What is the price we pay for our irrational fear? If I had a dollar for everytime someone that came over immediately locks my front door, I’d be a rich man. Most of my life I hear “Safety First!” everywhere; how can that be a bad thing? Well, last night it cost me $5 for a tip and about an hour of my time. Let me explain.
One of the things that drive me nuts about modern cars ( and I rent one almost every weekend) is that they lock their doors automatically every chance they get. I understand that it can be advantageous, a locked door won’t swing open as easily in a big crash and if you walk away and forget to press that button on the remote the car is “smart enough” to know you’re not coming back and might prevent coming back to a ransacked automobile. At the same time, I move fast, faster than the car, resulting in endless trying to open the door and having to unlock it again, and again, and again. Last night it got much worse.
It was going to be a rainy night here in Los Angeles and when we got done with our weekly gig at Pip’s I wanted to load up the car with all my gear as quickly as possible. It wasn’t as cold as I had expected so after doing the first two loads I took off my coat with the key fob in it and put it in the car. Normally any car with remote unlock will have tiny little buttons on the door handle that allow you to activate the mechanism if the fob is close by without having to touch it. I put stuff in the trunk, close it and walk back to get the last two thing. Mind you, at this point the car is unlocked! When I return 2 minutes later with the final load, the door is locked again; “no problem” I think to myself, but guess what: the little button on the passenger door does nothing. Wow, is it really gonna make me do this on the driver’s side? Nope, nothing there either!
At this point, I still believe this can’t be true! You mean, the car knows the fob is close, but inside the car? Why in the world won’t it let me unlock? I ask the valet guys and they explain that this does happen once in a while and that there is no other way than to get someone to break into the car! AAA to the rescue; in literally less than a minute the guy that came opened the car, and not with some kind of master remote which is what I expected. Instead he had a kind of inflatable airbag that he wedged in the door jam, and then inflated until the gap was big enough to get the end of a long flexible stick with a ‘finger’ at the end inside to press the unlock button! That goes to show you how silly we are in thinking we can keep out anyone with the intention to get into your car by locking it, although I guess it might have some deterrent effect on someone looking for only the easiest targets.
One big question remains though: why in the world would it be a good idea to automatically lock the car with the key INSIDE? This is not a rhetorical question. The only answer I can come up with is fear of the outside world. The only scenario I can imagine is if YOU are inside the vehicle and someone is trying to get to you, perhaps to rob you or do a car jack, and you don’t want him to be able to unlock it by the normal method of touching the little button. What other reason could there be? It’s absolutely throwing out the baby with the bathwater isn’t it?
So there it is: defeated by a damn Chevy Cruze and a Western world of snowflakes!