I had a luxury car from 2001 where the time could not be manually changed, only set to specific time zones. Of course, all the time zone rules had long diverged from its rule set, and it had to be changed four times a year to show the correct time.
This car also inexplicably forced you to manually choose a country, and then a time zone, despite having a GPS that already knew exactly where you were and already had chosen a previous time zone.
Carplay is nice but I would have settled for a non-luxury "clock set" button.
My 2019 Subaru has a red 7-segment LED clock below the touchscreen that has 2 physical buttons right there that change the hour and minute. It's a luxury I don't think I'll soon take for granted. I changed my battery recently (the original OEM battery finally got too tired), so I've set my clock twice in the last week, taking about 10 seconds and 1/2 second to accomplish respectively.
I can't wait until folks start pulling firmware out of head units, using AI to remove the crap, and putting it back in (akin to the TV revolution happening now)
> Carplay is nice but I would have settled for a non-luxury "clock set" button.
The clock set button is obviously the right solution, but this is actually why I demand CarPlay on any infotainment system in a car. I don't trust the manufacturers will keep it up to date, but I know my phone software will be updated/updateable/replaceable.
I've heard that some Subaru models have 3 clocks in the view of the driver, all on the CAN bus, one being the nav and another being a remote display for the nav, and one that's just there, of which none sync to each others. I've looked up how it happened, and discovered that to just to add insult to injury, at least one uses a uC that has RTC feature but no XTAL pin for 32.768kHz or one of any sane base 2 divisions and uses CPU clock of 15MHz or something for it, so it just drifts away.
I don't understand how Subaru stays in the business. Just how. It's a 4 digit time. Just broadcast it on CAN. Why not.
Also: a lot of these older, completely rectangular sat nav units actually follow what is colloqially known as "2DIN" standards. (cheap import Amazon)Aftermarket units are available and those can be swapped in with just a bit of work. That's what most people do when they have issues with the stock unit installed for their markets.
I've heard that the redesigned 2026 Outback has a much nicer interior. Lots of physical buttons and supposedly more stable infotainment software.
We've been pretty happy with our 2020 Outback so far (bought it just before the chip shortage). My only complaint is the stability of the infotainment software. The big portrait screen is actually quite nice, and with CarPlay I don't really care about the rest of UI and software. Except that the stupid thing just crashes all the time.
My car came with a cheap low-quality aftermarket combination car stereo and GPS. It would only play music from discs (no USB support), didn’t even support variable bitrate MP3s, and the GPS didn’t know the car’s location half the time.
I finally replaced the head unit with a plastic bracket and a standard old school in-dash stereo system. Much nicer setup.
It’s the cars which can’t have their head unit replaced with a simple stereo which worry me.
Denso head units for Toyotas can play MP3s, but the order of the files is when when they were copied to the SD drive. And you can't sort them any other way.
> It’s the cars which can’t have their head unit replaced with a simple stereo which worry me.
I agree. There's a lot of room for innovation, consumer choice, and competition that was previously guaranteed to be available in those one or two DIN units of space.
I haven't seen them present in any new car I've looked at in nearly ten years, but they were in every car I saw from the 50 years prior.
The counter argument to that is well designed modern cars have great info-tainment systems which get regular updates. My Tesla gets regular software updates, has upgradable hardware, and won't be subject to these kinds of issues for decades. Old cars encouraged exchanging and needed aftermarket parts because they didn't care or try, so the products were low-quality and often failed.
Yep. I didn't get into it in the article, but in reality the previous owner had already (accidentally) thrown the SD card in the trash, and was pretty much asking me if they want me for them to go digging through their trash to find it, and I told them not to worry about it.
I’m a little confused by the description of that interaction - why wouldn’t you take the SD card? Did they want to charge extra for it? Seems like even a 10 year old map (plus apparently other functionality) is something you’d want.
In any case, glad it took you on the wild goose chase that led to the write up!
I started using an "engineering notebook" for things like that. They are called other things in other lines of work or school (lab notebook, captain's log, ...). In an actual engineering notebook, you would use a sewn binding where you can't add or remove pages, the pages are numbered, you have an index in the front, entries are made in strictly chronological order, you'd have someone else witness and sign pages, draw a diagonal line across empty areas so you can't remove things, only cross things out with a single line, etc. All that because you might need to prove you invented something and other legal CYA reasons. Most of these requirements, you don't need for personal projects, though. But the things that are useful: keeping track of projects, what settings you've tried, what the results were, and so on. That way you don't have to reproduce it from scratch again later. "What settings did I need use to create the gerber files in kicad for manufacturing? How did I set ___ in the oscilloscope? What parts did I use to make that thing? What things did I wish I had checked last time? Where did I put those files?" You can also print things out and tape them in for reference.
