Unable to reliably lock/unlock car

[dazed]

After 8 years and 160,000 miles I've suddenly found I'm unable to lock/unlock my IS250 (MY2012) on my driveway. This has happened in the last couple of days and is a full on problem.

I can get in the manual way (setting the alarm off in the process) but it's not a particularly convenient workaround.

Both my fobs have new batteries in and the car locks/unlocks perfectly everywhere else - it's just my driveway where the problem is occurring.

As an experiment I turned off my mains at the fuse box and powered off all Battery powered portable devices in the house but it failed to solve the problem.

Is there anything I can do to try and rectify the problem without resorting to knocking on neighbours doors and asking if they've recently bought any new gadgets?

Thanks in advance.

[Herbie]

Almost definitely radio interference from something like a baby monitor, remote gate opener or other things like that.

It may work if you move the car a few feet/few metres either way but I'd say someone has got something new.

[madasahatter]

Different cars can interfere with the signal, when my brother in law owned a toyota i could not get in my car till he had left.

Peugeots interfere with Audis for some strange reason. Are there any new radio masks or the like been installed .

Does the fobs work away from your house? 

[dazed]

20 hours ago, Herbie said:

Almost definitely radio interference from something like a baby monitor, remote gate opener or other things like that.

It may work if you move the car a few feet/few metres either way but I'd say someone has got something new.

Agreed. I've tried moving the car around on the driveway (which is quite large) but to no avail.

 

20 hours ago, madasahatter said:

Different cars can interfere with the signal, when my brother in law owned a toyota i could not get in my car till he had left.

Peugeots interfere with Audis for some strange reason. Are there any new radio masks or the like been installed .

Does the fobs work away from your house? 

Interesting. The neighbours have had a different car in their driveway for the past few days - most likely a visitor. Will wait until the car goes and see if I can eliminate it from my enquiries.

There are no radio masts near me (I'm right out in the sticks) - just getting a 2G mobile signal is a challenge. The fobs work perfectly away from my home.

I can see that this sort of issue has the potential to cause much friction between neighbours, particularly on modern style housing estates where a dozen or more cars might be in signal range of each other.

I was hoping that it might be possible to have the car and fob shifted to a different frequency if necessary, but I suspect these systems use frequency hopping trickery like Bluetooth to avoid interference (ha ha) and for security.