I have gottta take a look at this NFC whitepaper. I'm sure they engineered something and I have a gut feeling your phone can be completely dead and you'll be able to get in and start your car.

 

+1 Beat me to the post. I was going to add it on to my vipers(starter/alarm), but didn't like the Canadian lack of options and support at the time.

 

I think we all agree that there are several downsides to using your phone to unlock your car and enable the ignition. Of course there are potential problems with just about any security feature. Even those pushbutton keypads Ford has used for years eventually show signs of wear. A business partner had them on her Town Car and over time the wear pattern showed that only a few digits were being used. Of course, her code was her birthday (as are many people's passcodes) - so a quick glance at her driver's license would give you the code. Add to that her habit of just leaving the keys in the car, often in plain sight . . . well, she was a blonde.

Of course there are the obvious problems to using your phone for access; loss or damage to your phone effectively locking you out of your car paramount among them. But putting your phone on a charging pad seems even worse. First, the inductive chargers I've seen so far require a module (antenna and transformer) to be clamped to the back of your phone, increasing its size and weight considerably. Nobody wants to go back 5 or six years in terms of their phone's bulk and heft. Those inductive chargers are also hugely inefficient, burning a fair amount of energy for the small trickle they transfer to your appliance - not so bad on 110v, where your electric bill may hardly wince, but in your car, just be sure to keep the engine running.

The most significant problem to me is that for any electronic lock, given the size of the reward, there is going to be a hack. Once these phone interlocks are relatively common, and large numbers of $30K+ cars are the reward, somebody's going to serve that potential market. It's like the conventional wisdom of installing a car alarm - don't follow the installation directions. Every thief on the planet knows the computer box is located in the driver's side kick panel and that's the spot they'll go straight to in order to disable it. Have your alarm installed by a professional who understands this and can hide the computer somewhere a thief won't check first.

 

Good luck with that. Make sure your phone battery are fully charge. Its a interesting as a optional feature. But if its primary............good luck

 

well in this case, Lexus Smart Card is a good route to go then. just keep an ordinary key. But im sure that it can be programmed with the phone and the actual car company will still make spare keys just in case. If it was thought out correctly that is.

 

Does NFC work like passive RFID in the current smart key system? Meaning, if our Lexus smart keys die, i can still hold it up next to the start/stop button and start the car via the passive usage its rfid chip, even with the battery completely dead.