Dodge Caravan Trunk opening

I received a call to open and make a key for a late model Dodge Caravan. The door locks on these vans are an adjacent part of the door handle cavity and use one key for everything.

After gaining entry to the van, I was trying to decide which of the three locks to attack to generate a key.  Knowing what a bear the door locks can sometimes be, because of the blockage of the retaining screws that hold the lock in the handle access area that is caused by the bottom of the window track and even sometimes the window glass, I decided to try the hatch lock.

My first problem was how to get the hatch open in order to remove the inside vinyl trim panel to get to the lock itself, since there was no inside release mechanism to open the hatch. I noticed that of the two radio speakers in the hatch, the left one seemed to be in close proximity to the lock. I removed the left speaker cover, the speaker and disconnected the wires. Looking into the cavity and lightly to the right (2” to 3”) was the rear deck lock.

Like on many Chrysler product trunk lock, the van’s lock was retained by large nut. Once I had loosened the nut, I was able to remove the lock from the outside of the vehicle and see the key  code number. Since this was of the es/ep seriers.  IN 1990, Chrysler changed to the wafer type lock and the F, and then G, series code and eliminated the code on the hatch locks. There were some code numbers on later model ignitions but, I found them to be unreliable.