The whole article is ludicrous. Why do you even need a car with an SD card slot in order to change the time? I reset all of my clocks this weekend and I don't even have a car.
> Why do you even need a car with an SD card slot in order to change the time?
The idea was that time came from GPS and you had a SD card with the update files for the maps and the current tzdata information. Timezones worldwide change ridiculously often and tying that together with the regular map updates makes sense.
Remember these things are from an era where smartphones were barely a thing and so was mobile phone connectivity in cars.
My 2014 vehicle stopped updating it's time automatically a few years ago. I think some cellular technology was phased out or perhaps the cellular contract GM had for vehicle connectivity expired.
Either way I just manually set the time twice a year now - I guess I'm thankful it still has that option.
When I was playing around with the radio in my girlfriends vehicle there was no option to set manually on the clock screen. Seems like a pretty shortsighted move to not allow that.
Older versions of the GM OnStar hardware used 2G cellular radios and carriers have decommissioned those networks. Adapters are available for some vehicles to use newer networks.
Considering that OnStar spies on you even if you don't subscribe to the service it's much better to just leave it broken, or even to actively disconnect it in newer vesicles.
A design rule for the display of any appliance with a clock: It must be possible to remove or hide the clock. I don’t need 10 devices to keep track of time for me.
Amen to that, I have a pair of built-in IKEAs, a microwave and convection oven, both with clocks when they're idle. But of course they're separate devices so they drift separately, which is obnoxious-looking. Happily the microwave did have a hidden setting to just display - - - - instead of the clock (though for no apparent reason the convection oven does not have that option, sigh).
Best they can do it blinking "12:00". Actually I encountered a kitchen appliance doing almost the opposite, after power off/on it didn't function before confirming any time.
As an Arizona resident, my recent Honda CRV's clock is off by an hour for half the year. Since usually the carplay display overrides the clock, it's no big deal, but it cracks me up that, despite being a professional programmer, I have yet to figure out how to set it correctly
The difficulty of setting a VCR's clock was a meme in the 1990s, and I can attest, justifiably so.
But at least it was possible. The clock setting being impossible without a proprietary and easily lost or destroyed SD card is pretty good, but we can do better. It could be just impossible to fix a wrong clock. Truly that would be the apotheosis of user unfriendly design.
My very technical and hands on father used to have us set the VCR clock, the controls were in a tiny compartment under a flap that required either small fingers, or very careful manipulation with the point of a protractor or something.
We went from difficult to manipulate buttons through to multi-function buttons where controls get hidden through some incomprehensible maze of menu options, to now where it sometimes feels lucky if you even get an option to manually set the time at all.
I'm reminded of an old commercial depicting kids taunting another kid by asking "What time is it at Billy's house? 12 O'Clock! 12 O'Clock! 12 O'Clock!" Might have been a Blockbuster commercial? I can't remember.
In 1974 when I was an medical intern at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Hospital, ALL the round analog wall clocks with hands in all 26 operating rooms were correct six months a year: there was NO provision for automatically advancing/moving them back when DST started/ended, nor did anyone do it manually.
I was told by our school electrician that long ago the clocks were adjusted by the power company. So around 2am DST they would either send power at 59Hz* to fall back or 61Hz* to spring forward. This was from the era when power grids were separate and analog. With newer national grid-tie it might not even be possible to do now.
I don’t know about that, but I was told by someone who worked at a power generation plant in the 1970s that they had a clock in the plant, that they would compare to the time broadcast on the radio frequency that carried the official time, and any time it diverged they would slightly adjust the frequency of the alternating current until it matched.
I worked in a Network Operations Center in the early 1990s, and there was a large projection display with four other monitors around it. Across the top were four round analog clocks, representing the time zones of the United States. I was one of four operators, all in our 20s.
So, Daylight Savings Time ended, and the early-morning operator had all the clocks set by the time I arrived, and the third operator came in, looked at them, and said "Great! So, did you take all four of them down and adjust the time individually?" "Yeah" "Didn't think about taking one off the end, adjusting it, and moving the others down the row?" *facepalm*
I never understood why car companies don't put more effort and resources into their MMI systems. Audi is a big offender. I've never seen a more thoughtfully designed car with an MMI interface that's more frustrating and buggy.
First is to bring the hardware and software design in-house. Except auto companies don't do well at software, they're used to letting OEM vendors write the engine control firmware etc etc. There's also the problem of the very long design cycles in car manufacturing. The new car platform being built today started its design four to five years ago. And that's when the hardware was locked down.
