Reddit mentions of 10L0L (2) Key for CAT Caterpillar Heavy Equipment # 5P8500

I'm just going to throw this out there -- but they may not have even needed to hotwire anything. It used to be very common for construction equipment at a site to all be keyed the same. You did not want a multi-thousand-dollar-an-hour project to grind to a stop because someone dropped the keys to the crane in a hole -- and no one wanted to dig though 400 keys to find the right key for a given machine. In fact, at one point most manufactures defaulted to the same key for ALL of their equipment -- no matter who they sold it to. Some still do.

It was not really a problem because the work sites were secured -- and it would be hard to steal the big equipment anyway, especially if its too large to travel on a typical street, and requires special training to use.