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)
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> 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!
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.
Before CarPlay, I’d agree, but no more. Now the car infotainment is basically just a monitor and interface for my phone, and I couldn’t be happier. I can keep on upgrading my phone and the tech in my car can keep on improving.
I would suggest that any car you can obtain now will be obsolete in 10 years:
Either the car is electric, and the battery will wear out in 3-5 years
OR
The car takes gas, and you'll need to replace it (with an electric one, or carbon capture to offset its emissions) within 10 years to avoid catastrophic global warming
most electric cars have batteries warrantied for 8 years... there are EVs on the road with batteries older than that today (the Nissan Leaf was originally released 12 years 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.
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.
You're correct that the real customer for a "new" car is the person who will drive it/own it for max 3 years. When I worked at a dealership it was funny how the used car lot managers would just auction a car that was slightly older than 3 years or just had more miles than what an average person drives in a year for the age of the vehicle. I've seen how cars my dad used to sale when he started selling cars vs the cars he was selling when I was working with him had gone down in terms of long term quality. These infotainment things are just another nail in the coffin for cars that would otherwise be useable. I feel at some future time this pain point of automobiles will be become more universal in nature and hopefully give a second option.
Yup. I don't really get why car manufacturers try to "differentiate" themselves with navigation and apps of their own. I mostly just want it to be a dumb screen that my phone can display on.
I have a Honda from 2004 with a navigation system. The last map update was in 2014. And that update was done by replacing a DVD, of all things, in the trunk. Granted, smartphones weren't a thing back in 2004, so I can't blame car manufacturers for not foreseeing this sort of thing. But nowadays there's no excuse.
this same sentiment could have been applied to cell phones 20 years ago, right? “Why does my _phone_ need a screen? all it needs are 12 keys, a speaker, and a microphone. if i wanted to listen to music, id use my CD player. If I needed directions, id use my map.”
No, it wouldn't have applied because computers (and eventually cell phones) did those things better. For instance, using Map Quest was way more convenient than using a map. Using iTunes was way more convenient than a CD. If someone asked me, "Do you want iTunes on your phone?" The answer would have been yes. What does a car do better?
I would tend to favor an approach based on support commitment and distance from the core functionality. Cars are really two products, a pretty mature transportation system and (these days) a low-end entertainment/map system which a cheap Android vendor would be ashamed to ship. They’re used to supporting the mechanical side for ages but software support is much rockier.
If the vendors had to support full functionality on those appliance-like systems at no cost for the 10-20 year service life of the vehicle, it’d just be CarPlay/Android Auto because they know that’s not their strength. “Smart” refrigerators would similarly not be common if they couldn’t orphan it after a year or two.
The difference is you replace your phone every few years so it doesn't matter if parts become obsolete. A car has to work for at least a decade so any tech in it will become problematic later in its life.
> 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.
Oh yeah buddy? I have it on my wrist with an Eco Drive watch :)
My 05 car's (I bought it used much later) navigation is way better than Google Maps at keeping a GPS fix and giving clear directions. If I could get new map data for it I would use it instead of my phone.
Has Google Maps got worse in the past few years? It's been jumping streets, giving turn directions that change at the last minute or upset it into recalculating even after the turn for me. I thought it was much better a few years ago.
Main issue to me is that in my experience unless I put the phone on the dash (where it can easily overheat in summer unless I put it right on the aircon vent) the phone doesn't grab the gps satellite signal that easily.
Tesla is the only car manufacturer that does it right. I put my phone aside when I am in a Tesla, which is safer than when I am in my other car, where my hand is often on my phone.
I use the Tesla UI for navigation, music, answering calls. Usually there is no need to touch my phone while I am behind the wheel.
Every car manufacturer has done that for years. This scenario worked with bluetooth before Android Auto/Carplay was a thing, and AA/Carplay have been standard since shortly after the backup camera mandate brought screens to all new vehicles. I haven't had a rental car that required me to mount my phone to see navigation in 3+ years, and I haven't needed that in my personal (non-Tesla) vehicles for considerably longer.
Tesla is strictly inferior to many manufacturers such as Mazda who manage to give you all of that without relying on a touchscreen.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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
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 !
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.
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.
> 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
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.
I mean, who cares? Is it really that big of a deal that your date in the car is wrong? Just set the time back to what it should be and go on with your day. On the list of things to pay special attention to, I would much rather they prioritize safety and reliability.
The problem is we can't determine how code is reused or what the blast radius is.
