Brand New CAS Keys Not Working?

[jbh1989]

Has anyone on here had brand new keys not work from the get-go?

I have a customer with a 2004 E66 745Li that lost his only key (we told him when he bought the car back in Sept that he needed more than one, but alas, he didn't listen). No problem, we got his information and launched an order for a new remote key and a valet key. They arrived next day and we supplied them to the customer with the instruction of holding the key in the slot for 10 seconds.

He calls back, it doesn't work. I take our Autologic with me and make a house call. Sure enough, the car says "Wrong Key" for both the valet key and the new master key. I can access the CAS and it reports all keys are disabled except for key 3 (how is this technically possible?). I cannot enable the keys since I don't have a valid key. Tried a battery and CAS reset to no avail. Autologic engineers don't know what to do. We had it towed to our shop and then on to the local dealer. Unfortunately, they are out of ideas, short of replacing the CAS and all the locks and keys in the car. We just got a new parts guy who is so close to useless it's not funny. I can't even talk to the old one because this new punk "kid" is trying to rule the roost up there.

I'm hoping there is a Service Advisor or Dealer Tech on this board that may have run into this or knows who to talk to. Have the keys been bad from the factory before? They work in a key reader, but that doesn't mean they work in the car.

Thanks for reading!

[jbh1989]

To follow up, the keys indeed were disabled in the CAS. Without the missing key, there was no way to reenable the keys. Instead of ordering the entire lock set, we found a part number in group 41 that was a set of keys with CAS module (no lock cylinders). 51 21 0 030 318. List price is $567.71 and includes two remotes, a valet key, and CAS module.. Compare that to the CAS module by itself that includes NOTHING and lists for $725.18. They reassign the electronic code so that none of the keys coded to the old CAS will work. It's a small price to pay since all of the parts in the 318 part number are so heavily subsidized. The mechanical code is unchanged, so the old keys do work in the lock cylinders, they just aren't recognized by the CAS.