So my wife is taking our baby to visit her parents in VA, she goes on saturday to start the car and....nothing...brand new, less than 3K miles and it won't start. Roadside asst takes the thing to the nearest dealer, and they told her they initially think the key lost its program....and that sometimes being close to a cell phone can cause the key to dump the program...anyone heard of this...kinda stupid to build a key that relies on a chip that can be blanked by a cell phone, don't most people keep both in a pocket..or women keep them in the purse together...
Short answer:
It's not possible.
Longer answer:
Chips don't get re-written that way. If it's a re-writable style of chip in the key fob, it would be erased with a programmer and a special program. They're electrically erasable, not magnetically, and not via radio frequencies (RF).
Also, it's a transmitter, not a receiver. Although you'd get some induction from the cell phone signals on the wires in the fob, they won't be enough to erase the chip. Not only do you have to have enough of a voltage, you'd have to enter in the correct sequence for re-writing.
I've never heard of a chip that could be erased by a cellular signal. I've worked with transmitters that are orders of magnitude more powerful than anything you're going to find in a cell phone. I say this an an EE who has worked with a lot of RF, and done a lot of coding in an RF-heavy environment. Yes, there can and will be interference, but once the source of that interference is removed, normal operation almost always resumes.
If it is somehow erasable that way, it's certainly worthy of a mention in the Risks Digest, at the very least.
It's quite unlikely. The fob's been around for a while, and there'd be many more people with reports of cell-phone related fob deaths.
It's more likely to be a dead battery. If the buttons on the fob get held down the fob will continue to send out the signal. If you have finger-shaped items in your purse (like lipstick, feminine products, candy, lighters, etc.) and they get mashed against the buttons, you could be inadvertently holding the button down for hours at a time.
That in itself is a little troubling, as it's pretty easy to turn off the transmitter if a button has been held down for more than 30 seconds.
It could be a defective Li cell.
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