car shop, showing V5 form with ID and a 2 hour waiting time for them to code the new key on 2nd visit.

Then, I discovered that Timpson's repairs car keys too: they gave me a new blade and a 'house' - in 50min for £50 I had a perfectly working REMOTE key!

You have options!! 

Currently trying to reach Citizen Advice to report Volkswagen for unfair pricing. 

ButterCheese

That's fine for some keys, but many modern keys require that the new key is coded.  I had to call out an automotive locksmith who charged £120 for the new key and fob, but spent over an hour on his machine trying to code the new key to the car, so for the time it took I thought it very good value.  Timpson's would not have been able to do that.  Annoyingly lots of keys only have a plastic master key inside a fob that's full of electrics

MouldyOldDough

@angrybird42

You can get it for free - if you "lose" your key - if you have paid an extra approx £20 for key cover on your motor insurance !

Suzuki charge a similar amount as do Nissan

born_again

angrybird42 said:

Hi! My car key fell apart and my first call was the dealership (Volkswagen, Vertu). They could not fix it so had to order a new one. They gave me a MANUAL key for, in total, £240 with labour, 2 visits to the car shop, showing V5 form with ID and a 2 hour waiting time for them to code the new key on 2nd visit.

Then, I discovered that Timpson's repairs car keys too: they gave me a new blade and a 'house' - in 50min for £50 I had a perfectly working REMOTE key!

You have options!! 

Currently trying to reach Citizen Advice to report Volkswagen for unfair pricing. 

You are paying VW for a OEM part & their labour charges, not a 3rd party part that Timpson supply & no doubt their minimum wage staff. So nothing CA will or can do. 🤷‍♀️

FlorayG

My keys don't even need coding, they are just keys. Land Rover wanted £65 for a new one and Timpsons cut me one for £10

ciderboy2009

OP - the problem here is that you're talking about two completely different services.

VW have given you a new key coded to the car.  If you ever lose that key then they can quickly delete it from the car's memory so It can't be used with that car any more. As part of the service they provided they will probably have deleted the broken key from the car's memory.

Timpsons are making an exact clone of the key you gave them to copy.  If you ever lose it then you still have the option of having it deleted from the car's memory but this will mean that neither the key you gave them to copy nor the key they produced will work with the car ay more.

400ixl

You may actually find that Timpsons have just hacked it and the next time you take it in for a service that key will stop working. Seen it many times on the VAG group and other manufacturers.

Or do you mean that Timpsons moved the internals from the remote that fell apart and put them into a new generic fob housing with a new key cut.

In which case that would be fine, you could have bought a new case off of the internet and changed things over. The only complication is that some manufacturers put the sensor int the housing itself so you need to be able to extract it and move it across as well.

forgotmyname

Dealer key will be a unique key and at your request they could have removed any old missing keys etc.

Timpson's will have cloned your key, you can have multiple clones but if the system deletes one key it removes all of them.

rollingmoon

forgotmyname said:

Dealer key will be a unique key and at your request they could have removed any old missing keys etc.

Timpson's will have cloned your key, you can have multiple clones but if the system deletes one key it removes all of them.

This. OP is comparing two different services here. I briefly owned a Mercedes a couple of years back, and as you'd imagine the keys for that were reassuringly expensive... so much so that when one of mine failed it was cheaper to buy a magic box and blank keys off Aliexpress and knock up my own. 

As forgotmyname says, though, these are only clones of the existing key and would probably have stopped working had I been foolish enough to ever take the thing anywhere a Mercedes dealership.

Murphybear

Citizens Advice are not there to report companies for what one person considers unfair pricing.  Or at least they weren’t when I did my one year long training to be a CA adviser