18 ms·

Clocks in Honda cars getting stuck at a certain time in 2002

94 points by hinoki 5y ago

lttlrck 5y ago
I wonder if this could affect GPS satellite lock performance by causing incorrect almanac lookups...
- boznz 5y ago
  GPS sends time in its data stream so doesnt need external clock, most car clocks use this now I believe though my nissan leaf is exactly 4 hours out to the microsecond so some programmers ignore timezones :-)
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    But that is relative to the GPS epoch. I have a handheld Garmin that needed a firmware update after the last GPS week rollover because it didn't deal with the epoch change and displayed a date 20 years in the past. Anything built before 2019 could be prone to this.
  - szundi 5y ago
    I am pretty sure they forgot to account for the probably 9600 baud serial rate the GPS transmits the exact time so it is sure in the milliseconds range if not half a second
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Not sure which year LEAF and which timezone, but I think you can override it on mine. (And the LEAF doesn’t do a lot of timezone crossing trips.) https://youtu.be/DHdlsS4jSo8&t=66 https://youtu.be/DHdlsS4jSo8&t=66
gnabgib 5y ago
A dupe of three other posts, including this very link ([1] a day ago - looks like maybe Jalopnik changed the title?): - YK22 bug causing Honda clocks to stop working[0] (140pts, 83 comments) - Honda Clocks Are Stuck 20 Years in the Past and This Might Be Why[1] (2 pts, 0 comments) - Honda's Y2022 Time Issues[2] (3pts, 1 comment) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818572 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811369 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782874
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Contacting the mods with this feedback would let them clear up all the dupes and merge conversations, using the footer contact link. Otherwise they might not see this.
xwdv 5y ago
Oh to go back to 2002, when there was still hope for the future. Personally I’d just leave it that way and remind myself of what I was doing on those dates.
- laurent92 5y ago
  *2001. Shrek and 3 other stunning movies had gone out. The world had been in mostly peace for long. That was before they hammered the terrorist risk on TV, mandated water bottle checks at the airports. Everything went down after that.
throwawayboise 5y ago
This is why I don't want electronic gizmos (nav systems a particularly good example) in my car. You have a phone that can do GPS and navigation, and probably do it better than the software in your car. The phone is much more easily replaced than the built-in navigation unit, should it stop working for any reason. The phone works the same way in all cars. The phone gets software updates easily and seamlessly. Quit putting unecessary technology in cars. It will only cause expensive problems in 5 or 10 years, because it will be utterly obsolete by then and unfixable. The car should not care what the date is. It should not care what time it is. The clock in my car says 12:00. Why? Because I have never bothered to set it. I don't care, and I have the correct time, accurate to the millisecond, on my phone. The technology in the car should only be about running the engine and transmission and other essential systems in the car.
- klyrs 5y ago
  My first pickup didn't have a clock, so I got a cheap one and stuck it to the dash with a magnet. Had to adjust it for DST, which was fine, as it had usually gone off a few minutes at that point. That was an okay level of electronic gadgetry for me. What we've got today is bonkers.
  - pwr-electronics 5y ago
    Anybody remember the analog clock in the Chrysler Sebring?
  - brirec 5y ago
    Daylight savings time? Hah, just rotate the damn thing 30°
- alkonaut 5y ago
  While I agree this would be the best way to design things, is it really a net positive for the first owner of each car who might just have it for 1-3 years? That’s the primary target for the design after all. And with more and more cars being leased, what the second and third owner will feel about outdated or flaky tech is becoming even less relevant to the person who is the customer.
javajosh 5y ago
One interesting effect this will have is to disable OTA updates, if it happens with https. The client (the car) will see the server cert as invalid because its not valid yet. If your laptop dies, and it's on motherboard battery dies, you won't be able to use the https web until you update your clock to be at least roughly correct.
- szundi 5y ago
  2012 like the last impacted batch is too old for OTA updates, isn't it?
  - nexuist 5y ago
    There are cars rolling off the factory line today that still take firmware updates over USB. Tesla is the only manufacturer that has embraced OTA updates for all of its models.
- twblalock 5y ago
  I don't think most of the affected cars have OTA updates or network connectivity of any kind.
barbegal 5y ago
