That's not how car door locks work!

Nov 14, 2024 Last reply: 1 year ago 8 Replies

There's a question being posed on Facebook - one of these "thought you might be interested in this" pages which FB automatically offers.



It asks "if you were locked inside a car and only had a baseball bat, how would you get out?"



Almost everyone has replied by saying "it is impossible to be locked inside a car - just operate the door handle and it will unlock and then open the door". Have they not heard of deadlocks? Are people so out of touch with modern technology that has existed since at least 2008 (the age of my car) and probably for a lot longer.



The whole point of the second deadlock position on a car's central locking is to disable the inside door handles so a thief can't just smash a side window, unlock the door from the inside and (once he's defeated the ignition lock) drive away. OK, he can still wriggle in through the window he's broken but it's a lot harder to do that surreptitiously and you have no quick means of escaping if the police stop the car and you try to leg it on foot.



I know that this is how it works because I accidentally locked my wife in my car when I stopped at a motorway service station for a pee. She stayed in the car and I walked away, automatically pressing the lock button twice as I always do when I'm on my own. When I got back, she was *not* happy because I'd locked her inside with no way of getting out. We tested it later. The system will not allow you to lock the car with the keys inside - it probably waits for the door to be opened from the inside (as the driver gets out of car) before allowing the deadlock to be armed. But it will let you lock someone else in the car if you and your keys are outside.



I've never made that mistake again!


How long was it before you could eat solids again :-)

Why didn't the alarm go off? Is there no internal sensor?

Deadlocking has been around for a long time - a colleague managed to deadlock himself inside his car (I can't remember how), back in about 1994.

On my car, you can disable that (in case you leave, say, a dog in the car)

My mate arrived at the gate of his house, got out to open the gate letting the car door slam behind him, waking up the dog who put his head to the window and his paw on the top-of-the-door lock button thing activating the central locking and he was then locked out of the car and out of the house with dog, keys, phone and wallet all out of reach, in his shirt sleeves in the rain, a long way from anywhere. LOL!

TW

Why weren't the fathead's keys in his pocket?

IME (2017 Auris), if I get out of the car with the keys in my pocket, the engine will continue to run for a while befor shutting off.

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