Aftermarket Remote Start

Does anyone have any experience with aftermarket remote start kits? My wife has a 2008 Saturn Vue and I was thinking about getting her a remote start for Valentine's Day (romantic, eh?). I've done some web searches and found prices all over the map. The most reasonable price has been ~$70 for a Stellar unit that retails for $200. Just curious to see if anyone has experience with these and how painful the installation is.

I have some experience with them.

I'm a firefighter and I have put out at least half a dozen car fires that were traced directly to remote starters. I would guess that most of them were not professionally installed. Kind of hard to tell by the time we get there, except for the Jeep that had an extra six feet of wire coiled up and stufed along the inside of the fender.

Not a judgement, just an observation.

I have done it, on a older escort maybe a 94ish? Didnt have any problems, bought it on clearance for around 30ish. But the newer stuff will have more computers that have to be talked to just right and such........

I say go for it, but then its not my wife and if it blows up I still get to sleep in my bed.

Some of the units I have seen include some sort of bypass kit for the transponder. It seems that this bypass fakes the transponder for a few seconds while the car starts. IIRC, this was on a more expensive kit that did not require additional keys, etc. Sounds like taking it somewhere will probably be the best way to get it done economically, correctly and reasonably quickly.

The better kits are 'plug and play', the cheaper ones are splice and dice. Most problems I've heard of involved the splice type, that were DIY. Shop carefully, not all installers are conscientious.

One local place I just called is saying $300 installed, which is way more than I was looking to pay. Anyone know of a repuputable installer in Upstate, SC?

I had already called the local Saturn dealer and that was the company the specifically mentioned. It seems like they'd at least need to know what model car they are installing it into in order to provide a realistic/accurate quote.

Here in winnipeg over 50% of cars have them for winter. Be very wary of the cheap installs and most big box stores. Some of the wiring jobs are horrific and cause a ton of problems down the road. Older cars are pretty straight forward, new cars like push-button start muranos and altimas can get very compicated.