Review of Web Service "Tom's Key"

Somewhere in Las Vegas there's a rental car with the key fob to my Gen 3 Prius under the driver's seat. The pockets in my favorite walking shorts are too shallow.

Knowing the risk of losing both Prius key fobs, I got serious about replacing the lost key. Local Toyota dealers want north of $300 for a replacement key fob and the service to pair with the vehicle.

I've replaced several lost key fobs to my Gen 2 Priuses by learning how to do the "chicken dance", a complicated series of motions like opening the driver's door x times, unlocking the door locks y times, etc. However, I was told that Toyota engineering squelched chicken dance pairing for Gen 3 vehicles and now require their Techstream diagnostic tool to accomplish pairing on vehicles newer than 2009s.

There are bootleg programming tools on EBay that claim to be able to pair a virgin Gen 3 Toyota keyfob with the vehicle, but it's not clear whether these programmers will do the "smart" version of the key fob that starts the engine with the fob still in your pocket.

I've also heard that poorly-designed bootleg programmers have the ability to brick the key fob system in the vehicle entirely.

Which brings me to the topic of this post: Tom's Key Company, a Salt Lake City based online seller of Gen 3 key fob clones and the tools to pair them with the vehicle. They also sell fobs for other Toyota vehicles and non-Toyota vehicles.

I have no connection to Tom's Key whatsoever. This is an arm's length review of their service.

Appearance-wise their Prius key fob is an exact copy of my 2010's factory key fob. The "blank" (i.e. never used) key fob costs $128 in July 2024. The fob comes with a blank metal key at that price but for an additional $60 Tom's will send a metal key machined to fit your vehicle. They do this using images of the factory metal key that you e-mail to them.

I doubted that a key machined from a photo would work without jiggling it in the vehicle's door lock, but mine worked fine.

For those who say "I can get a key cut locally for $5 at the hardware store" keep in mind that Gen 3 vehicles have a slot, not an edge to cut. It's rare to find someone locally who can cut slotted keys.



To program a Tom's Key replacement fob I rented their OBDII programming tool that looks like this:



The OBDII dongle comes with a cheap Asian smart phone based on Android Go (BLU Advance L5) that some would call a burner phone due to its lack of features. This is easily the slowest smart phone I ever met.

The smart phone in the kit talks to the OBDII module via Bluetooth and serves as the module's screen and keyboard. The OBDII module and burner the phone are numerically paired to each other and cannot be separated. The smart phone cannot be used for anything other than programming key fobs. All other Android functionality in the phone has been disabled by Tom's Key.

In July 2024 the rental cost of Tom's Key programming hardware is $70 plus a refundable $90 security deposit. The programming kit comes with a prepaid USPS shipping label to return the programmer to Salt Lake City.

There are no provisions for downloading Tom's Key's programming app to your own Android phone and no way to purchase their OBDII dongle. This is an inseparable programming kit only available on a rental basis from Tom's Key.

This is the custom Android app that Tom's Key wrote:



The programmer's smart phone begins by interrogating the vehicle via the OBDII dongle to determine the kind of electronic key system the vehicle supports. The app has a screen where it asks if you wish to erase the vehicle's list of paired keys, and thereafter reload them into vehicle memory. This implies that the tool will also work with stock Toyota key fobs, not just Tom's Key fobs.

For obvious reasons I chose to not erase the vehicle's list of existing keys, but if you have a former spouse or owner you'd like to block from using a key fob they kept, this erase feature might be worth the risk.

Tom's Key's Android app is not without its problems. Most of the app screens are text mode when an image might be helpful. The app's self-learn feature concluded I have a "prox5" vehicle, but one screen implied that only 2016 and newer Priuses have prox5 compatible keys. I ignored this inconsistency and the new key programmed OK anyway.

The app crashed a bit at the point where it wanted the sensing antenna behind the Prius's start button to "taste" my Toyota factory key, but I rebooted the app and this problem self-corrected.

And the folks at Tom's Key might have a better website if they used AI a bit less pre-sale. I typed "please have a real person contact me!" several times in the chat window as I arranged my purchase, but in the end it all worked out.

I'm generally pleased with this purchase and the price I paid for it. Before I send the programmer back to Tom's I intend to program another blank key I purchased from them.

 

Tom, I had some left over commas and periods from my lengthy post. I'll leave them here for your use.
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I am the original poster in this thread. I mentioned the following in my original post:

"The app crashed a bit at the point where it wanted the sensing antenna behind the Prius's start button to "taste" my Toyota factory key, but I rebooted the app and this problem self-corrected."

Before returning the programmer I purchased a second identical key for my brother's 2010 Prius. Just as with my effort with my own 2010, the programmer crashed at the point where the new key is to be placed against the start button. I rebooted and did the programming exercise multiple times, each resulting in a communication error where the key is sniffed by the start button.

Whereas multiple programming tries with app reboots eventually resulted in a programmed key on my Prius, multiple programming efforts on my brother's car yielded only a key whose distance and RFID features worked. My brother's key's proximity feature did not work. You could not open the door or start the vehicle with the cloned key in your pocket.

Yes, brother's vehicle is equipped with the proximity key feature as demonstrated by his remaining factory key.

***
I mentioned all of this bad programming experience to Tom's Key in a long e-mail to them. Tom's Key does not advertise any telephone number for tech support. They responded to me quickly by e-mail but mentioned that they could not discuss this matter with me by phone. They gave no reason why telephone support is not offered although I asked.

Their e-mailed suggestions for correcting the problem were unhelpful, and fell into the Hail Mary category of "make certain that contacts are clean and the battery is charged", etc. along with suggestions to rewatch their online videos.

The online responder questioned whether I had purchased the correct key for my vehicle, but I reminded them that Tom's Key suggested the key that was shipped.

I'm a techie and I know that code-writing involving multiple hardware systems, some of which have no documentation, is an arduous task for even a highly-trained software jock. This vehicle/key programming thing absolutely falls into that category given Toyota's disinterest in making its locking system design public.

My estimation is that Tom's Key's programmer still has some code bugs in it that render it mostly unusable for Gen 3 Priuses.

I can say with some clarity that Tom's Key's "e-mail or chat-only" communication policy with its customers is absolutely unhelpful to its customers. The problem is serious enough that I do not recommend Tom's Keys to others.

What follows is only conjecture on my part. These cloned Toyota keys from Tom's Keys are heavily-engineered affairs. I know this because I design electronic hardware in my job. I estimate that the investment in tooling and software to offer these cloned keys is millions of dollars, probably done by a mid-sized corporation intending to sell millions of keys per year across multiple vehicle platforms.

I noticed that the shipping envelope from Tom's Keys was marked "Car Keys Express", a Louisville, KY corporation that is quite large and sells cloned car key fobs at retail locations across the US and via truck-equipped techs that show up at your home or business.

Does anyone know if Tom's Keys is CKE's online outlet?