There’s an urban legend that claims you can put most elevators into “express mode,” causing the car to sweep directly to your floor without stopping. Supposedly, all it takes is holding down the “door close” button in combination with the desired floor number (and, perhaps, a slight lack of scruples).
Is this fact or fiction? The hack is rumored to work with most Otis elevators and some other manufacturers’ equipment as well. Testing would require one person to operate an elevator and a second to attempt to interrupt the elevator from another floor. Try this out in a few buildings this week and comment on your results. You don’t have to worry about the scruples — this is purely for research purposes.
18 thoughts on “Elevator express mode hack: truth or myth?”
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A building I formerly worked in had Otis elevators and it didn’t work, however the current building I work in also has Otis units, although with a different button panel. When I do the Floor+Door Close combo, it immediately responds. But that could just be the normal action of the Door Close button since I haven’t done any testing.
I have been trying this over the last couple of years. I am totally convinced that it does not work. Next time I am in a building with elevators I will continue to run more tests but so far I have not had any success.
Having worked as an engineer for a company that built elevator controllers (many of which are in Manhattan) I know we never programmed in any elevator express codes that can be activated in the car.
We did however program floor bypass based on the load in the elevator. If the controller thought there were too many people in the elevator it would not stop for a hall call.
There was also a neat feature called nuisance reset. Here’s the scenario little brat kid gets on the elevator and hits all the floors. Controller reads the load in the elevator and determines that there are not enough people to warrant all those calls and resets the car calls.
We used to see how many calls we could make before the car would reset. Not an accurate measure of weight but definitely a sign to cut back on the snacks
My boyfried is an elevator man and he says this is B.S.
I have tried this hack, but everywhere I try it, there is more than one elevator and I can not get an effective result.
My boyfriend.. not boyfried.. although… it could happen.
It worked in Marriott hotel because I took a up elevator down. And it didn’t have to go up. But if I don’t press it you have to go up all the way
Why is 13 skipped?
Answer my question why 13 is skipped.
Floor 13 is skipped because people are superstitious morons.
Plus the government keeps all the secrets on floor 13 as well.