[Kirby64]

> Garage door spring broke or power is out, and battery died on your electronic house lock? You're not getting in.

How, exactly, would this happen simultaneously? Any reasonable system should alert you when batteries in your locks are running low. Unless you brazenly disregard those warnings (since, the low battery at least on mine means you still have... weeks left of battery), you will always have access. Also, with multiple entry-points into the house, you'd need ALL door locks to have their batteries die simultaneously. And the power to be out. That's a level of redundancy that is just unreasonable.

> Actually had that conversation about the house with my wife when she didn't carry house keys: do you want to find yourself stuck out of the house while the pets freeze or boil because you didn't just carry a damned key?

In what world would your pets die because you got locked out of the house? You should have AC/heating... and in some sort of power outage event (which, also, would require you to not be home either), your pets are certainly not going to freeze/overheat immediately. In such a crazy unrealistic scenario, breaking a window or drilling out a lock is a straightforward solution. But also, that would require so many multiple events to happen simultaneously (to get to needing to break a window) that it will never reasonably happen.

[camtarn]

In the UK, and I'm guessing a lot of other parts of the world, many people live in apartments with only a single entrance door.

Pets which require medications on a schedule might become very ill without them. But yes, I suspect that any country where the weather is enough to kill your pet should probably be running AC/heat on a thermostat instead of manual. (Here in the UK, we rarely have AC, and a lot of people just put on heat manually when they're cold - but our weather is pretty mild.)

Personally I would never rely on a phone to get me into a house or vehicle. Mine runs out of battery too frequently. I've already been bitten by not being able to take a bus because my phone died and I couldn't pay for a ticket.

[Kirby64]

Smart locks typically have more option than just a phone to open them. Keypad, fingerprint, etc.

For ones that support Apple's Homekey, it doesn't even matter if your battery runs out. Apple devices still provide Homekey via NFC even with a dead phone.

I don't think this exists yet for car keys, although I know there's work on UltraWide Band key support.

Also, this seems substanially less fragile than just... losing a pair of keys. It's not evitable that your battery in your lock runs out (again, unless you ignore warnings), but losing your keys is one of those 'hard to prepare for' events.

Migitation for losing your keys could just be keeping a spare key with a neighbor/friend/whatever... but, well, you can do that with an e-lock too (cause they all have regular keys for true backup).

[camtarn]

> Smart locks typically have more option than just a phone to open them. Keypad, fingerprint, etc.

Ah, that's a fair point.

> Apple devices still provide Homekey via NFC even with a dead phone.

Huh, that's neat. I haven't come across that as I'm not an Apple user.

[grahamj]

Yep. I’ve forgotten or lost keys in the past and been locked out, but never have all of my e-locks and garage died at once.