This is the truth. As the trend to keyless go marches forward, they use an inductive coil to communicate with the key for coding and in the event of battery death.With the push button start systems this should also allow you to start the vehicle if the key fob battery is dead.
That's what I read anyways.
My new Lariat uses a key which I am perfectly okay with.
On the cars I work with (mercedes) the keys use a 315mhz radio signal and the inductive coil when needed. We use to also use infrared also but that went the way of the dodo bird.
There is actually a bunch of science that goes on inside. Originally in the keys with the IR sensor we used 2 cr2023 batteries. They would last years. As we crammed in the keyless feature they moved to 1 cr2023 to save space using the same exterior dimensions. Battery life in the key was only a couple years. Now, all keys are keyless (actually after about 2015 or so). In the newest keys we use a cr2032 and they are only good for a year or two at the most. These keys have the ability to go to sleep and not transmit after a time of no movement. They actually trigger and store a diagnostic scan in the key on every start. (We don't do anything with that stateside).
As to the government listening, rest easy knowing that this is happening. I am currently working on a new car with the fancy voice activation. The problem is that you give it the wakeup comand and it just turns off. Step one is like 4 hours of software updates on the audio systems. Step two is confirming all the microphones are working and the switches function. Step 3 is to dig into how it actually works, or doesn't in this case. When reading through the doccuments it says that the car monitors "all" speech, transmits it to the "high performance AI servers" in Germany. It parces the audio to detect if actionable commands are present.
No this system is really cool. You basically have voice control in like 7 languages over most user selectable vehicle functions from all multimedia, heat / ac, ambiance lighting etc...
The tinfoil paranoid guy I am will never be convinced that they are not recording, archiving, cataloging and listening to everything everywhere.
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