A tracker for car keys, the fob and the forgotten spare

A modern replacement key is the sort of bill that ruins a week. Coded fobs are expensive to source and expensive to programme, and the dealer quote is rarely the end of it once you add getting the car there. That is the real economics of a tracker for car keys: it is not a gadget purchase, it is a very cheap insurance policy against a specific, common and irritating loss.

Where car keys actually go

Almost nowhere interesting. Ask around and the same six places come up: a coat pocket in the wardrobe, the wrong handbag, the kitchen table under the post, the hall table under a newspaper, down the side of a sofa cushion, and — the classic — still in the door of the house or in yesterday's jeans.

Notice what those have in common. They are all indoors, all within a few metres, and all invisible. That is a sound problem, not a mapping problem, and it is why the loudest feature of a tag turns out to be the most-used one. A tag ringing at up to 100 dB is audible through a coat, a cushion and a closed drawer, and the search is over in under a minute.

The genuinely away-from-home losses are rarer but more painful: keys left on a pub table, dropped on a footpath, or put down in a supermarket trolley bay. For those, the map pin and Lost Mode matter more than the noise.

The spare set nobody can find either

Here is the case people forget. The spare key is the thing that saves you from the dealer bill — and in most households nobody is entirely sure where it is. It went in a drawer in 2019. It may be at a relative's house. It may be in the box the car came with, which is in the loft.

Tagging the spare is arguably better value than tagging the everyday set, because you only look for it on the worst day of the year, under time pressure, usually in the dark. A tag on the spare turns that into a thirty-second job. It also means that if you ever hand the spare to a family member or a neighbour, you can see whether it actually made it home again.

What a tag on your keys does not do

This needs saying because the marketing around vehicle security blurs it constantly.

A tag on your keys is not a car tracker. If the car is taken, the keys are usually in your pocket and the tag goes nowhere near it. A tag hidden in the car is a different proposition, and even then it is not a vehicle tracker: it has no SIM, sends no live feed, and reports a position only when a passing Apple device hears it. On a residential street that is often enough to give police a lead. In a container or an underground unit it will go quiet.

Nor does a tag do anything about relay theft, where the signal from a keyless fob is amplified from outside your front door. The countermeasure there is physical: a signal-blocking pouch or tin for the fob, kept away from the hall. A tag and a pouch solve different problems and there is no reason not to have both.

Setting it up so it earns its keep

1. Thread the tag onto the ring itself, not onto a fob strap that can slip off.
2. Name it something you would say out loud — "car keys" — because that is what you will search for.
3. Turn on the left-behind alert. Keys put down on a café table trigger it while you are still in the street.
4. Add a Lost Mode message with an email address rather than a phone number if you would rather keep the number private.
5. Tag the spare on the same afternoon, while you can still remember where it is.

How Beacon Tag handles car keys

Weight and thickness matter more on a key ring than anywhere else, because a heavy tag swinging in the ignition is a genuine annoyance and, on some older barrels, a wear problem. Ours weighs roughly 10 g and stands 9 mm proud, on a body 36.3 mm to a side, with the key ring hole moulded straight into the shell — so there is no adhesive pad to peel and no separate holder to buy. A key ring comes in the box.

It rings at 80–100 dB from up to 60 m, sealed to IP67 for the day the keys go in a puddle, and runs on a CR2032 that lasts up to two years and costs a couple of pounds to replace. Everything happens in the Apple Find My app already on the phone — no second app, no account, no subscription now or later. It rides on Apple Find My, so the household handset has to be Apple's own, running iOS 14.5 upwards — Android does not work with it, which is the one thing to check before ordering a set as a gift.

Two trackers, two key rings, one box, under £15. One goes on the everyday keys and one on the spare in the drawer — which is exactly the pair of problems this post is about.

Order a two-pack and cover both sets of keys.

If you want the wider buying checklist first, read our guide to choosing a tracker in the UK.