I have a Hyundai with a key fob which locks the door with one click and sets the alarm with another.  The alarm is in fact nearly useless, as it does not go off when the car is bumped or anything, nor would it be set by a broken window, but it does go off when I open the door.  I mean with the key of course, since the door was locked to begin with.

Not only this, but while annoying the heck out of all persons nearby, there is nothing I can do to shut the damned thing off, except for some magic combination of buttons on the key fob which I have not completely figured out yet, and which seems to work only 5 seconds after pushing it.  Oh, and beyond this there is the ignition which will not allow accessories nor engine to be turned on with the key.

I can however open the door with the key, crawl in the car with the alarm blaring, shut the door behind me and wait until three or four cycles of the alarm finish, at which point it will stop because the door is shut.  I can do anything I want when in the car, save for start the engine and go anywhere.  Once the door opens again the alarm trips afresh, of course.

I think this design is not only obnoxious, but it could be worse.  For one, it recently forced me to stay a few extra days at my parents’ place when I lost the key fob, yet still had the key in possession.  Fortunately they had the spare fob as we found later, but I can easily imagine a scenario of someone absolutely needing to drive away at that moment, but with only a key in hand they cannot.  I’ve looked everywhere for ways to manually override the thing – a few websites mentioned things like turning the ignition to accessory, off, and back on with certain amounts of waiting at each position.  One website had the thought that there would be a valet override switch under the dashboard which could be used to silence and subsequently reset the alarm.  But neither seem to be the case for my car.  Nope, and the Hyundai dealer service department was adamant that it was a ’safety feature’ and there was no way to disable or override it – but of course I could avoid using the key fob if I did not like it (?!).  Ridiculous.

At $80 for a spare fob, it seems that the biggest reason to do this is to make a little money in selling more key fobs.  Bah!  The only thing I can understand is that it makes the car more difficult to steal outright, but I am sure somebody willing to steal the car would prepare with enough knowledge of the electronics panel to do it regardless.  I just want to know how to get that knowledge myself, so I don’t face the same situation again.  Please leave a comment if you know how to override this thing, I think it is knowledge that anyone who owns one of these cars should have.

On the topic, I hear one can purchase a fob for a Hyundai car for cheap on eBay, and then take the car into the dealer, who will set the car’s system to recognize the new fob’s code, for free.  Only two fob signals can be recognized by the alarm system at once, but you can purchase other fobs having the same code from the dealer.