Homelink safety question

Ranman57

Ranman57

:
'24 CX-5 Turbo Premium
So I've noticed that my Homelink buttons are always active, even with the car off. A quick search shows that's not uncommon across many brands of cars. It's been discussed in a number of forums that can be a fairly serious security breach, especially if you have an attached garage since your window or door can be forced open if the car is in the driveway and then anyone can have access to your garage, or worse if you have an attached garage and don't lock the entry door from the garage.

My question is has anyone rigged something up to kill power to the mirror when the car is off? It seems pretty simple on paper but I was curious if anyone had done that and if so how they went about it.
 
I agree with you. With my Frontier, I added a HL mirror and when it was wired up it is as you suggested (no power when the car is off). It seems like a much better idea for security purposes for those who leave their cars outside.
 
I guess the reasoning behind "always on" was if you didn't have Homelink you would have an opener in your car which would basically be the same circumstance. Thief could break the window & grab the opener.

It would be nice if it was an option on one of the menus to either keep active (for people who always park in the garage, like me) or people who park in the driveway but have a garage too.
 
our 3 homelink cars park in garage.....driveway car has no homelink mirror and no opener gets left in it. if you kill the constant pwr to mirror wouldn't it wanna be programmed every time it pwrs up?
 
i12drivemyMP5 said:
our 3 homelink cars park in garage.....driveway car has no homelink mirror and no opener gets left in it. if you kill the constant pwr to mirror wouldn't it wanna be programmed every time it pwrs up?
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I thought about that but if so it would need to be reprogrammed every time you disconnected the battery or it went dead for some reason. And I've read some cars shut it off when the car's not running.

As far as the car always being in the garage mine is 95% of the time, but there are occasions when I'll just pull up in front and not bother / forget to stick it in the garage. And the bad guys who do this stuff know all the tricks and sniff this stuff out.

A friend of mine lost his BMW when his daughter left it in the driveway with the fob fob in it in a very nice suburb. That is of course amazingly common. The coppers found it on the south side of Chicago like three weeks later and the guy had actually had the windows tinted. All the better for drive by shooting I guess. 😀
 
Our garage door opener has a button on the wired pad next to the house entry door that I can push and it blocks any wireless opener transmissions. Basically a "lock" for it. Piece of mind anyway.
 
It isn't really worth thinking about. Go on youtube and watch how fast people can open garage doors from the outside. They offer zero security. Just make sure your inner door is locked and nothing too valuable is in the garage. This is why the industry stopped using the fancy garage door openers that jumped between frequencies. The weakest link in a garage door will always be the mechanism that opens the door.
 
crayonbreak said:
It isn't really worth thinking about. Go on youtube and watch how fast people can open garage doors from the outside. They offer zero security. Just make sure your inner door is locked and nothing too valuable is in the garage. This is why the industry stopped using the fancy garage door openers that jumped between frequencies. The weakest link in a garage door will always be the mechanism that opens the door.
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Not as easy as they make it appear.
 
crayonbreak said:
It isn't really worth thinking about. Go on youtube and watch how fast people can open garage doors from the outside. They offer zero security. Just make sure your inner door is locked and nothing too valuable is in the garage. This is why the industry stopped using the fancy garage door openers that jumped between frequencies. The weakest link in a garage door will always be the mechanism that opens the door.
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AFAIK all garage door openers use rolling codes to make it tougher to grab codes. You don't actually change the frequency, just the codes that are sent out.

But that being said I agree a garage door isn't very secure. If you leave the handle attached to the rope pull to disconnect the door from the opener it's very easy to just drill a hole in the door and reach in with a bent hanger to grab it and pull the rope and in you go. Or, as happened to me some years back, they just used a crowbar to force the external entry door open.

But still, it just seems to make sense to not have the Homelink always active. it's just one more way to get in. If you read the blotter in many local papers garage break ins are a very common crime.
 
But still, it just seems to make sense to not have the Homelink always active. it's just one more way to get in. If you read the blotter in many local papers garage break ins are a very common crime.

