“If you are like me, you enjoy the charm of driving an older vehicle. The mechanical feedback from the car is more organic. You aren’t surrounded by safety and driver aid systems that jump at the opportunity to correct your oh-so human actions. These cars were born in an era when manufacturers strove to have their own look. Shoot, you still get to plug the key into the ignition! You get the point, but as much as the above is appealing, there are many shortcomings in older vehicles, one of the primary being security.
Nowadays, most cars come with keyless ignition systems as standard equipment. This technology has been used in the industry since the late nineties in high-end automobiles, and only in the last decade or so has this system made its way to the masses. These systems can certainly come with their own set of headaches, but they do make auto theft much more difficult when using less tech-savvy methods.
My goal here is to create a keycode-based security system for starting my 80’s-era soon-to-be daily driver.
Disclaimer: the motor for said daily driver is still not actually in the car, so installation of this system will be covered in a future post. This system is designed to function with a starter circuit found in a 1980’s-era Volvo.
The primary motivations behind installing this system are to disable the ability to start the vehicle without entering the proper keycode, and to make the act of “hot-wiring” the vehicle much more difficult. The intention is to be as non-invasive as possible, so this system does not require the removal of any OEM parts included in my vehicle’s starting circuit.”