Digital car keys are getting more sophisticated

Last month, over a dozen automobile and smartphone manufacturers gathered in Palo Alto, California, for the 16th annual “Plugfest,” hosted by the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) to test out the latest in digital key technology.

Digital keys, which allow vehicle owners to lock, unlock, and start their cars using smartphones or other digital devices, are becoming more commonplace. And the goal of Plugfest was to provide a place for CCC members — ranging from automakers and smart device manufacturers to cloud providers and chip makers — to come together to test interoperability and real-world performance across vehicles, devices, and wireless technologies. Plugfest is an opportunity for companies that are typically heated rivals to come together in the spirit of cooperation to ensure that digital keys work across different devices and vehicle brands.

But the event was also an acknowledgement that as modern cars get more complex, these validation efforts will grow increasingly important to ensure that digital keys can keep pace with the innovation in the auto and smartphone markets. As automakers turn their focus to software-defined vehicles that can receive over-the-air updates and seemingly improve over time, digital keys will need to improve too.

“It’s a hard technology problem when you’re trying to resolve wireless access with such fragmented set of device hardware and then device software,” Wassym Bensaid, chief software officer at Rivian, told noti.group. RV Tech, the joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen, hosted Plugfest this past month.

Bensaid said the complexity favors companies like Rivian with more vertical integration. Seamless phone-to-car connectivity requires deep integration across vehicle software, cloud systems, and a highly fragmented device ecosystem spanning iOS and multiple Android variants with differing wireless characteristics. Industry standards like CCC are essential, he argued, when aligning these technologies.

Much of the power seems to rest in the hands of phone manufacturers, who need to ensure that each auto brand adheres to their rigid standards around data security and privacy. At last year’s WWDC, for example, Apple announced that it would soon support digital car keys from 13 vehicle brands, including Audi, Cadillac, Chevy, Hyundai, Kia, GMC, Volvo, Rivian, and others — bringing the total number to 33 brands. The keys are added to the Wallet app, and can be used to lock, unlock, and start the vehicle using technology like NFC, UWB, or BLE — depending on which are supported by the vehicle.

CCC is doing most of the heavy lifting by bringing together most major car companies as well as Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. It also includes the FiRa Consortium, a nonprofit that supports ultra wideband and includes Apple, Google, Cisco, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others as members. CCC President Alysia Johnson said that since launching the Digital Key Certification Program in late 2023, the group has seen a dramatic increase in certifications, from two in 2024 to 115 in 2025.

This year, CCC is rolling out version 4 of its specification, which offers more support for fleet owners like municipal governments, as well as rental car companies. Another major enhancement is improved “friend sharing,” which allows vehicle owners to securely and easily share access with others, regardless of the recipient’s phone type or manufacturer. Johnson gave the example of letting your neighbor borrow your car if theirs broke down by texting them a secure copy of your car key. And as soon as they’re done, you can easily revoke access to the digital key.

“It’s just like sharing a photo, if you’ve ever texted a photo to somebody,” she said. “They don’t need to have an app for my vehicle. They don’t need to have my same kind of phone.”

Digital keys are hardly a flawless system. Reddit is teeming with posts from people complaining about their digital keys in a variety subreddits, including those for Kia, BYD, Rivian, Volvo, and others. “I’ll be standing there with the app open and it won’t recognize I’m there,” one Tesla Model 3 owner said in a post last month. Like any software-based system, flaws remain a persistent problem.

From Rivian’s position, UWB represents the technology with the most reliability, Bensaid said. UWB’s superior accuracy and security, particularly when combined with BLE for proximity-based locking and unlocking, gives customers a better experience through its accuracy, he added.

“Some of the anecdotal feedback that we had from our customers as we launched CCC end of last year, some of them are pointing to accuracy at the edge,” Bensaid said, “which is something that they’re really enjoying now.”