Volvo's platform was so old at launch that they threw in the towel and are now offering to upgrade your hardware if you complain hard enough.
The other choice is to shop it all out to a consulting firm or OEM vendor. Then you have cultural conflicts between the car maker and the programmers, communication overhead, choice of hardware conflicts, etc. And you know it's going to be shopped out to the cheapest bidder. And you're still at the mercy of launching with hardware that's way older than the smartphone in the driver's pocket.
Okay, this was gratifying to read, but ... can't you wedge CarPlay onto this thing? I'd want a victory lap with root doing at least something. Bad apple on car boot, there's lots of options here!
Yeah, I'll keep working on this to get it to do more stuff that's at least a little bit more useful, if not just a better UI that isn't 90% a useless "No maps found" screen. It's more complicated than it might initially seem because they actually have a kernel module blocking me from mounting non-signed partitions as exec, so I'll need to work around that.
I'll probably post a follow up if I get anywhere with this!
I was just wondering the same thing for a 2013 Honda Civic - has the screen's (the "head unit"?) firmware been fully dumped and reverse engineered?
How realistic would it be to run fully custom firmware there, and even communicate over usb - for example, if I had a pi running in the car, and it used the usb connection to show things on the built-in display?
I'd love to pwn the head unit in my 2014 Honda CR-V just so I can stop it from sending a "Play" command every time a phone associates with the Bluetooth and the audio system was left "on".
I also have a 2014 CR-V and I hate this too. But even moreso, I hate that there isn't a play/pause button at all. If I need to stop audio (e.g. pulling up to a drivethru, or starting a conversation), I gotta hit the phone. Heaven forbid I'm playing a CD, nothing I can do at that point.
Putting up a bug bounty of "ordering you a pizza" if anyone tackles this!
It's probably easier to just buy an aftermarket head unit. The only thing you'll need to confirm is that it supports features you care about e.g. steering wheel controls.
Pretty awesome write up to explain their journey in it all.
I suspect a bunch of car head units will face new problems in the spring when many Canadian provinces will no longer change their clocks. The units won't get updated DST rules.
my skoda simply has an entry in the menu: DST? which puts the clock one hour ahead or behind.
This posts remind me that when i will be in the market for a new van i will have to decide to get the trafic or the vivaro, solely on the head unit they use (renault ones have had incredibly stupid design decisions for years, on ergonomics alone, even more in firmware)
I wish someone would jailbreak the Nissan Leaf (MY2018) head unit. Every time I turn on the car, it shows a EULA asking if Nissan can please collect every detail of my car at all times and sell it to whoever asks.
Every. Time.
Even if I beat my head with hammers to think like a lawyer, I can't imagine how it would be necessary to ask constantly. Doesn't matter if I accept or decline, it still asks again.
8 inches or more of dashboard real estate to display "maps not found", "don't get distracted" warning, terms and conditions, and blinking "12:00". Having had rented a fair share of subcompact and compact cars in half dozen of countries, the car navigation was updated and working exactly only once.
> The system had DRM checks which rejected SD cards without the correct CID (a unique ID burned into the card) and files with signatures based on that specific CID, so I couldn't even copy the files to a blank SD card.
FWIW, there are grey market sites that will sell you an SD burned with a custom CID so you can clone an SD card with this kind of copy protection. It sounds like in this case maybe he could've gotten away with an empty maps card + menu definitions file.
This car also inexplicably forced you to manually choose a country, and then a time zone, despite having a GPS that already knew exactly where you were and already had chosen a previous time zone.
Carplay is nice but I would have settled for a non-luxury "clock set" button.
The Toyota one requires selling your driving data to insurance companies.to update the tzoffset based on location.
And so two clocks on the dashboard are off this week until I can remember where the dst adjustment is in the settings.
The clock set button is obviously the right solution, but this is actually why I demand CarPlay on any infotainment system in a car. I don't trust the manufacturers will keep it up to date, but I know my phone software will be updated/updateable/replaceable.
I don't understand how Subaru stays in the business. Just how. It's a 4 digit time. Just broadcast it on CAN. Why not.
Also: a lot of these older, completely rectangular sat nav units actually follow what is colloqially known as "2DIN" standards. (cheap import Amazon)Aftermarket units are available and those can be swapped in with just a bit of work. That's what most people do when they have issues with the stock unit installed for their markets.
We've been pretty happy with our 2020 Outback so far (bought it just before the chip shortage). My only complaint is the stability of the infotainment software. The big portrait screen is actually quite nice, and with CarPlay I don't really care about the rest of UI and software. Except that the stupid thing just crashes all the time.