And you wouldn't believe how many leave their garage doors up during the day. Everytime I walk my dog through the neighborhood I'm amazed at how many doors are up with all kinds of expensive tools and such just sitting there.
 
I see that all the time too. I've got mine tied into my home automation system so if no motion is detected in the garage for 5 minutes the garage door closes itself unless I consciously put it into a bypass mode. I did that after the ex left it open one day and it got cleaned out of a lot of stuff.
 
Ranman57 said:
But still, it just seems to make sense to not have the Homelink always active. it's just one more way to get in. If you read the blotter in many local papers garage break ins are a very common crime.
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As someone who does read them: it's not that common. Of course, break ins still happen. But smashing the car window to get to the homelink button cannot be all that common. That's a big risk an intruder would be taking. If you're going to smash a window, wouldn't you just...smash one on the house? Can you imagine smashing a car window just to find out the person didn't set up HL? "Well, hell...now I have to smash a window on the house." Well, gee...should have done that first! If someone is willing to gamble on your homelink button, I don't think they're just going to give up because the button didn't work.

Solution looking for a problem.
 
7eregrine said:
As someone who does read them: it's not that common. Of course, break ins still happen. But smashing the car window to get to the homelink button cannot be all that common. That's a big risk an intruder would be taking. If you're going to smash a window, wouldn't you just...smash one on the house? Can you imagine smashing a car window just to find out the person didn't set up HL? "Well, hell...now I have to smash a window on the house." Well, gee...should have done that first! If someone is willing to gamble on your homelink button, I don't think they're just going to give up because the button didn't work.

Solution looking for a problem.
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And most crackheads aren't that smart. Most break-ins occurs because people either leave the door unlocked or the window open. Most scum walk through neighborhoods trying car doors.

You would not believe the people that still leave their wallets, pocketbooks, computers, money out in the open in their unlocked vehicles. I snapped a picture of a car at my gym that had a bunch of cash stuffed in the center cup holder in plain view even though there were numerous reports of car break-ins in the parking lot. People just don't learn.
 
As someone who does read them: it's not that common. Of course, break ins still happen. But smashing the car window to get to the homelink button cannot be all that common. That's a big risk an intruder would be taking. If you're going to smash a window, wouldn't you just...smash one on the house? Can you imagine smashing a car window just to find out the person didn't set up HL? "Well, hell...now I have to smash a window on the house." Well, gee...should have done that first! If someone is willing to gamble on your homelink button, I don't think they're just going to give up because the button didn't work.

Solution looking for a problem.
 
Ranman57 said:
As someone who does read them: it's not that common. Of course, break ins still happen. But smashing the car window to get to the homelink button cannot be all that common. That's a big risk an intruder would be taking. If you're going to smash a window, wouldn't you just...smash one on the house? Can you imagine smashing a car window just to find out the person didn't set up HL? "Well, hell...now I have to smash a window on the house." Well, gee...should have done that first! If someone is willing to gamble on your homelink button, I don't think they're just going to give up because the button didn't work.

Solution looking for a problem.
Click to expand...
Garage break ins are quite common here in Chicago, here's a quote from one of the local websites, blockclubchicago.org. It's from '21 but it gives you an idea of just how common it is.

As of Oct. 23, the 14th Police District, which covers most of Logan Square, had seen about 100 garage burglaries this year, according to a Block Club analysis of police data. That puts the district on pace to match levels seen in 2020 and 2019. But those numbers are lower than previous years, data shows.

And those are just the reported ones in one neighborhood.

As far as breaking a window, I'm sure it's pretty rare if even nonexistent. But as the CX-5's auto lock feature isn't the most reliable thing (one thing I like about auto-folding mirrors is you can glance back at the car to check if it locked, I've made it a habit to always look) I maintain that it just makes sense to turn off the homelink when the car is off, it would cost nadda to implement and adds a layer of security.
 
Ranman57 said:
I maintain that it just makes sense to turn off the homelink when the car is off, it would cost nadda to implement and adds a layer of security.
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And I am disagreeing. Make it an option, at best. This would drive me nuts if I had to start the car just to use the HL button.
 
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