Keys on the seat, doors locked, and you are standing on the wrong side of the glass. A technician drives to the car, lifts the door frame with an air wedge, works the lock with a long-reach tool, and hands your keys back. Most Vancouver calls are on scene in 20–30 minutes, with no tow and no broken glass.
A lockout is a door problem, not a key problem. Your key still works, the immobiliser is untouched, and nothing needs programming. We open the door, you pick the keys up off the seat, and you drive away on the key you already own.
Call and you get a licensed locksmith sent to the car itself, not a tow truck and not a dispatcher who farms the job out to whoever answers. The tools are an air wedge, which lifts the top corner of the door frame by a few millimetres, and a long-reach rod that works the interior handle or the lock stem through that gap. Coat hangers and screwdrivers are what wreck cars: the inside of a modern door panel carries side-airbag wiring and a window regulator that costs more to replace than five lockouts put together.
| Situation | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Standard car lockout (keys visible inside) | $50–$120 |
| After-hours / overnight lockout | $80–$150 |
| Trunk-only lockout | $70–$140 |
| High-security or keyless vehicle | $90–$180 |
| Lockout where the key is lost (add replacement) | +$60–$260 |
Where you land inside those bands comes down to the vehicle, the hour, and how long it takes to reach the car once the truck is on site. A daytime open in an open lot sits at the bottom. A push-to-start car on a Saturday night three levels underground sits at the top of it. The firm number is agreed on the phone before anyone drives, and it does not move once the truck arrives.
Make, model, colour, and the exact spot: nearest cross street above ground, or the level and stall number if you are underground. Dispatch gives you a real arrival window on that call.
Most of Vancouver runs 20–30 minutes. If the car sits behind a gate or a locked lobby, this is the point where we work out who is letting the technician down to it.
Entry itself takes minutes on most vehicles. We close the door, check it seals and locks the way it did before we arrived, and you go.
A large share of the cars we open in Vancouver sleep underground behind a gate, and the fob or remote that raises that gate lives on the same ring as the car key, which is on the seat. You are not just outside the car. You are outside the level it is parked on.
Building credentials belong to the strata, not to us. A locksmith cannot clone a fob, trip a gate arm, or badge into an underground, and we will not pretend otherwise. What does work: a tower with a staffed desk can usually send a licensed technician down to the parkade once you have authorised it, so tell the concierge we are coming at the same time you call us. In a building with nobody on overnight, meet the technician at the lobby and ride down together, or ask building staff to open the door. Either way, give us the level, the stall number and the colour of the car at the start of the call, because a parking level is a long row of dark hatchbacks that all look the same at 2 a.m.
Two different jobs, two different sets of gear, and the difference changes the price more than anything else on this page. If you can see the keys through the glass, on the seat, in the ignition, in the trunk, it is a lockout and it is the cheap version: the door opens and that is the end of it. If the key is genuinely gone, the door still has to come open, but then a replacement has to be cut and coded to the vehicle before the engine will start, which is a longer visit and a bigger number. When you are not sure which one you have, say so on the phone: the technician arrives carrying the gear for both, and the job closes on one visit regardless of which way it turns out.
Call 911 before you call a locksmith. If a child or an animal is shut in a car and there is any doubt about how long they can safely wait, that is an emergency call, and a replaceable window is worth less than the risk of waiting for anyone. Then phone us as well. We are often 20–30 minutes out and the opening itself is clean, but whoever takes your call will say plainly whether waiting for us is sensible or whether responders should go ahead and make entry. Give 911 the same detail you would give us: level, stall, colour, plate. A full parkade or a packed beach lot is as hard for them to search as it is for us. These calls go to the front of our queue.
Three things decide whether this is a 20-minute job or a 40-minute one, and none of them is the drive. The first is where the car actually is. A house number is the front of the house, and on the east side of the city the car is often on a pad off the lane behind it, which is a different street entirely, so give the lane and the nearest cross street: Victoria Drive, Nanaimo, whichever one it is. The second is access, meaning gate, lobby, concierge, or nothing at all between the truck and the car. The third is proof the car is yours, which we do have to see before the door opens. A registration or insurance slip on your phone, plus photo ID, covers most jobs.
After that, stay near the car if it is safe and comfortable, or somewhere dry within sight of it, and tell us where you will be standing so the technician is not circling a full lot looking for you. Do not start working on the door with a hanger or a screwdriver in the meantime. That is how a lockout turns into a door-panel repair, and it is the one part of this we cannot undo when we get there.
Lockouts here follow parking types more than they follow neighbourhoods, and Vancouver has four that generate most of the calls. Gated residential undergrounds, which means the downtown peninsula, the West End, Yaletown and the newer Cambie corridor towers. Surface and beach lots out on the west side, where the key goes in a bag and the bag goes in the car. Lane pads and kerbside spots on the residential grid east of Main Street, where the car is behind the house rather than in front of it. And the working kerb along the arterials, Hastings, Broadway, Kingsway, 41st, where somebody hops out for two minutes and the door swings shut behind them.
We are mobile only, so there is no counter to drive to and nothing waits for a shop to open. The honest variable in an arrival window is traffic rather than distance: Georgia, Granville and Hastings tighten up around midday and again at the evening rush, and the bridges on and off the peninsula do the same. Whoever is nearest gets sent, and you get told the number we can actually keep instead of a hopeful one.
The same truck handles the rest of it: a key that is lost rather than locked in, a fob that has stopped talking to the car, an ignition that turns but will not start.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
Residential Security Container (RSC) burglary classification: a key-locked security container designed to provide entry…
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.