Locked out of your car: what to do in the first ten minutes

Almost everyone does the same thing in the first thirty seconds. They walk around the car and try every door, including the ones they know are locked, and then they look through the window at the keys sitting on the seat. That is a normal reaction and it costs you nothing, so get it out of your system and then work through the following in order.

First, decide whether this is urgent

Most lockouts are an inconvenience. A few are not, and they should be treated differently. Call emergency services first, not a locksmith, if any of the following is true.

• There is a child or a pet inside the vehicle
• The engine is running and the car is locked
• Anyone inside the car needs medical attention
• You are somewhere genuinely unsafe to wait

In a Louisiana summer the inside of a closed car climbs to dangerous temperatures far faster than people expect. If there is a living thing in that vehicle, nothing in this article applies and you should be dialing 911 rather than reading.

Second, check the boring possibilities

Before anyone gets called out, spend a minute on the things that occasionally solve this for free. Does anyone else have a spare, and are they close enough to bring it? Some newer vehicles can be unlocked from a manufacturer app if you have the account set up. And if the car is a hatchback or an SUV, check whether the rear hatch is actually locked, because it is the door people forget to test.

If none of those pan out, stop trying things. This is the point where continuing to experiment starts to cost money rather than save it.

Third, do not improvise with the door

There is a lot of advice online involving coat hangers, wedges, shoelaces and inflatable bags. It is popular advice because it occasionally works, and it is bad advice because of what happens the rest of the time.

Modern doors are full of things that are expensive to replace. Wiring looms for windows, mirrors and airbag sensors run through the cavity. Weather seals tear. Paint scratches along the top edge of the frame where a tool goes in, and the window regulator sits exactly where people push. A locksmith call out is almost always cheaper than a body shop visit plus the locksmith call out you end up making anyway.

Getting a door open is not the hard part of this job. Getting it open without leaving a mark on the car is the hard part, and that is the whole reason the tools exist.

Fourth, work out which lockout you actually have

There are three common shapes and they are not the same job. Knowing which one you have makes the phone call much shorter.

• Keys visible inside the cabin, doors locked. The most straightforward version.
• Keys locked in the trunk. A different access route, and worth saying up front.
• A key that has snapped off in the door or the ignition. This needs extraction before anything opens, and usually a new key afterward.

That third one catches people out. If part of the blade is still in the lock, the job has quietly become two jobs, and it is better to know that before someone arrives than to discover it together.

Fifth, tell us where the car is, precisely

We cover Baton Rouge, Baker, Zachary, Prairieville, Gonzales and Denham Springs, and we come to the vehicle because a locked car is the one thing that cannot be driven anywhere for help. What helps most is a precise location rather than a general one. A parking level, a building name, a row, or which side of the lot you are on.

Have the year, make and model to hand as well. If the key has broken rather than simply been locked in, that information determines whether we can cut and program a replacement on the same visit, which we usually can.

And afterward, get a spare made

The people who call us twice in a year are almost always people running a single key. Once you have one working key back in your hand, a duplicate is a much smaller job than an emergency, and it turns the next lockout into a five minute errand instead of an afternoon.