The Top 3 Places You’re Most Likely to Lose Your Car Keys

The Top 3 Places You’re Most Likely to Lose Your Car Keys

Nothing wrecks your day like lost car keys.  Searching for them not only disrupts your tight schedule, but also raises stress levels and destroys your focus, your motivation and your energy for a good part of the day.

Since few of us can really afford to have lost car keys disrupt our daily routines, here’s some interesting data to note.  Below, you’ll find the top three places you’re most likely to lose your car keys.  Take note and perhaps you’ll never lose your car keys again.

First, here’s an interesting statistic about lost car keys…

If you were to guess, how much of the population would you say loses their car keys at one time or another?  Go ahead, take a gander: would you say 10%?  Or maybe it’s a universal problem so perhaps more like 75%?

In either case you’d be way off the mark.  According to a survey by Lloyds Bank Car Insurance, just over a quarter of drivers lose their car keys.

That’s a lot of lost time, missed appointments, and brain-scrambling stress eating into our lives!  One way for us to beat this terrible annoyance is to understand how and where people are losing their car keys.

We have Lloyds Bank to thank for helping us with that.  The same survey that indicated a full quarter of us are losing our keys also tells us where we’re losing them.

Here are the top three places you’re most likely to misplace your car keys. They’re listed in descending order, so the most common is first.  Armed with this information, there’s a good chance you can prevent yourself from losing them in the future.

#1.  Your job is where you’re most apt to misplace your car keys.

20% of us lose our car keys at work.  That’s the most common place, and no wonder: most of us spend the major portion of each day grinding it out at work.  Work can make us stressed, and stress as you know seems to temporarily disable our brains.

A brain that’s stressed, whether it’s from exhaustion or it’s caused by outside forces, loses the ability to handle small tasks that are normally semi-automatic. For example, if it’s your habit to throw your keys in your desk drawer when you return from your lunch break, that habit might become disrupted if you’re having a bad day.

When the brain is preoccupied, it tends to stray from all those helpful routines you’ve set up for yourself to get through the day.  Safely stashing your car keys in a special spot each day?  The stress of a missed deadline or a bad confrontation with a colleague might mean you leave your keys on the edge of your desk (and later they fall off into your trash bin…lost).

#2. A shopping trip is the second most common event to cause loss of car keys.

The excitement of a great deal, the rush to get things done, the constant digging around in your purse…whatever shopping means for you, it’s the second most likely thing in your life to make you lose those keys.  15% of us lose our keys while shopping.

Perhaps it’s that we’re all distracted while shopping.  Perhaps it’s because we’re constantly taking things out of our pockets or bags to pay for items.  Or maybe you set your keys down to look at an item on the shelf.  Maybe you even toss your bag in the shopping cart and the keys fall out?

Whatever the case may be, a shopping trip makes a good portion of us lose our car keys.  This can be an especially harrowing experience because usually when you’re shopping you cover a lot of ground…they could be anywhere!

#3.  Losing your car keys while visiting friends or relative is number three.

Work stress and whirlwind shopping make us lose our keys, but we can also lose car keys when we’re distracted in positive ways, too.  Our number three event for losing car keys is almost neck-in-neck with the number two reason: 13% of us lose our car keys when visiting friends or relatives.

Finding your car keys in someone else’s home can be quite a task.  You may not be familiar with all the places keys can hide, and you may not have been paying attention to what you were doing because your brain was pretty much consumed with socializing.  Again, anything could happen.

Lost car keys can not only wreck your day, they can cost a lot too.  Before you pay your dealer for an expensive replacement key or to make you a new key, call autolocks Ltd.  We can help you gain entry to your car, get you a new key, and have you back on the road in no time.