On Car Problems

I just sent the following to Audi Canada, if anyone has suggestions of where I might get a rapid response I would welcome it:

To whom it may concern,

In early June of this year my wife gave birth to identical twin boys. Dues to the physical size of modern CSA approved car seats our previous car, a VW Jetta was too small for the two car seats so in late June I purchased (financed) a Certified Pre-owned Audi Q7 (VIN: WA1Cxxxxxxxxxxxx).

By in large I am satisfied with my purchase, it is one of the few vehicles large enough not only for my wife and I, our two children, their car seats and a stroller but it even has room for a few groceries after all of the above. However, the truck does have one very serious deficiency, specifically, the automatic door locking after 60 seconds of inactivity, I call this a defect because this “feature” could have killed my children on the afternoon of Friday September 21.

On that Friday afternoon, my wife had loaded the car seats and babies, into the car and realized she dropped her car keys on the ground. She shut the car door, and walked over to the keys, only then realizing she had in fact dropped her house keys (the garage door key fob looks like an Audi car key and was on her house keys), the car keys were in the car. By the time she returned to the car, the doors were locked, with, as I already noted, the car keys inside the vehicle.

Ultimately, and luckily for my wife, as I was at work at the other end of town, a tow trucker driver was near-by, he spent about twenty minutes trying to jimmy the door lock, as both my sons and my wife became more hysterical, finally, he smashed the passenger side front window.

Frankly I don’t care about the damage to my vehicle, it’s a machine, it can be repaired or replaced, my children are, my children, there is no point of comparison. When I found out what happened naturally I got to my wife as quickly as possible, luckily the boys are fine and the car is at a shop getting new windows and repairs to the door.

As one might expect I contacted my dealer (Crosby in Kitchener ON) they told me they had never heard of this happening before, which is very strange as the tow truck driver told my wife he sees this all the time. The service department at Crosby told me there is no way to disable the auto locking feature on Audi’s, this is apparently an anti theft measure, as there are a limited number of frequencies for key fobs the concern is two similar key fobs in the same car park could result in one car being left unlocked.

As a computer network engineer by training and network security professional by trade I appreciate the need for strong security; however, I find this situation totally unacceptable. In less than three months of owning the Q7 a reasonable set of circumstances conspired to leave my infant sons locked in the vehicle until someone smashed a window, scattering glass all over my children.

I believe that if I pursued this matter in the civil courts I could ultimately, after some great cost, find financial restitution; however, as an engineer I do not see any sort of civil action as an effective resolution of the fundamental problem, namely the car locks itself with the keys inside.

As an engineer I would therefore request the following changes be made to the existing auto lock feature, or if it cannot be made with a firmware update then future models have the following changes:

1. If the car is unlocked with a key inserted in the door, the car stays unlocked until locked from a fob or by the key being reinserted. (It would be an easy habit to get into, not to use the fob to unlock the door, up until the mid 1990s that is how all cars worked.)

2. Give owners the ability, either through a dealer provided configuration change, or a owner performed change, to alter the auto lock timer, in short allow me to decide if I want more than one minute to get in the car after I press the button on the fob.

3. Use CHAP (Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol) with the key fob serial, VIN and a date/time stamp to properly certify that the key fob is truly the fob intended to open the car door. (This is a somewhat technical solution but I was able to design, in my mind, a very secure authentication exchange between a key fob with a very limited processor/battery and the car that would be virtually undefeatable yet ensure total uniqueness of the key fob without switching radio frequencies or otherwise stretching the limits of existing technology.)

As I noted, I don’t want to treat this as some cause for a civil case, frankly I think Audi’s are generally pretty well made machines, and civil cases are for people not interested in actually solving problems. My wife and I both enjoy the Q7 and are, or were until Friday, considering replacing our CPO model with a brand new Q7. I would be more than happy to speak in greater depth to my three recommendations. I look forward to your prompt response.

Michael Cole
B. Math (Waterloo, Co-op, Hons. Computer Science Major)
M. Eng. (Ryerson, Computer Engineering, Computer Networks)