No, you don't have to remove the column from the car. You do have to do a lot of disassembly to get at this thing though. These have a electric piece to the tumbler so there are two wires that travel up the length of the column to the tumbler down to the base of the column which is used for theft deterrent. No, you can't bypass this without a lot of mucking around. You need special tools to disassemble columns and some good mechanical knowledge to do this. I did a ton and even mechanics shook their heads when they saw how much had to come apart.
