Slate comes with two key fobs and two metal key blades

[Orley]

I asked Slate about fobs. Thay said you get 2 fobs standard along with 2 manual key blades for the driver's door. The colored fobs are an accessory option no price yet available.

 

[Gozer]

That is good to know. My Slate will be a surf vehicle and I need a blade key secured in my wetsuit.

 

[kvermeer]

4 keys? That's fantastic! Twice as many as you get with a Maverick! 🤣

Can I leave a fob locked in the truck, and just open and close the doors with a cheap, slim, durable, replaceable, copyable blade key? Maybe in a Faraday pouch?

 

[EV Trek]

4 keys? That's fantastic! Twice as many as you get with a Maverick! 🤣

Can I leave a fob locked in the truck, and just open and close the doors with a cheap, slim, durable, replaceable, copyable blade key? Maybe in a Faraday pouch?

No, pretty sure it means two fobs with two keys not 4 keys

 

[FlyHappy]

4 keys? That's fantastic! Twice as many as you get with a Maverick! 🤣

Can I leave a fob locked in the truck, and just open and close the doors with a cheap, slim, durable, replaceable, copyable blade key? Maybe in a Faraday pouch?

You may, as long as you are comfortable with that...

 

[Johnologue]

4 keys? That's fantastic! Twice as many as you get with a Maverick! 🤣

They heard all the feedback about doors and decided to one-up the Mav on a door-adjacent thing just for fun. /j

 

[NJBob]

So the Fob on the accessories just means it colored?

 

[Kopsis]

Can I leave a fob locked in the truck, and just open and close the doors with a cheap, slim, durable, replaceable, copyable blade key? Maybe in a Faraday pouch?

From what Slate has shown previously, the fob has to be inserted into a socket in the dash to start the car, so a Faraday bag may not even be necessary. However, at that point you're relying entirely on the security of the door locks which typically only offer enough protection to prevent crimes of opportunity.

 

[EV Trek]

So the Fob on the accessories just means it colored?

I guess that one is if you need to replace one or extras or want one in a different color

 

[Sl8Ready]

I'll buy a fob cover, (guessing that is what the colored portion on the accessory page is), and scan and 3D print to match my interior. Or to make it an accent piece.

 

[knob]

You may, as long as you are comfortable with that...

The things one finds on a public forum

 

[MontesDesigns]

Wait so thats 2 keys (1 fob + 1 door key = 1 key set) right?​

 

[ClayJar]

I imagine the fob is like all my recent ones, i.e. a button blob with a little release catch that lets you pull the metal key out of the fob like you're drawing the sword from the stone. (And for some people, almost as hard... in spite of the pictures in the owner's manual.)

That being the case, I'd welcome confirmation that the metal key matches one of the plethora of stock key blanks out there. It's really nice to be able to cut a dumb door-only non-starting plain metal key to carry underwater while scuba diving. With my wife's Subaru, the plain key would set off the car alarm when you used it to open the door, but that was but a small inconvenience compared to a fob or chip key failing due to water ingress at depth.

(Not a problem for boat dives where you can keep a small dry box aboard, but for quarry dives, shore dives, and the like, everything stays in the car but what you take down with you. Do rinse the key before using it, especially on saltwater beach dives, heh.)

 

[dragondroptv]

So the Fob on the accessories just means it colored?

I think the color option is a nice touch if you have multiple slate trucks so you know which key's go to which trucks. I mean they so in-expensive you can by two for the same price as most truck's today.

 

[ClayJar]

For a moment, I thought you were saying the key fob was so inexpensive you could buy two, which had me checking the Slate Maker. Alas, still "Price coming soon", but now that I have the "comes with two fobs" report, I got to delete the additional key fob from my designs.

Best part was that I deleted the fob from each of my three designs in order of reverse preference of design, so my electronic garage is now properly sorted again. I previously stripped and re-added all the options from my designs so they would show up in the design summary list in order of decreasing cost, as I was annoyed that they were listed in the order they were added to the design with no sort order control. Now all three of my designs (Intended, Splurge, and Minimal) are not only internally ordered but also ordered in the garage. *contented sigh*

Oh, and although the key fob price is "coming soon", I feel like I should note that installation is marked as "Beginner" ("Basic tools, under 1 hour. No experience needed."). Is this really newsworthy? Not really, in context of Slate, but actually... kind of yeah? My wife's recently departed 2007 Subaru Forester let you program a new fob just by following a convoluted song-and-dance number printed right there in the manual...

1. Sit in the driver's seat with all doors closed and unlocked.
2. Open and close the driver's door.
3. Before 45 seconds expire, rapidly turn the ignition key from LOCK to ON and back 10 times within 15 seconds, leaving the key ON at the last cycle.
4. When you hear the tone, open and close the driver's door. The tone will sound again.
5. Within 45 seconds:
   1. Start at the first digit of the fob's printed code.
   2. Press the door LOCK button the number of times corresponding to that digit of the fob's code.
   3. Press the door UNLOCK button to accept the digit.
   4. Continue from step 5.2 for the next digit until you've entered all eight.
6. Now, enter the code a second time (repeating from step 5).
7. If you did that correctly, the locks will magically lock and unlock, and the horn will beep.
8. If you have another fob, continue from step 5 with the next fob (the most recently added four fobs are kept, with older ones rolling off the end).
9. Remove the key. The horn will beep three times to tell you programming mode has concluded.
10. Test the fob(s).

Meanwhile, the 2017 Saturn she recently picked up from her parents as a low-mileage old car had a slightly different process:

1. Buy a third-party programming tool off Amazon, eBay, or whatever, knowing that it's a third-party hack and explicitly bricks itself after programming three fobs.
2. Follow the terrible instructions and hope for the best.
3. ...
4. Profit? (Managed to get two fobs programmed in spite of the fact it was clearly bought, used, and returned to Amazon.)

That, at least, was cheaper than the process would be if I needed a new key for my car. For my car, there isn't an "easy" procedure in the manual, and there isn't a sketchy knockoff programmer you can plug in to the OBD2 port and pray. For my car, the process is, at least, simple:

1. Schedule a service visit with a dealer.
2. Pay a metric crapton of dollars.

So... given all that, being able to program a fob yourself is a breath of fresh air. If it's a bit easier than the Subaru song-and-dance, I'll be happy, but then again, once you got the hang of it, the song and dance was kinda catchy -- LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK UNLOCK... LOCK LOCK UNLOCK... LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK UNLOCK... -- even if it normally took me at least three or four tries to do the ignition key step. 😅