Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsCarlock is unreliable and tech support is close to non-existent.
Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2022
After 30ish days with Carlock and countless hours troubleshooting two different units I can say with great disappointment that the product just doesn’t really work as a car alarm and GPS tracking product.
First the good:
It’s a really neat idea that packs both car alarm, GPS tracking, and mobile notification into an easy to install and easy to use mobile smartphone interface for a low acquisition cost and reasonable monthly fee.
Now the bad:
The product is just not reliable. I went through two different Carlock units and a Carlock bluetooth tag (which never worked either).
Neither Carlock unit I had could reliably detect vibration short of directly tapping on the units case. No manner of attaching it to multiple parts of the vehicle frame, repositioning, tape, zipties, etc. would allow it to reliably detect any sort of vibration short of having access to the physical plastic carlock device case and tapping on it. At times if it was tethered to the car frame near a door it could be set off with a really exaggerated door slam.
Neither unit would reliability track a vehicle in any meaningful time frame either. Best case scenario you are at least a mile down the road before it starts tracking its first GPS waypoint (or sending an alert). This means geo-fencing is worthless as you won’t get a geo-fence alarm signal prior to your car being stolen and at least a mile away from where you left it.
The first unit I received would randomly lock up and was unable to record any information about 5 minutes into a drive. So you could go for a 30 minute drive, the unit would lock up shortly after recording the first GPS waypoint. You could continue driving and the unit would never record another data point (GPS, Battery Voltage, Alerts, etc.) Eventually you would come home and about 4 hours later you would get all the updates and alerts that happened over the past 4 hours. During these 4 hour freeze period the Carlock would usually show my car somewhere in the middle of the street about a mile from my house even though it had been in my driveway for hours. This makes the unit worthless for GPS tracking as if your vehicle is stolen and it takes 4 hours to update its location what benefit does that provide. The only way to get the unit out of this frozen state (other than waiting hours) was to remove the Carlock device from the vehicle, open the carlock device case, remove the SIM card, reinstall the SIM card at which point all the cached alerts would come streaming into my phone based app and the web portal. After troubleshooting with Carlock for a week I returned it to Amazon and bought a second unit thinking…maybe the first one was just bad. I was wrong.
I received the second unit and it seemed to work a bit better. It wouldn’t freeze up for hours on end like the first unit did into a drive, but would still sometimes take upwards of 10 minutes to record its first data point once I started the vehicle for a drive That meant the Carlock unit could be armed, I don’t unarm it, I get in the car (which it should vibration detect and alert), start the car (which it should also detect and alert), drive the car away, leave the geo-fence zone (which it should detect and alert) and Carlock would report none of these actions in anything close to real time. Roughly 10 minutes later Carlock will finally report, car started, but wouldn’t ever show the 10 minute test drive I took. Again an alarm system that goes off 10 minutes or more after the vehicle has been started and driven away and never record that it left your driveway doesn’t’ buy you much. Mind you this is with Carlock reporting a lock on half a dozen GPS Sats and 4 out of 5 bars on the GSM meter via the app.
Now let’s get to Carlock tech support. Carlock tech support has no phone number so you will never talk to a live human. Carlock doesn’t appear to have many support reps and my guess is that the few they do are not in north America. Any inquiry to tech support takes at least overnight to respond in the best case scenario. In the worst case it can be days before you get a reply, especially if your response was sent to carlock toward the end of the week. (Carlock has no support on weekends) so you can reply on Friday morning and not hear back until Monday evening. The Carlock tech support responses always comes in the middle of the night or early AM US time. The result is trying to troubleshoot with tech support stretches on for days as every inbound/outbound communication is significantly delayed.. My efforts also seemingly never went anywhere other than “we got your ticket”, or “we updated your unit try it again” or “we need to research that further” to which the unit would still not function properly.
Here is the bottom line from what I can tell. This is a basically a feel good security product that gets sold to people who want the illusion of security for $50 upfront and $9 a month. It’s the equivalent of the little sliding chain link lock that old hotels put on the door to make guest feel safe when they open the door, when the reality is that little chain link lock provides nothing but the illusion of security and will most likely fail when pressed and it counts.
The unfortunate reality is that Carlock so unreliable, so slow to notify you of alerts, and the GPS and geo-location so slow and spotty the odds that Carlock would ever alert you prior to your car being broken into is slim much less let you ever find your vehicle. Carlock provides a thief plenty of time slim-jim open your vehicle, cut away your steering wheel lock, program a new key, start the car, etc. and drive way with your vehicle before you ever get an alert any of this was happening. Once your can is now stolen, Carlock’s slow and spotty GPS tracking means you could probably never track your car in any real time to find and potentially recover it. The internal Carlock device battery is also so small that once Carlock is disconnected from vehicle power or a thief just removes connection to the car battery carlock will cease function in under 30 minutes.
If you needed Carlocks help to troubleshoot your Carlock alarm once your car was taken you may be waiting literally days for them to even acknowledge your support request (and then getting a meaningless reply).
I wanted to love Carlock. It seemed like a great product based off the marketing without spending $1000 on a traditional car alarm, requiring a car alarm tech cutting all sort of wires in your vehicle to install it, and an even more expensive monthly fee for cellular monitoring.
After 30ish disappointing days, two carlock units and one carlock tag later, I am now returning the second unit, the same as I did with the first one (and tag) as I have no faith the product will perform when it counts.
I guess for approximately $50 upfront and $9 a month I should have known it was too good to be true.
