A traditional car key can be trivially duplicated at any hardware store. That's the difference. You can make as many spares as you want for a couple bucks a pop. No dependencies. No network.
Do any cars have "traditional keys" anymore? My 15 year old Corolla has an embedded RFID tag in the key, and can only be duplicated at a Toyota dealership.
Assume that for anything new enough to have keyless entry, the answer is no.
The big switchover was in '96 when OBDII/CAN bus became mandatory. At that point it became pretty cheap to do things electronically, often cheaper than mechanically, so lots of things started switching over around then.
Not fully true. Just as it's not true with non-car keys. Some blanks are heavily protected. Now these days with the dissemination of cheap cnc mills, maybe thats a bit more trivial, but you are paying a lot more for a cnc mill than you pay for a old key grinder.
Same issue we have now with ghost guns honestly. CNC mills are powerful tools, with the right software you can essentially just place the properly sized chunk of metal in the box and hit go.
That's why I said traditional key. They're just metal with a few parts cut to a specific profile. It's once you start mucking around with immobilizers and other encrypted things that need the factory tools... Those can cost tens of thousands, and usually require continuous internet access back to the home office.
Because they only have the public key. You need the private key which NO ONE gets, not even the dealer. They send the required info in (which includes the serial / "key") for the new key to the home office. You can't just copy the key, even electronically, as it will have a different hard-wired "seed".
