Car Story

For Christmas my son received a gift for his car. It was a Ready Remote Auto Start and Power Door Locks kit. Since it is cold out and he has to park outside this is a pretty cool gift to get. He can start his car and let it warm up from the house. Of course being a 16 year old he wants to go out and install it at 7pm one night. Let’s get this installed he keeps bothering me as he wants to use it the next day. I won’t do it but I agree to watch the DVD on how it is installed and start working through the process. I watch the DVD and there is a bunch of wires to connect, a hood kill switch, and that is about it. There is an online code to get the wiring diagrams and phone support 24x7.

My son leaves for a couple days to visit his dad and we forget the kit for a week. Another week goes by once he gets home and I agree to last Sunday start working on it.

Sunday: We pull it in the garage and I tell him to remove the lower parts of the dash. He does this and then I start looking under the dash for the wiring harness to start figuring out the kit. After a bit I am thinking NO WAY. I had got this name of a guy, Dudley, in a small town 2 minutes from here that is starting a new shop up and trying to build his clientele and works at a reasonable price. I thought give him a call. He quotes me 2 hours of work at $60 per hour. Ok $120 lets have him do the work which he says he can do it on Monday. My son and I deliver the car to him Sunday so he has it for Monday.

Monday: It is in the afternoon when I hear from Dudley that the tech he had working on the car got sick and needed to go to the Doctor. I said fine we can live another day.

Tuesday: It is again afternoon and he says they started working on it at 10am. Dudley asks me about an alarm system. I don’t know of one and he says he will keep working on the car. He calls back shortly again and says yes it has a factory one on it through the Radio. If the car is tried to be started without a key in the ignition the alarm will kill the fuel to the engine. It will not start and he will have to buy this bypass switch to install. He does some looking and Car Toys sells it for $100. In the mean time I and my son find it online for $35. Dudley checks and can get it from an Auto Store for $23. It is not the one that is called for but is suppose to work. If it won’t work we can take it back and order the right one for $35 and wait 3 days for it. We try the $23 one. We will not see the car till tomorrow. OK.

Wednesday: Talk to Dudley in the am. He called in sick to his night job so he could stay and work on this car. They, him and his tech, worked on it till 4am. Still would not work right. They had already spent a couple hours with tech support for this Ready Remote kit.

Thursday: Dudley found that there were 2 more relays that needed to be bought to be put in the car to allow it to start correctly. He also figured out that the alarm on the car had to be reset and that cost him $800 to by this computer to plug into the car to reset the car’s computer and reset the alarm. In this case he is a new shop and this is now a tool he has for working on cars. His tech is working on car finalizing the soldering and they think they will be able to get us the car around 9pm. Now if you see my previous posts I am at the hospital with my sister when all this is happening. At 9:30pm my wife calls me and asks where Dudley and the car is? I call Dudley and leave a message. He returns my call around 10pm and says he is ready to bring it over. I say too late, I am at the hospital and my wife and kids are all in bed. See you in the morning.

Friday: Dudley calls and I ask him to bring the car to me here at work. He does and shows me all the features and demos the job. It works awesome and I think my son will love this feature. I might even thing about it for my cars. Lesson learned though I made the right decision to not install this item. I wondered if Dudley learned a lesson of not doing these anymore. I asked him and he said he would gladly do another. He fills confident now to do the work on them and I think learned a lot.

SO the take aways of this experience I would like to share.
1) Do NOT try this install on your own.
2) Hire a professional to do the work that will stand by getting it done.
3) Plan more down time for the car then you thought.