Alternator died in my car so I got a new one fitted. Got the car back from the garage and the stereo was asking for the code (since they obviously must have disconnected the battery).
Checked my owner’s manual and discovered that the little card with the code on has fallen out at some point and is lost somewhere in the vast entropy of our filing system. 🙁
Fortunately we live in the internet age, so once I had the serial number off the radio it didn’t take too long to find someone who could sell me the code for less than £3.
Which makes me wonder… what exactly is the point of that code then? 😕
If the codes are so readily available then it doesn’t seem to be much of a theft deterrent. Does it now purely exist so dealerships can charge a massive premium for looking up a number in a database?