The car key is obviously something essential to start the engine and be able to leave. Let's see how we can duplicate them with or without immobilizer.

Lately we see many modern cars, equipped with cutting-edge technologies and which can also be opened simply with a mobile phone. The vast majority of people, however, are still tied to the old key which is obviously necessary to start the engine.

The very important difference when considering the duplication of a key, is the fact that the latter is linked to an immobilizer.

In fact, it is currently not easy to duplicate a car key. Once it was something very trivial and it was enough to simply go to any hardware store until about 1995 .

It was like duplicating any key that can be tied for example to a bicycle or another very simple and banal lock.

With the advent of technology and with the increase in aspects related to automotive engineering, things have clearly become more complex and even more expensive. Duplicating a key is especially essential to have extra security in case our first key is lost by us.

The presence of an immobilizer within the car's technology, however, has made the duplication of keys considerably complicated as it is necessary to enable the key so that it is recognized by the car control unit.

In some cases the cars do not allow the insertion of new single keys, but they need to rewrite the whole series of keys in possession and this can be problematic for emergency situations.

We can therefore no longer go to any hardware store , but our advice is to find a key specialist within our territory or otherwise go to an official dealer of our car.

In this way, if the duplicate was made to perfection, we might even be lucky enough not to have to rewrite all the keys.

Surely the cost is much higher than the classic duplication of keys in the old way, but we must still consider that there is a much higher safety factor that must be considered. The keys are in fact difficult to replicate and difficult to reproduce individually.

The single key reproduction specialist can in fact perform a perfect reproduction using a compatible key that can be physically duplicated which subsequently will have no problems in the software recognition part of the control unit.

Obviously, if we decide to contact our automotive parent company, the cost will certainly be higher and in some cases invoices of over € 1000 could arrive . It also depends on the complexity of the control unit and the brand. We are referring to premium brands such as BMW, Mercedes or Audi. In this case, the cost is certainly higher than a cheaper car manufacturer in terms of brands such as Dacia, for example.

We just have to consider that contacting an authorized dealership of our parent company, although it is more expensive than a professional or a key specialist, however, puts us away from any recognition problems after duplication.

The control unit could be updated due to problems related to ordinary maintenance, and therefore there could be problems in terms of key recognition and therefore we could have thrown away some money that we would have subsequently spent anyway.