Skorp

Hello everyone. Not sure this is the right place, but I absolutely am needing some help as this is driving me crazy.

I own a 2013 Porsche Boxster and have had it for more than 2 years now.
At least a two months ago, my key remote started to become weak and would be troubling to use to open my car. As the weeks past, it got worse and worse. I thought it was a battery problem so I put a new battery and it seemed to work...only for the first couple of minutes and ended up the same way as before.
I tried my spare key and it would work for a couple hours and just end up in the same way. My spare key was kept in a safe and has actually never been used before until a few days ago, so that really seems to be some connection problem in the car.

As of today, it has come that my keys only work 10% of the time and become random intervals. I have been trying to open my car with it for the last 10 minutes and my keys won't connect at all anymore no matter how many times I press all the buttons.
Anyone have had this problem before or know what is going on? I saw a way to reset the sync of your key to the car on the older models online and tried using it, but it did not work. My key did work for a few seconds and then it stopped again.

Any support or tips is much appreciated. Thank you.
Bryan

PistolPete

This happened to one of my keys on my GT4 this past weekend. Left it alone for a bit and started working again. I didn't have the spare key with me to test at that moment. I thought the buttons were sticking or something but for now I'm thinking it's a low battery.

Strange for a 1 month old key, but who knows. I'm putting in a new battery in the key and keeping an eye on it.

PistolPete

Happened again to be today in the middle of a road trip. I had both keys with me and they both stopped working. I gave up after trying for 10 minutes.

No way could both keys go bad at the same time.

At the next rest stop, both magically worked again. Not sure what to tell the dealer at my next visit. It's certainly not a dead battery on the key FOB.

dadster

I know this is an old post, but I was experiencing a similar problem. I have an low mileage (under 10k miles) 2014 Boxster S. My remote fob would work for limited distances and sometimes only right next to the car (if at all). Replaced the battery and the problem persisted. I swapped remotes and the problem continued. So I researched and found the car has multiple antennas all going to a controller. I reasoned that the only thing common to the antennas was the controller and the ground. Anyhow long story short, I loosed the grounds and sprayed with Caig contact cleaner. My remote now works from 30+ feet!

Here's where the ground (brown) wires attach to the chassis, behind the truck liner near the driver side air cleaner. I loosed the nuts, sprayed with cleaner and re-tightened.

dadster

Background:
I have a 2013 and a 2014 Boxster S. The 2013 has 90K+ miles the 2014 just a little over 10K. The 2013 remote has always worked great, the 2014 (a recent purchase) was intermittent and on occasion, I would have to break out the emergency key to unlock the car. I had replaced the car's battery and the batteries in each remote (and cleaned their contacts). After cleaning the grounds it was better (no longer had to use the emergency key), but would often have to hold the key fob next to the A pillar to get it to unlock.
This was driving me nuts!
The Fix:
Following up, cleaning the terminals helped, but didn't completely eliminate the problem (and I found a third ground point). However, cleaning the terminals did improve things and it lead me to the next thing which has SOLVED THE PROBLEM. I can now lock and unlock the car reliably 100% of the time at >20ft and often greater than 30ft.
The How:
I attached a jumper wire between the three chassis ground points. The GREEN wire I added is a 12 gauge stranded copper wire (size is not critical, but bigger is better). The wire is attached to the three grounding chassis nuts with crimp ring terminals.You could use solid copper wire, but its more likely to fail (break) from vibration. If you're not sure which are the correct nuts, the chassis ground nuts are located in the trunk just behind the carpet where the air cleaners are. The nuts are painted gray from the factory and attached ground wires are BROWN with a white stripe. There is no issue/concerns if this jumper wire touches the chassis as the car's chassis is the ground. You are connecting three terminals that already connect to each other electrically through the aluminum chassis (this is a completely redundant connection, so there is no fear of damaging anything), but for whatever reason, these ground points are not providing a solid connection.
The Why:
To give you the "why" this worked, and to let you know that I'm not just making this up, to get a solid 12V from the battery, you must have a good ground. If the ground is resistive, voltage is lost (dropped) across that resistance. The higher the ground terminals resistance the less of the original 12V is available to the attached devices. Connecting all three of the trunk's ground terminals together theoretically drops the resistance to 1/3 of what it was, increasing the available voltage to the attached devices. Even if the resistances of each terminal are not the same, the resistance will be dropped substantially by connecting them in parallel. Example: If each ground terminal had a resistance of 5 Ohms, adding the jumper would drop the resistance to 1.67 ohms Rt=(R1∗R2+R3)/(R1+R2+R3).

Larson E. Rapp

So what you're doing is temporarily interrupting power to some controller or gateway somewhere when you loosen the ground lugs to clean them or bridge them with an external wire. It's the power-cycling that is helping, albeit temporarily.

dadster

I replaced the car battery, the battery in each remote and cleaned the terminals in the remotes. Nothing worked.
If you have this problem, you should try iI’s been working for weeks.

Cayman Ed

@dadster , I shared your DIY photo in Planet-9 to a fellow member who was facing the same key fob problem and your solution also worked for him.