> our Engineering Team have informed us that you will experience issue from Jan 2022 thru August 2022 and then it will auto-correct So the issue persists for 8 months then corrects itself. The only thing I can think is that the software doesn't properly work with the 10 bit rollover of the GPS week number (which happens roughly every twenty years). Now we would expect to see this bug in 2019 when the week number went from 1023 to 0. Some clever programmer probably changed the epoch so that with a car sold in say 2010 that it handles the time correctly from 2004 up to 2029. So why the bug in 32 weeks of 2022? Well maybe some other clever programmer back in 2002 wrote some tests to check the handling with dates in 2002. Now with the 2010 update those tests fail as they say 2022 instead of 2002. Finally some naïve programmer writes a workaround to fix those failing tests so that if the week number matches the week number used in the tests it subtracts 1024 weeks such that the tests pass. After all 2022 looks like a long way ahead back in 2010!
oh_sigh 5y ago
The problem is that they are even displaying the year. What a pointless piece of information.
- dqv 5y ago
  Well, you can leave out the year, but then you will be asking why it says today is Sunday and not Thursday.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Easily solved by not showing the week day :)
- lostmsu 5y ago
  I disagree. See this car as an example: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RfHR31OQTxk/TidBUkUuVkI/AAAAAAAABTk/LSIqSz_Eq3Y/s1600/back.png http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RfHR31OQTxk/TidBUkUuVkI/AAAAAAAABT...
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
And noone bat an eye. Programming is not an engineering discipline.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Do you think the mechanical side of a car is any better? Stuff routinely fails in weird "unforeseen" ways.
  - Arainach 5y ago
    "Wait 8 months and your car will start working again" has never been an acceptable answer for the mechanical side. It's not an acceptable answer for the digital side either, but that doesn't stop teams from trying to use it.
    - whateveracct 5y ago
      If it was actually a severe issue, I'm sure there are ways to deploy a fix. But the cost-benefit is clearly not there for this kind of meh issue. Bad PR is the main downside here.
      - superfrank 5y ago
        Exactly. The person you're responding to is mixing business and engineering decisions. There's always a fix, it might just be expensive. If this was a critical safety issue that had the ability to kill tens of thousands of people and cost the company billions of dollars, teams would work night and day to rewrite the code and they would bring the cars in and replace the navigation systems with ones that work. But this isn't a critical issue... Someone has done a cost benefit analysis and decided it's cheaper to just tell people to wait until August and make whole any customer who throws a fit about it. There's "no solution" because no solution is cheaper than the actual solution to the problem. <insert Fight Club quote here>
    - nexuist 5y ago
      > "Wait 8 months and your car will start working again" has never been an acceptable answer for the mechanical side The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders? Yeah, all software would be great if we could just tell our clients to fuck off whenever they bring in some garbage for us to fix! You want a fixed car? Go buy a new one lol! But we don't have that privilege, so this is what happens.
999900000999 5y ago
I really really really want in entertainment systems that I can easily swap in and out of a car, I want to be able to just mount a tablet, and then take that tablet with me when I go inside . The first reason is I obviously don't want someone to break into my car and rip out the electronics, second I want to upgrade every year. When I owned a Kia, I looked up that a replacement OEM infotainment system was something absurd like $5,000. How absurd, the cars only 16k new !
- andromeduck 5y ago
  Remember stereo theft?
causality0 5y ago
This is why I'm glad the only clock in my car is a black and white LCD that just counts to 12:00 over and over.
nightfly 5y ago
> We have escalated the NAVI Clock Issue to our Engineering Team and they have informed us that you will experience issue from Jan 2022 thru August 2022 and then it will auto-correct. Please be assured that we will continue to monitor this and will advise you if a fix is available before that time. It's amazing that it will start working again in August/September
henvic 5y ago
2038 is coming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
mkhpalm 5y ago
On a similar note: I've owned a 2007 Acura and lived in a state that doesn't observe DST. I'd have to to remember to turn DST on or off whenever I drove out of state. Same problem on my father's 2016 Honda as well. On the flip side, my Uconnect vehicles both handle going between states with and without DST just fine.
garaetjjte 5y ago
I'm a bit of shocked of how many dead pixels are on the display shown on the photo in the article.
- Lindby 5y ago
  How can you tell dead pixels apart from the stars off the night sky background image?

