2014 Nissan Murano
Key Replacement - Save vs Dealer in San Diego

2014 Nissan Murano Smart Key Replacement - Fast, Affordable & Professional

I got a call from a guy in the Richland area of San Marcos. He drove a 2014 Murano and had a key made by another shop about a week and a half earlier. It had started fine at first. Then things got strange.

He'd go out in the morning, press the start button, no problem. Come back in the evening, and the dash would throw a key-not-detected warning. Sometimes it would recover if he held the fob closer to the button. Other times it just sat there, unresponsive. He figured the car had developed some kind of electrical fault. That's a reasonable assumption when the symptoms are that inconsistent.

I came out to him. Ran a scan, checked what was actually registered to the vehicle's immobilizer, and read the fob that had been programmed. The transponder chip inside it wasn't the right one for this application. That's the failure mode nobody warns you about: a chip from a close but wrong family can pass the initial registration handshake and even start the car reliably for several days, then the vehicle's security system finishes its deeper verification over subsequent start cycles and the key starts to lose the argument. It doesn't fail all at once. It degrades. Which is why it looks like an electrical gremlin instead of a key problem.

The fob also had a low CR2032 in it, which was making the RF side flaky on top of everything else.

I programmed a fresh key with the correct transponder matched to this vehicle, seated a new battery, and tested it across lock, unlock, and multiple start cycles before I packed up. He texted me two weeks later to say it had been working without a single hiccup.

The dealer was going to charge him a significant amount more just to get it looked at the next day. He'd already lost over a week to the wrong fix. Sometimes the cheaper first call costs more in the long run.

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