*edit, you are responding with "who cares it is a clock" but the parent was talking about programming in general has a pervasive quality issue that shows that programming as we do it now is NOT engineering. Engineering is like 80% failure analysis. In no other discipline do we call the 20% the 90% (even the good in programming is barely passable). I'd love a filter that killed comments that aren't even talking about the same thing
Everything is interconnected, this is why safety critical systems go to such great lengths to cordon themselves off from the rest of the world. It is the unintentional critical system (everything at some point will be critical to someone). This is the equivalent of bondoing (putty used by backyard car body mechanics) over some important piece of technology.
Honda should at least send everyone a piece of tape that says remove on Date ZZZ so someone doesn't see the wrong time and do something unwise.
Until you turn it off, and resets itself to the incorrect date again, despite having the auto-update feature turned off. Which what these Hondas are doing. So every time you turn the ignition, the car “corrects” its clock to the wrong date.
While that's relatively worse, it's still a non-issue - just look at your phone if you want the current time. Nobody buys a car for its accurate timekeeping abilities.
I understand that customers are rightfully pissed off that they paid for a clock and no longer have a working clock, but the cost of said clock can't have been more than a few dollars so it still doesn't really matter.
In my head this would suck a lot more if the time was needed to enable more connectivity i.e. syncing calendars, remote start/unlock, etc. But if that was the case these systems would use NTP and avoid this whole mess entirely.
That’s like the slumlord approach to property maintenance. Screen door is broken? Building Code doesn’t require it, rip the thing off!
If you’re making a durable product that’s going to be around for a decade or two, make it right.
This attitude that we should just shrug and accept bad “engineering” is just dumb. Honda in particular didn’t move their entertainment systems to CarPlay/Android Auto until 2018 in some models - so internally they felt there was some strategic advantage to owning the car entertainment stack, and they still fucked it up.
> That’s like the slumlord approach to property maintenance. Screen door is broken? Building Code doesn’t require it, rip the thing off!
Screen doors have an essential use during storm conditions. They are important for physical safety. What safety benefits do you rely on a clock for?
> This attitude that we should just shrug and accept bad “engineering” is just dumb
Are you really going to tell the Honda owners in your life to go buy another car because of this clock issue? Otherwise, they're just accepting bad engineering!
> If you’re making a durable product that’s going to be around for a decade or two, make it right.
The cars still drive, and those that are properly maintained drive well, better than most other brands. I ask again, who the hell buys a car for its timekeeping abilities?
What is and isn't a big deal depends on the person. Maybe it's not for you. Maybe for someone else it is.
Anything not directly related to getting you from A to B can be a non-issue. Do you really need power windows? Do you really need AC? Do you really need sound insulation? Do you even need heat? I mean put on a jacket for christ's sake! Doesn't really matter. I guess if the whole car falls apart around you, it's a non issue as long as it gets you where you wanna go right?
> I guess if the whole car falls apart around you, it's a non issue as long as it gets you where you wanna go right?
Yes, this is how the majority of people approach used car sales. They're bought for the A to B capability, not for anything else.
Regardless, it is ridiculous to compare something as critical to human comfort as heating to an accurate clock. Who the hell needs the time to be right in their car? You can afford a car but not a $5 wristwatch?
>Is it really that big of a deal that your date in the car is wrong?
In 2002, probably not. In 2022, it could have much more of an impact if OTA updates are signed/decrypted/etc so that being able to generate a valid timestamp is required. It would totally suxors to get into your car to have it not start because of some stupid time related bug.
If your car has OTA updates it almost certainly gets its time from NTP and doesn't rely on manual time configuration or wacky code written a decade ago. Furthermore, absolutely no part of the ignition system should depend on cellular connectivity to start the engine. This is a non issue in 2022 models.
"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.
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.
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.
Personally, I drive around with the clock off by one hour for half the year. So as long as it is just the clock, then put me in the "I don't care" column.
> "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.
> The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders?
Which side is that? Insurance companies total out cars based on repair value exceeding the car’s value. If you want to fork out your own cash, nobody is going to refuse to fix it.
Right, that's how insurance companies do it because it makes sense. Have you ever heard of software systems routinely being "totaled"? And yet the expectation is for the software to be more reliable than the hardware despite years and years of tech debt.
A couple of years ago I was a tech lead on a project that “totaled” a 30 year old, perfectly functional application and migrated it to a big cloud solution.
Remember during COVID hearing about state unemployment systems running on obsolete mainframes? The dirty little secret there is that many states use a semi-standardized solution developed by IBM in the 80s (when the Feds spent a bunch of money to computerize unemployment insurance). The mainframe stuff is solid, the garbage bolted to it for IVR and web support 20 years ago is not. Because of that poor stewardship, the Federal government will probably spend billions over the next decade totalling those systems.
In both of your examples the existing projects were 30-40 years old...there are 2022 model cars getting totaled right now. It's not comparable. How many 40 year old cars do you see getting totaled?
