Acura Trunk Lockout

As a locksmith technician with many years of experience in the area, I found that most of the calls I would usually get are for automotive lockout service. I guess it is most common experience accidentally leaving the keys inside the vehicle while locking the door behind. Normally, for a professional locksmith, unlocking a vehicle is a straight forward service, especially if the technician has all the right specialty tools. However, with all the different makes and models in the market, sometimes even using the traditional tools in the traditional ways would not help.

I remember years ago I got called for a lockout service in the area. The customer claimed to have accidentally lock the keys inside the trunk of his 1993 Acura. Since I knew these types of vehicle models are equipped with a mechanical trunk release lever, I knew it will not be a complicated job, so I accepted the job and drove to the customer's location.

Once I got to the parking lot where the car was parked, I got my tools from the van and started working on unlocking the vehicle first. I got the vehicle unlocked withing couple of minutes. However, as I was trying to pull the trunk release lever to open the trunk, I noticed nothing was happening. I asked the customer if he had any idea why it wasn't working, and he said that he got the car like that and it never worked for him. I decided to call a fellow Spokane locksmith technician of mine and see if he might know anything about that particular vehicle's locking mechanism.

Once I got my technician friend on the phone, he said that in these years there was suppose to be a switch in the glove box compartment that was responsible for enabling and disabling the trunk release lever. As I was finishing the conversation, I went to the glove box compartment in order to check for the switch but it was locked. Since I knew the glove box lock should not be so hard to unlock, I used my pick tool set in order to unlock it. Once I got it open, I did saw the switch right in front of me, flipped it to the on position and I was able to use the trunk release lever in order to get the trunk open and retrieve the customer back his keys.