Who I Am — and Why You Can Trust This

I'm Dean Ferreira. I've spent the last decade with car keys in my hands, and I built this reference for one reason: almost nothing written about car keys online is verified by someone who actually does the work. I've spent years catching the databases — and even the dealers — getting it wrong. This is the version that's right.

It started with locks, not keys

I opened Naples Locksmith in 2017. In the beginning I did all of it — houses, safes, lockouts, the whole trade. My brother came on early and we learned the business side by side; it grew into a genuinely successful shop.

But the part that grabbed me was car keys. Not because it was easy money — because it was a challenge. Every manufacturer is its own animal. A Toyota is a completely different beast than a Ford, and a Ford is the opposite of a Chevy. To be good at this you have to learn how each company thinks, and that kind of problem is exactly the kind my brain likes. That's what pulled me in.

And I started early enough to remember when it was easy. A decade ago there were fewer vehicles, the programming was simple, there were no bypass cables, no dealer software. Honestly — we didn't realize how good we had it. I didn't read about how this trade got hard. I lived through it getting hard.

The garage full of keys

At one point my brother and I split for a few years, and I ran everything solo — including inventory. I'm wired to be organized, and I made myself one promise: I would never be the locksmith who didn't have the key.

So I set up a garage to stock one or two of every key I could get my hands on, just so I'd have the right fob whenever a customer called. I got so obsessive about it that I ended up with around 2,000 different key fobs — nearly every fob for nearly every vehicle on the road.

Sitting in that garage surrounded by keys, it hit me: I understood this catalog better than almost anyone. Why not supply keys online — to regular drivers and to other locksmiths stocking their own inventory? That's how Executive Car Keys and Executive Key Supply were born.

Four years, one key at a time — and the truth problem

I wasn't a computer guy. I was a full-time locksmith. So after long days I'd sit down for two hours with a laptop, and a few sharp people showed me how to build a site and add products. The moment I could add a product, I was off — working every single day, almost never skipping one, loading keys onto the site.

It took four years to get them all up. And it was brutal, because here's what nobody tells you: nothing in the key world is black and white. Cars aren't built perfectly. A single fob will cover only half a model year.

To get it right I'd cross-reference five other websites, the databases, even the dealer — and I kept finding the same thing: they contradicted each other, and sometimes the dealer itself had the wrong information. Most sites just tell you "this key fits this car" with nothing behind it. My question was always: where's the truth behind that? How do we actually know?

So my catalog quietly turned into a database. I refused to list a key as fitting a vehicle unless I knew it was true. That standard is the whole reason this reference exists.

Why locksmiths buy from me: every key is labeled

Here's a detail most people never think about. Most fobs look identical on the outside — but the inside is completely different. Nissan is the classic case: roughly 80% of their fobs look exactly the same, while the board and chip inside are not.

That's a disaster waiting to happen. Order from a random Amazon or eBay seller and the listing might say it's correct, but what's actually inside often isn't. And the second you drop two unlabeled keys on the bench at the same time, you'll never know which is which — the only way to find out is to try programming one to a car and go "whoops, wrong one."

So we label every single key before it ships. That one habit is why locksmith shops trust us to stock their inventory — they know the key in the bag is the key on the label.

How the game changed — and how I stay ahead

Around 2021, the manufacturers started closing the door. Ford, Chevrolet, and others began locking aftermarket programmers out of their newer vehicles. Now, more and more, programming a single key means dealership software — which requires a certificate and a paid subscription to the manufacturer just to turn one key on. The trade has become pay-to-play, and you'd better be sharp with a computer to keep up.

I keep up. My order of operations on the bench:

1. AutoProPad — my first go-to.
2. Autel IM608 — when the AutoProPad can't get there.
3. Dealer software + subscription — the last resort, for the locked-down stuff nothing else will touch.

Knowing which tool a given car needs — and when you've hit the wall that forces dealer software — is its own hard-won knowledge. It's the kind of thing I'll be documenting throughout this reference.

Where things stand now

Executive Car Keys has been selling online for two years and grows every day. We carry about 3,000 SKUs and we're actively expanding — because being the best is in our blood, and giving people options is what we stress. We're shipping 50 to 100 key orders a day to drivers and to locksmith shops across the country, and we're just getting started.

Why I built The Car Key Encyclopedia

After ten years, four years of verifying fitment one key at a time, and thousands of keys through my hands, I got tired of watching people — drivers and even pros — get bad information from sites and dealers who never did the work. So I decided to write down what's actually in my head: every key type, every chip, every quirk, in plain language, verified, and free to read.

If it helps you order the right key, program it yourself, or just walk into a dealership knowing exactly what you're being sold — then it did its job.

— Dean Ferreira, Founder, Executive Car Keys & Naples Locksmith