XSeries-forum

My car only came with one key. I've looked into getting a spare but they are over £200! Looking through the bits and bobs draw and found a key from my old 1 series. It's the same style key, could it be reprogrammed to use with my X5?

Sent from my SM-N950F using Tapatalk

Contact lost key company or similar, could be possible, but the blade, mechanical key would be different.

I think the code is burnt in once and cannot be changed.  The chip used for the key generation was a PROM (Programmable Read Only Memory) rather than an EPROM (Erasable PROM) so could only be coded up once. 

BMW used to make a set of keys per car and held the unusused ones in Munich - to a maximum of 5.  There was a reference to this on one of the BMW Forums I remember reading a very very long time ago, so some of this may be a bit hazy.

You could try seeing if the car will accept the key in case it has identical ‘Master Key Codes’.  It would need to be attached to the proper blade though for this to work.  VW (or their systems supplier) got into trouble recently for having common codes across their entire range - which is a really really bad thing to do in light of how easy it has become for scumbags to buy the necessary cloning hardware on line.  >:(

I heard that Timpson can cut your key but only at certain branches