Power Locks

Hi,

I leased a 2006 Caravan a year ago and as part of the deal I received
a Mopar remoter starter. Imagine my suprise when I found that there
was no button for unlocking the doors. No only that but the only way
to unlock all the doors is to unlock one of the front doors, open it
and push the button to unlock all.

Every other car I've seen with power locks allows you to turn the key
twice to unlock all the doors but the dealer states that this is not
available on the caravan.

I'm told that the only way to get remote entry is to rip out the
dealer remote started and replace it with an aftermarket one.

Can anyone out there confirm/refute this claim? This is very
inconvenient when you have kids.

 

If there's no button on your remote for power locks, then I highly doubt
you can make do much more than remote start your van, although it seems
odd that it wouldn't at least have the option to do so. I have never
personally worked on a Caravan that will unlock all doors with two
turns of a key in the door, however most '04+ Caravans I have seen come
with factory keyless built right into the ignition key itself. It might
be worth heading back to your dealer to see if the van has the option
for factory keyless. If it does, then it may just be a matter of
buying yourself one of the fancy keys from them, which will probably
run you $150-180. If it's going to cost any more than that, I'd just
have an aftermarket remote starter installed with keyless entry.
Shouldn't run you much more than $200.

 

Thanks, that's the same info I got from the dealer.

As it is a short lease I'm unwilling to spend more money on it. This
is my first Dodge and the other cars I've had, even without remote
entry, allowed you to unlock all of the doors with the key in one of
the two front doors. I can assure you this won't happen again and I'm
still amazed that the expensive Mopar starter doesn't have it included
and the $200 aftermarket one does.

I appreciate the response.

 

Well you gotta remember that ANYTHING from a dealer is going to be more
expensive than anything comparable to aftermarket. I was surprised at
how how much the thing actually cost and what poor range it has. I've
installed a few for Chrysler dealers and they said that they charge
over $400 for it installed!!!! The funny thing is that the 'MOPAR'
piece is actually made by CodeAlarm which is an aftermarket company.
For $400 you can get a very nice remote start with over 1mile range.
Dealers do offer a piece that does do BOTH keyless and remote start but
they rarely sell and install it because of the complexity of the
install.

 

avital alarms have some top of the line systems that work off the satellites and you get
paged when your vehicle is started and moving and tracked by sat.
and you can shut it off no matter were you are in the world. very expensive
the best system and most reliable is the directed electronics stuff . great range and very
dependable as long as the system is soldered in and not just but connected taped and spliced
but that goes for them all code alarm sucs and the system they make for d.c is a pain to
get fixed because most dealers don't back up the product

 

Well, not really. Avital isn't really all that anymore. And no, they
don't have anything that works off of satellites. Now, on some of
DEI's other lines they do have stuff like the Viper 210v which works
off of cell phone technology but not satellites.

Compustar has a a little more user friendly system called the
Computrack. It allows the user to be able to control their car from
any web-enabled computer. You can see where your car is at all times
even disabling the car if you've forgotten to arm it prior to looking
it up on the web.

I will agree that no matter whats installed, it is dependent on the
installer.