Clocks in Honda cars getting stuck at a certain time in 2002
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
- 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)
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!
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.
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
More like 8-12 years.
[0] https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/electric/how-long-do-electric-...
How many people chose to replace batteries inside their phones instead of getting a new phone?
What viable alternative do you suggest that exists?
Average time a new vehicle is kept is 8.4 years: https://www.iseecars.com/how-long-people-keep-cars-study
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah buddy? I have it on my wrist with an Eco Drive watch :)
I’ll handle the rest.
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.
Tesla is strictly inferior to many manufacturers such as Mazda who manage to give you all of that without relying on a touchscreen.
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 !
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.
It's amazing that it will start working again in August/September
On the flip side, my Uconnect vehicles both handle going between states with and without DST just fine.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29832525.
*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.
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.
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.
Where else do they suck?
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?
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?
No
> Do you really need AC?
No
> Do you really need sound insulation?
No
> Do you even need heat?
No
> 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?
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.