Richmond is flat, and that settles one question early. A car standing level with its wheels straight puts no load on the steering lock, so if the key still refuses there, the fault is the cylinder or the blade and we can say so before a van moves. We free, recode or replace the ignition cylinder wherever the car stopped, from a tower parkade off Alderbridge Way to a farm lane out past No. 4 Road.
A jammed ignition, a key that turns to nothing, and a cylinder worn past holding are three different repairs at three different prices. All three get settled at the vehicle, because a car that will not start is not going to be brought anywhere to have it looked at.
The van turns up loaded for every version of the job, since the car it is coming to see cannot travel: cylinder tools, spare cylinders for the makes we are called out to most often, a cutting machine, and a programmer to teach the chip in a key head to the car. What this city changes is not the kit but the odds. Where the ground goes up and down, an ignition that refuses is often released by the caller inside a minute, because the column was only carrying load. Here that escape route is mostly shut, so more of these calls turn out to be real wear inside the lock or a blade gone soft, and more of them finish as a repair rather than as a phone call.
Anywhere with hills, the first move on a key that will not turn is to unload the column, because a car parked on a slope leans its own weight into the steering and clamps the lock pin against the plug. Richmond does not have that. The island is delta flat, so the bind that happens here is the ordinary kind: wheels cranked hard into a curb on a residential street in Thompson or Broadmoor, or wound round to fit a tight underground stall. Steering geometry is doing the clamping rather than the weight of the vehicle, which is why it usually lets go on the first or second attempt instead of fighting back.
Rock the wheel hard left and hard right, and let the key sit under nothing heavier than everyday turning pressure while you do it. The pin comes off the plug, the ignition rotates, and nothing was ever wrong with it. Give that two or three attempts and no more. Weight applied to a blade jammed against a loaded pin shears it at the shoulder, and recovering the broken half from a keyway is dearer than the visit you were trying not to book.
The flip side is worth knowing before you book anything. A car sitting level with its wheels dead straight, which in Richmond describes most of them, has already ruled the steering lock out, so there is no trick left to try and nothing to be gained by waiting an hour to try it again. A key that refuses in that position is telling you about the cylinder or about the blade, and that is a different conversation at a different price.
These two sound alike on the phone and they decide whether this is locksmith work at all. A key that will not rotate is ours by definition, because a lock is refusing: wafers worn past the point of lining up, a blade thinned by years of copying from copies, grit packed into the keyway, or the column holding the plug. A key that rotates cleanly while the car stays silent has already proved the mechanical half is fine. Three things past that point are still ours. One is the ignition switch wired in behind the cylinder. The second is an immobiliser that has stopped accepting the chip in the key head, because a transponder has to be programmed to the car’s computer before the engine is allowed to run, which is why a blade cut without one turns the ignition and gets you nowhere. The third is a dead battery inside a proximity fob, which is what usually turns up on a vehicle that has been left parked for a fortnight.
Past those three you are into the battery, the starter or the fuel side, which is a mechanic’s work rather than ours, and you get told that at the car instead of billed for the privilege of finding out. Where the chip and not the lock turns out to be the fault, transponder key programming happens on the same visit. Where the fob cell has simply died, it is a car key battery replacement and very little else. Where the blade is what wore out, the answer is a car key replacement cut from code at the vehicle.
| Ignition service | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Jammed ignition freed and the cylinder serviced | $90–$180 |
| Ignition recoded to your current key | $120–$240 |
| Replacement cylinder fitted, parts and labour | $180–$380 |
| Cylinder replacement with a new key cut and coded | $240–$480 |
| Electrical diagnosis of the ignition switch | $110–$260 |
Parts, labour and any programming sit inside those figures, and where in the Richmond coverage zone the car is standing does not move them: a vehicle stuck in Steveston is quoted on the same basis as one in City Centre. The service call is charged when the van is dispatched and then credited against the finished job, so it comes off the total rather than arriving on top of it, and it is only kept if a booked visit is cancelled once a technician has already set out. Which end of a band you land on is mostly a question of what you drive. Mainstream Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Kia and Mazda platforms price toward the lower half of each row. A coded cylinder or a laser-cut blade on a Lexus, Acura, VW, Audi, BMW or Mercedes sits at the top of whichever row applies, because the part is tied to the vehicle and the coding takes longer. Compatibility on the less common platforms gets confirmed on the call rather than at the car. Year, make and model turn a band into an actual number before anybody is dispatched.
