A Honda key is written to the car, not to the blank, so the whole job happens wherever the car is standing. We bring the cutter, the blanks and the programmer to a Kerrisdale driveway, the retail lot at West 41st and Arbutus, or the short-term parkade at YVR, and pair a new Honda key or smart fob to your immobiliser there. Nothing gets towed anywhere.
Two answers decide the visit before anyone drives out. Do you put metal into a slot or press a start button, and is there still one key in the house that works? The first tells us which blank and which fob leave the shelf. The second is the difference between a short job and a full immobiliser reset.
With a working key still in hand, cutting and coding a second one runs 30 to 60 minutes at the vehicle. With nothing left to copy from, we pull the codes, rebuild the immobiliser through the port under your dash and write the new keys from nothing, which can take up to 90 minutes on a newer Honda. Everything that started the car before that point stops starting it, which is the entire reason the procedure exists.
| Key or fob type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Basic cut blade, no chip | $80 – $120 |
| Transponder key (chip, no remote) | $120 – $200 |
| Remote head or flip key (cut and programmed) | $180 – $280 |
| Proximity smart fob (push-to-start) | $250 – $420 |
| All keys lost (full re-program) | $280 – $500 |
| Spare cut at the same visit | $60 – $150 |
Each band covers the part, the cut and the coding as one figure, and these are the same bands published on our Vancouver car key replacement page. What lifts a Honda up its band is the electronics rather than the metal: a sealed proximity fob is a costlier component than a blade, and a reset with no key to start from is the longest procedure on the list. We would rather quote from the VIN than from the badge, so keep the registration within reach when you ring.
One line people miss is the mechanical insert blade. It lives inside the smart fob and it is cut separately, so a replacement fob supplied without that blade recut leaves you with no way into the car on the day the battery goes flat.
Kerrisdale, Dunbar and Shaughnessy are where this city still parks in a driveway, and that changes what slows us down. There is no gate and no concierge to negotiate. There is the last hundred metres.
Shaughnessy is the clearest case. The streets curve, the driveways are long, and the house number sits behind a hedge that is unreadable from a moving vehicle after dark. Angus Drive, Osler, Hudson and Marguerite do not run on the grid the rest of Vancouver is laid out on. A light left on over the door you will actually come out of tells a driver more than the house number does, and the technician rings from the corner so nobody is standing about in the dark. Dunbar and Kerrisdale are gentler: street parking runs the length of the residential strips, the village strip at West 41st and Arbutus has its own retail lot, and Arbutus, West Boulevard and West 41st feed us in from three directions. In daylight we are usually at a Kerrisdale address inside 20 minutes and a Dunbar one inside 30. Late at night the west side stretches to 25 or 35 minutes, and we would rather tell you that on the phone than leave you watching the street.
Those three answers decide which blank comes off the shelf and whether this is a duplicate or a reset. The VIN plate at the corner of the dash makes it exact, and it is readable through the glass if the registration is not to hand.
A driveway set back behind a hedge, a numbered row in a retail lot, a level in an airport structure. Where a barrier stands between the van and the Honda, name whoever can open it, because that gets arranged during the call rather than argued out at the gate.
We read the VIN and check it against your registration, cut the blade, write the chip to the immobiliser, then pair the remote and the walk-up sensors. The engine gets started and every door and the trunk worked before the van moves.
The airport call is its own category. You come off a flight, walk to the short-term parkade, and the only fob you own is in a jacket in another city. Both the short-term parkade and the cell phone lot are within reach for us, and two details get a technician to the right bay: which structure the Honda is in, and which level. Nothing inside an airport parkade works as a landmark, so a description like near the elevators narrows down almost nothing. Expect somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes once the call is booked.
Reaching you there is a bridge question rather than a distance one. Vancouver into Richmond runs over the Oak Street Bridge or the Arthur Laing, and which one is moving decides the arrival time far more than the kilometres do. The same holds coming into Kitsilano and Fairview, where the Burrard, Granville and Cambie Bridges are the real variable and West 4th thickens up through the middle of the day. We quote the window with the bridge counted in, not without it.
Most of the expensive Honda calls we take are the same story told twice. A household runs two drivers and one surviving fob, that fob goes missing on a Saturday at Kits Beach or out of a pocket at an event, and a $60 to $150 job turns into a $280 to $500 one. Writing a second key while the programmer is already connected to your car is the only line in the table above that you get to choose in advance.
The dealer route is the other half of the arithmetic. A Honda with no working key has to be delivered to the service department, which means paying for a flatbed before anybody has touched the immobiliser, then waiting while the fob is ordered in. Ours turns up with the fob and the programmer in the same van, and the car never has to leave the spot it stopped in. A small number of vehicles remain locked to Honda's own tooling, and when yours is one of them you hear about it on the call and no van is dispatched.
The other makes we key, and the automotive jobs that travel on the same van.
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.