94 points by hinoki 5y ago

lttlrck 5y ago

I wonder if this could affect GPS satellite lock performance by causing incorrect almanac lookups...

boznz 5y ago
GPS sends time in its data stream so doesnt need external clock, most car clocks use this now I believe though my nissan leaf is exactly 4 hours out to the microsecond so some programmers ignore timezones :-)
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  But that is relative to the GPS epoch. I have a handheld Garmin that needed a firmware update after the last GPS week rollover because it didn't deal with the epoch change and displayed a date 20 years in the past. Anything built before 2019 could be prone to this.
- szundi 5y ago
  I am pretty sure they forgot to account for the probably 9600 baud serial rate the GPS transmits the exact time so it is sure in the milliseconds range if not half a second
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Not sure which year LEAF and which timezone, but I think you can override it on mine. (And the LEAF doesn’t do a lot of timezone crossing trips.) https://youtu.be/DHdlsS4jSo8&t=66 https://youtu.be/DHdlsS4jSo8&t=66

gnabgib 5y ago

A dupe of three other posts, including this very link ([1] a day ago - looks like maybe Jalopnik changed the title?): - YK22 bug causing Honda clocks to stop working[0] (140pts, 83 comments) - Honda Clocks Are Stuck 20 Years in the Past and This Might Be Why[1] (2 pts, 0 comments) - Honda's Y2022 Time Issues[2] (3pts, 1 comment) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29818572 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811369 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782874

floatingatoll 5y ago
Contacting the mods with this feedback would let them clear up all the dupes and merge conversations, using the footer contact link. Otherwise they might not see this.

xwdv 5y ago

Oh to go back to 2002, when there was still hope for the future. Personally I’d just leave it that way and remind myself of what I was doing on those dates.

laurent92 5y ago
*2001. Shrek and 3 other stunning movies had gone out. The world had been in mostly peace for long. That was before they hammered the terrorist risk on TV, mandated water bottle checks at the airports. Everything went down after that.

throwawayboise 5y ago

This is why I don't want electronic gizmos (nav systems a particularly good example) in my car. You have a phone that can do GPS and navigation, and probably do it better than the software in your car. The phone is much more easily replaced than the built-in navigation unit, should it stop working for any reason. The phone works the same way in all cars. The phone gets software updates easily and seamlessly. Quit putting unecessary technology in cars. It will only cause expensive problems in 5 or 10 years, because it will be utterly obsolete by then and unfixable. The car should not care what the date is. It should not care what time it is. The clock in my car says 12:00. Why? Because I have never bothered to set it. I don't care, and I have the correct time, accurate to the millisecond, on my phone. The technology in the car should only be about running the engine and transmission and other essential systems in the car.

klyrs 5y ago
My first pickup didn't have a clock, so I got a cheap one and stuck it to the dash with a magnet. Had to adjust it for DST, which was fine, as it had usually gone off a few minutes at that point. That was an okay level of electronic gadgetry for me. What we've got today is bonkers.
- pwr-electronics 5y ago
  Anybody remember the analog clock in the Chrysler Sebring?
- brirec 5y ago
  Daylight savings time? Hah, just rotate the damn thing 30°
alkonaut 5y ago
While I agree this would be the best way to design things, is it really a net positive for the first owner of each car who might just have it for 1-3 years? That’s the primary target for the design after all. And with more and more cars being leased, what the second and third owner will feel about outdated or flaky tech is becoming even less relevant to the person who is the customer.

javajosh 5y ago

One interesting effect this will have is to disable OTA updates, if it happens with https. The client (the car) will see the server cert as invalid because its not valid yet. If your laptop dies, and it's on motherboard battery dies, you won't be able to use the https web until you update your clock to be at least roughly correct.

szundi 5y ago
2012 like the last impacted batch is too old for OTA updates, isn't it?
- nexuist 5y ago
  There are cars rolling off the factory line today that still take firmware updates over USB. Tesla is the only manufacturer that has embraced OTA updates for all of its models.
twblalock 5y ago
I don't think most of the affected cars have OTA updates or network connectivity of any kind.