There are three of them: the key does not rotate, it rotates and the engine ignores it, or it grinds going in. Add the vehicle year, make and model. Then one more thing, whether a working key exists anywhere, because that governs whether a replacement cylinder can be pinned to a key you already own.
Wheels straight in a level stall, or cranked hard into a curb. On an island with no grades that one answer either eliminates the steering lock or promotes it to first suspect, and when it is first suspect the dispatcher can often walk you through releasing it and cancel the visit.
Freeing, recoding or swapping the cylinder all happen where the car is parked. Any key the work calls for is cut and taught to the vehicle there as well, and the full switch sequence gets checked off before you are handed anything back.
There is a threshold here and it is worth knowing where it sits. A lock that has gone dry or picked up grit is a service job: it comes apart, gets cleaned, goes back together and behaves. A lock whose wafers have worn round no longer holds position at all, and no amount of cleaning changes that, so it comes out. Consistency is what separates the two. Stiff on every single attempt points at wear inside the lock. Fine one morning and hopeless the next points at something outside it, which in Richmond is usually the wheels or a key that has quietly drifted out of tolerance.
When a new cylinder does go in, most vehicles will accept it pinned to the key you walked up with, in which case nothing on your keyring changes and only the lock did. On the vehicles that refuse, the key supplied with the new cylinder is cut to the doors as well, so the count in your pocket stays at one.
Automall Drive produces a category of ignition call you do not get elsewhere in the city, because the Richmond Auto Mall concentrates a great many vehicles, a great many keys, and a great many people holding a key that is not theirs to begin with. Dealers and visiting customers both end up on the phone for the same handful of reasons: a fob whose cell has died on a car sitting on the lot, a transponder the receiver has stopped hearing, and the occasional cylinder that has simply had enough. The useful thing about that corner of Bridgeport is the approach. River Road and Automall Drive tend to stay moving when the rest of the north end is not, so a van reaches a dealer lot without being held up on the way in.
The rest of Bridgeport reads differently again. It is the one district here with no real residential grid to work through, so an ignition job there is almost always in a commercial setting: a surface lot beside the casino complex on River Road, a hotel lot, or an office and light-industrial yard on one of the streets running off No. 2 Road. Those are open, easy to describe and easy to park a van next to, which is why Bridgeport is generally the least complicated place in Richmond to have a car refuse to start.
West and south of the tower corridor the character of the call changes completely. Broadmoor, Seafair and Terra Nova are detached houses on full lots, and a car that has died there has died on ground its owner controls, so there is no building to ask, no gate to open and room to work beside the vehicle. Gilmore is the awkward one, and only because of where the addresses are. Out where Steveston Highway and No. 4 Road give way to Agricultural Land Reserve farmland, properties sit back along private lanes and farm roads that take a moment to pin down, so name the closest intersection, or a landmark you can actually see from the road. Mention it too if what quit is a truck parked out on the property rather than by the house, since that is a different walk from the gate.
Parkades are the other half of the picture, and they ask for more detail here than a lockout does. For a lockout the technician only has to find you. For an ignition the van has to get in and stay put. In the Aberdeen Centre and Lansdowne Centre structures the numbering is easy to misread, so say which deck you are on, which elevator core or stairwell is closest, what the car looks like and who made it, and read out any number or letter posted on the pillar next to it. Richmond Centre works the same way, so give the deck and the nearest core there too. YVR is the exception. Those structures are big, so give the parking level plus whichever zone letter is marked on the closest pillar.
Work vehicles come from the other end of the city. The warehouses, auto shops and small manufacturers off Cambie Road and along Viking Way in East Cambie call in vans that will not start, and those get routed around the industrial traffic instead of straight down Cambie Road, which is why the exact address matters more out there than the neighbourhood name.
An ignition fault usually arrives attached to a key problem or a lockout. Whether the cylinder is worn or the key is, it is the same diagnosis on the driveway, so start with whichever of these matches what the car is doing.