The day I drove this car home from the dealer, I had to get out and open my garage door manually. I thought I'd better hurry and read the user manual to find out which of the many physical and touch-screen buttons I needed to pair with my garage door opener.

Imagine my surprise at finding out that there was no such button, at least in the common understanding of what I was looking for. Nissan's idea was that I should subscribe to a cloud-based paid MyQ service. Sure, there was a free trial period, but come on! Nobody wants that. (Not actually true that nobody wants that. But I don't.) There is another option to change out the rear-view mirror, but it costs at least US$200, so it's also not a great option. 

I guess that I should add that I already have a cloud-based non-subscription service by which I can operate my garage door from my mobile phone. It's integrated into my home automation system. We don't routinely use that to open or close the door. We only use it to monitor the open/closed status of the door and automatically close it if it's been open too long. I plan to replace that system with a completely local system when I get around to it (I already have the components). Even then, I don't want to have to fool around with my phone just to open the garage door as I drive up to the house.

To deal with the short term situation, I went on a scavenger hunt to find one of the handheld remotes for our garage door opener, which we hadn't used for 10-15 years (because, you know, cars have those things built in these days). I found two of them. Both had dead batteries, but both worked with both garage doors after I changed the batteries.

I don't care for the look of a remote clipped to the visor, so I used velcro to mount one under my car's center armrest console. It's completely out of sight, but it's easy to find by feel when you need it.

The down side to this is the need to occasionally change the battery. You probably think that's every couple of years. However, I once bought a boatload of the cheapest coin cell batteries I could find, and they only last a couple months in this remote. How could I provide better power to remote? (I mean, besides buying a better battery. That's crazy talk.) I thought about some kind of plugin to those USB ports just below it, but I didn't really want dangling wires there along with potentially a buck converter to drop 5v to 3v.

I started daydreaming about how to implement a remote in a tidy fashion and operating off the car's power. Hmmm.