Nothing about a replacement fob happens at a counter. It has to be the right part for your exact model year, cut to your own door lock if it carries a blade, and then written into the car's immobiliser at the kerb. All three steps ride in the van, so a replacement fob is finished where the car is standing: a tower stall off Hollybridge Way, a driveway in Broadmoor, a bay in an airport parking structure on Sea Island.
A fob replacement is usually a booked job rather than a shouted one, which is most of what separates it from the rest of the automotive list. The part is confirmed against your year, make and model before a van is dispatched, so the window you are given on the phone tends to hold.
The reason this is mobile work in Richmond rather than counter work has a street address. The city's dealerships are gathered into one retail strip on Automall Drive up in Bridgeport, which is a fine place to buy a car and a slow place to replace a single fob for one: the part is ordered against your VIN, the vehicle is booked in, and you go without a working remote until both of those land. A locksmith carries the stock and the programming tool in the van instead, so the fob is matched, cut and enrolled wherever the car happens to be sitting.
Those same lots on Automall Drive are a steady source of this work, which sounds like a contradiction and is not one. A dealership parts counter is organised around the marque on its sign. A row of trade-ins, customer cars and stock waiting outside is not organised around anything. So the calls that come off Automall Drive are the ordinary ones: a flat cell in a fob on a vehicle that has been standing for weeks, or a transponder that has quietly stopped answering the receiver in a car that otherwise looks perfect. Dealers and the people visiting them get the same van and the same quote.
Sea Island produces a version of this call that almost nowhere else does. A car left in airport parking for a week or two meets an owner who presses the button and gets nothing back, and the fault is very often the coin cell rather than the fob: a remote that was already weak when you flew out has had the whole trip to finish going flat. That is the cheapest possible outcome, so it gets ruled out before anything is sold, and if a fresh cell turns out to be the entire repair the visit becomes a car key battery replacement and is billed as one.
The useful thing about Sea Island is that you do not have to stand in arrivals to start this. A fob visit can be booked against your landing time with a buffer on top for customs and baggage, so the technician meets the car instead of the queue. Give the parking level and the zone letter on the nearest pillar when you book, and the make and colour of the vehicle. The same applies to the employee parking structures attached to airport operations and the logistics units along Miller Road, where a vehicle can stand for days between one drive and the next.
| Fob type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Fresh battery, where nothing else is wrong | $10–$25 |
| Writing your own fob into the car | $60–$120 |
| Plain remote fob, part and enrolment | $90–$190 |
| Remote head key, one unit with the blade | $140–$260 |
| Flip or switchblade fob, blade folded in | $120–$240 |
| Proximity key for a push-to-start car | $180–$400 |
| No surviving fob: car re-initialised, set written | $220–$460 |
Each supply row is a single figure with the part, any blade cutting and the enrolment already inside it. The two programming rows price the labour on its own, since the hardware in those cases is yours. European and luxury systems with proprietary security land at the top of whichever row they fall in. Distance inside the Richmond coverage zone does not move the figure, so a farm-road address out by the Agricultural Land Reserve and a tower stall in Brighouse are quoted on the same basis. Give us the year, make and model and you get a figure rather than a band, before a van moves.
Year, make, model, and whether a working fob survives. Those four answers pull the right part off the shelf and fix the figure, and between them they decide whether this is one visit or two. If the old fob is still in your hand, read out the number printed on the back of it.
Richmond's numbered roads make an address easy. The parking underneath it is the harder half. In the Capstan and Hollybridge Way blocks, most of the newer buildings run visitor parkade access through the lobby, so give the building address and the level and the way in gets arranged. On a private lane or a farm road off No. 4 Road, give the nearest intersection or something visible from the road instead.
The blade goes on the cutting machine where the fob carries one, the fob is written into the immobiliser at the vehicle, and then you work it yourself: lock, unlock, trunk, panic, remote start, and the start button if that is what you drive. Nothing is settled until all of it answers.
The industrial belt in the northeast corner of the city, near where Bridgeport Road meets the rail corridor and out along Viking Way, runs on vehicles that are somebody's working day. A delivery driver or a tradesperson with a dead fob is not inconvenienced, they are stopped, and the van is usually loaded. Fleet vans and pickups are handled here exactly as cars are: part confirmed on the call, enrolment done at the kerb. Give the specific address rather than a cross street, so the route can be planned around the industrial traffic rather than straight into it. Residential callers in East Cambie are reached from the side streets instead of off Cambie Road itself.
Away from the No. 3 Road corridor the parkade disappears and this job moves onto private ground. Thompson is almost entirely detached single-family with very few strata properties, so the person meeting the van is the homeowner rather than a tenant or a property manager, and the car is in the driveway or shut in a garage. Broadmoor and Seafair work the same way. Out at the Gilmore end, where subdivisions give way to Agricultural Land Reserve farmland and hobby farms along Steveston Highway and No. 4 Road, the vehicle is as likely to be a farm truck parked beside a workshop as a car on a slab.
One real advantage a fob job has over a lockout is that you pick the hour, and in Richmond that is worth using. A car you can still open and drive is not an emergency, so the visit can be set for the middle of the morning or the middle of the afternoon instead of against the peak. Say what suits you and the window is built to it. Everything else on the automotive locksmith list is booked the same way.
Fourteen areas, Sea Island among them, each with a page of its own: what the parking is like, how the route runs, and which calls come out of it most.
A fob is one shape the problem takes. The rest of the automotive list runs off the same van.
Homes, businesses and everything in between, handled by the same licensed Richmond technician you would get for a fob.