New cars come with 2 keys. And modern keys have chips in them. But there’s this little post-covid chip shortage which you might have heard about lol. So to combat further/continued delays with new vehicle deliveries, Toyota is delivering cars in Japan with one chipped key, and one regular mechanical key-key. Like the good ol’ days. And the crazy thing is… guess what… the vehicle still works just fine. It starts… same as it does with the chipped key. Now Toyota will send their customers the 2nd chipped key as soon as the chips become available. But it begs the question: How did we get here? Why do we need chipped keys in the first place? So the vehicle isn’t as easily stolen? That’s fair.
But if I’m locked into 6-years of $1,000/month car payments on something like a sad/sackless Ford Mustang Mach E… I honestly WANT you to come steal it.
Yeah it seems like more often than not these days…
The solution ends up being more irritating than that problem it solved. It’s like you open one door of technology that makes good sense. But then it leads to another door… and another one. And so on & so on until your lost & you don’t know how to get back. And each door along the way becomes more & more unnecessary. Pretty soon we’re here… where (not great but decent) new cars have shot past $50,000. And they each come packed with 1,000-2,000 chips just waiting for their inconvenient opportunity to fail on you. I mean really… do your hi-beams really need to be automatic? As the pilot of a vehicle, can you not handle that simplest of task? It’s no longer luxury… it has crossed over to incapability & dependency. A lot of our problems would be solved with a return to simplicity.
