The whole aftermarket key ecosystem, even vehicles going back 20 years, is messy, horrible thing.

It's dominated by Chinese manufacturers of specialty tools (Autel, Xhorse, ...), which inevitably mandate bundled accounts, subscriptions, mandatory cloud features, etc. Even the older cars, you have either cheap Chinese tools, where you never know wheather it'll really work, or the manufacturer's tool which needs a dealer code, which of course the dealer won't have after 20 years.

I wrote about my 20 year old car-key-adding adventure here: https://jonas.bike/low-cost-diy-key-/-transponder-for-my-200... - it requires desoldering an eeprom, two pieces of hardware from aliexpress which come with pirated copies of software, and lots of hope that it'll work...

An open source community curated collection of scripts, which works with a cheap OBD dongle (which is all the chinese devices are: OBD hardware + per-car software), would be amazing.

I had this same thought the other day. For a lot of cars you can buy aftermarket programmers, but the Dorman ones are limited to 3 uses. 3 uses for like eighty dollars is terrible, and surely it's not a technical limitation.

You can do that with teslas. Buy two keys (they at those credit cards sized keys) and you pair them on your own. Two for $40. Do it right at home. You can pair multiple cars to a single key. Or make guest keys

Keys in European and newer American cars reliably have Some Kind of real-ish crypto scheme applied, as this is fairly regulated in Europe. It’s an anti theft measure driven by the real stolen auto trafficking issue faced especially in Europe. Most of the aftermarket tools vendors use some kind of exploit (code exec, arbitrary read, update signature bypass, etc.) to extract the crypto material from a control module participating in the immobilizer - it’s neither a weird conspiracy nor as simple as it seems to bypass.

Good luck with Claude not just immediately giving you a refusal.