I finally replaced the head unit with a plastic bracket and a standard old school in-dash stereo system. Much nicer setup.
It’s the cars which can’t have their head unit replaced with a simple stereo which worry me.
I agree. There's a lot of room for innovation, consumer choice, and competition that was previously guaranteed to be available in those one or two DIN units of space.
I haven't seen them present in any new car I've looked at in nearly ten years, but they were in every car I saw from the 50 years prior.
My takeaway: You should have just gotten the SD card and trusted the previous owner. Sometimes "simple users" do know. ^^
In any case, glad it took you on the wild goose chase that led to the write up!
Man this is too real for personal projects. I really need to write down my findings and thoughts more for future me.
I got a few of them, partially-used, from a canceled project and I really enjoyed using and carrying them.
It can be changed without the SD card in the car radio.
The idea was that time came from GPS and you had a SD card with the update files for the maps and the current tzdata information. Timezones worldwide change ridiculously often and tying that together with the regular map updates makes sense.
Remember these things are from an era where smartphones were barely a thing and so was mobile phone connectivity in cars.
Either way I just manually set the time twice a year now - I guess I'm thankful it still has that option.
When I was playing around with the radio in my girlfriends vehicle there was no option to set manually on the clock screen. Seems like a pretty shortsighted move to not allow that.
2022, I got a letter saying that my car's crash response SOS system will stop working because FCC is retiring the 3G spectrum it is using.
The car clock however is synced to the GPS instead.
If GM used NTP instead of GPS, then it makes sense that it stopped working arbitrarily around 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover
https://www.onstar.com/support/faq/2g-network-sunset
https://github.com/ea/bosch_headunit_root
If anyone feels like using that access to throw some tokens at various systems.
But at least it was possible. The clock setting being impossible without a proprietary and easily lost or destroyed SD card is pretty good, but we can do better. It could be just impossible to fix a wrong clock. Truly that would be the apotheosis of user unfriendly design.
We went from difficult to manipulate buttons through to multi-function buttons where controls get hidden through some incomprehensible maze of menu options, to now where it sometimes feels lucky if you even get an option to manually set the time at all.
So, Daylight Savings Time ended, and the early-morning operator had all the clocks set by the time I arrived, and the third operator came in, looked at them, and said "Great! So, did you take all four of them down and adjust the time individually?" "Yeah" "Didn't think about taking one off the end, adjusting it, and moving the others down the row?" *facepalm*
First is to bring the hardware and software design in-house. Except auto companies don't do well at software, they're used to letting OEM vendors write the engine control firmware etc etc. There's also the problem of the very long design cycles in car manufacturing. The new car platform being built today started its design four to five years ago. And that's when the hardware was locked down.
Volvo's platform was so old at launch that they threw in the towel and are now offering to upgrade your hardware if you complain hard enough.
The other choice is to shop it all out to a consulting firm or OEM vendor. Then you have cultural conflicts between the car maker and the programmers, communication overhead, choice of hardware conflicts, etc. And you know it's going to be shopped out to the cheapest bidder. And you're still at the mercy of launching with hardware that's way older than the smartphone in the driver's pocket.
My Model 3 is showing the wrong time and this requires an OS update to fix.
Suffice to say I would prefer an option to update it myself.
https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-fixes-bc-clock-bug-up...
"Hold on babe, the christmas lights have to finish installing a firmware update", is a real sentence that actual people are saying in 2026.
The Web is a universal platform very capable in 2026.
I'll probably post a follow up if I get anywhere with this!
How realistic would it be to run fully custom firmware there, and even communicate over usb - for example, if I had a pi running in the car, and it used the usb connection to show things on the built-in display?
Putting up a bug bounty of "ordering you a pizza" if anyone tackles this!
I suspect a bunch of car head units will face new problems in the spring when many Canadian provinces will no longer change their clocks. The units won't get updated DST rules.
my skoda simply has an entry in the menu: DST? which puts the clock one hour ahead or behind.
This posts remind me that when i will be in the market for a new van i will have to decide to get the trafic or the vivaro, solely on the head unit they use (renault ones have had incredibly stupid design decisions for years, on ergonomics alone, even more in firmware)
Every. Time.
Even if I beat my head with hammers to think like a lawyer, I can't imagine how it would be necessary to ask constantly. Doesn't matter if I accept or decline, it still asks again.
FWIW, there are grey market sites that will sell you an SD burned with a custom CID so you can clone an SD card with this kind of copy protection. It sounds like in this case maybe he could've gotten away with an empty maps card + menu definitions file.