barbegal 5y ago

> our Engineering Team have informed us that you will experience issue from Jan 2022 thru August 2022 and then it will auto-correct So the issue persists for 8 months then corrects itself. The only thing I can think is that the software doesn't properly work with the 10 bit rollover of the GPS week number (which happens roughly every twenty years). Now we would expect to see this bug in 2019 when the week number went from 1023 to 0. Some clever programmer probably changed the epoch so that with a car sold in say 2010 that it handles the time correctly from 2004 up to 2029. So why the bug in 32 weeks of 2022? Well maybe some other clever programmer back in 2002 wrote some tests to check the handling with dates in 2002. Now with the 2010 update those tests fail as they say 2022 instead of 2002. Finally some naïve programmer writes a workaround to fix those failing tests so that if the week number matches the week number used in the tests it subtracts 1024 weeks such that the tests pass. After all 2022 looks like a long way ahead back in 2010!

oh_sigh 5y ago

The problem is that they are even displaying the year. What a pointless piece of information.

dqv 5y ago
Well, you can leave out the year, but then you will be asking why it says today is Sunday and not Thursday.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Easily solved by not showing the week day :)
lostmsu 5y ago
I disagree. See this car as an example: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RfHR31OQTxk/TidBUkUuVkI/AAAAAAAABTk/LSIqSz_Eq3Y/s1600/back.png http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RfHR31OQTxk/TidBUkUuVkI/AAAAAAAABT...

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

And noone bat an eye. Programming is not an engineering discipline.

R0b0t1 5y ago
Do you think the mechanical side of a car is any better? Stuff routinely fails in weird "unforeseen" ways.
- Arainach 5y ago
  "Wait 8 months and your car will start working again" has never been an acceptable answer for the mechanical side. It's not an acceptable answer for the digital side either, but that doesn't stop teams from trying to use it.
  - whateveracct 5y ago
    If it was actually a severe issue, I'm sure there are ways to deploy a fix. But the cost-benefit is clearly not there for this kind of meh issue. Bad PR is the main downside here.
    - superfrank 5y ago
      Exactly. The person you're responding to is mixing business and engineering decisions. There's always a fix, it might just be expensive. If this was a critical safety issue that had the ability to kill tens of thousands of people and cost the company billions of dollars, teams would work night and day to rewrite the code and they would bring the cars in and replace the navigation systems with ones that work. But this isn't a critical issue... Someone has done a cost benefit analysis and decided it's cheaper to just tell people to wait until August and make whole any customer who throws a fit about it. There's "no solution" because no solution is cheaper than the actual solution to the problem. <insert Fight Club quote here>
  - nexuist 5y ago
    > "Wait 8 months and your car will start working again" has never been an acceptable answer for the mechanical side The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders? Yeah, all software would be great if we could just tell our clients to fuck off whenever they bring in some garbage for us to fix! You want a fixed car? Go buy a new one lol! But we don't have that privilege, so this is what happens.

999900000999 5y ago

I really really really want in entertainment systems that I can easily swap in and out of a car, I want to be able to just mount a tablet, and then take that tablet with me when I go inside . The first reason is I obviously don't want someone to break into my car and rip out the electronics, second I want to upgrade every year. When I owned a Kia, I looked up that a replacement OEM infotainment system was something absurd like $5,000. How absurd, the cars only 16k new !

andromeduck 5y ago
Remember stereo theft?

causality0 5y ago

This is why I'm glad the only clock in my car is a black and white LCD that just counts to 12:00 over and over.

nightfly 5y ago

> We have escalated the NAVI Clock Issue to our Engineering Team and they have informed us that you will experience issue from Jan 2022 thru August 2022 and then it will auto-correct. Please be assured that we will continue to monitor this and will advise you if a fix is available before that time. It's amazing that it will start working again in August/September

henvic 5y ago

2038 is coming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

mkhpalm 5y ago

On a similar note: I've owned a 2007 Acura and lived in a state that doesn't observe DST. I'd have to to remember to turn DST on or off whenever I drove out of state. Same problem on my father's 2016 Honda as well. On the flip side, my Uconnect vehicles both handle going between states with and without DST just fine.

garaetjjte 5y ago

I'm a bit of shocked of how many dead pixels are on the display shown on the photo in the article.

Lindby 5y ago
How can you tell dead pixels apart from the stars off the night sky background image?