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?
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.
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!
Had a Chevy that was extremely obnoxious about this. If it was playing over USB it absolutely would not allow it to stop. Hitting pause on the phone would have the car immediately hit play to restart it.
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)
Over here in South Africa we have a single time zone and no DST.
This contributed to me in my very early years of dabbling in software development being oblivious to time zone considerations and would do really bad things like make sure the web server was setup with the correct time zone so that the ASP Classic output would show the correct time.
As an Arizona resident, by 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
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 was a kid but I do know the clocks in my elementary, middle, and high school were accurate. Near end of day, we would impatiently stare at the clock waiting for the release bell. Being a public school, the clocks were bolted securely to the wall. Being little shits, students would probably steal them if they could, LOL. So how did they keep 100s of clocks on time? I asked and was told by the school maintenance that it was done through power.
> 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.
That wouldn't have worked.
Grid-tied synchronous clocks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_clock) were once ubiquitous and did derive their timekeeping stability from the grid frequency, but that is only suitable for keeping time once set. It works because electric grids are frequency-controlled and stabilized, where deviations from the reference frequency are corrected over long intervals.
In principle you could send power at 59 or 61Hz to adjust these clocks, but there are two problems:
1. The grid frequency isn't arbitrary, it's also directly coupled to the rotary inertia of every turbine that powers the grid. This is why power fluctuations cause frequency changes: temporary oversupply or undersupply causes these turbines to slow down or speed up respectively, using their inertia as power storage. Potentially screwing up every other piece of mechanical equipment tied to the grid for the sake of clock changes is... a poor optimization.
2. A one-Hertz difference isn't enough to change the clocks in a timely way. To change time by an hour you need to gain or lose 3600 * 60 = 216k cycles, but a 1Hz change gains or loses one cycle per second. It'd take about 2.5 days to complete a one-hour change via this mechanism.
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 remember in my elementary school the clocks were all synchronized to a system somewhere, presumably in the head office. The day after going back to school after a DST change the clocks would all be off by an hour and sometime in that morning they would all suddenly freeze, then fast forward or rewind an hour and then restart. In retrospect it is amusing that whomever was in charge of updating the clocks didn't do it when they first got in but waited until the school day had started.
I just use composition notebooks which are like $1-$5 depending on the quality, store, sales, etc. That's also what we used as a lab notebook in chemistry class when I was in high school, which follows a similar discipline, so to me it's fitting.
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!
Because OP refused to believe that he, a technically literate person, wouldn’t be able to find the correct settings page and assumed that the previous owner was just not the brightest bulb. Which, in my opinion, is reasonable, because a reasonable person wouldn’t expect infotainment systems settings being only available with maps SD card.
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 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.
(in NZ) I have a 2005 import from Japan with time set by GPS, but apparently no way of changing the time zone away from Japan. The navigation still thinks I'm in Japan too but randomly flying around at high speeds too - even the compass calibration is way off. I too would rather have a manual clock set.
I live in a region that changed time zones just 2 days ago and my brand new 6-month old car now as an incorrect rule set and presents the wrong time when synced with GPS.
It has no over-the-air update capability so it seems like this sync-with-GPS feature is now broken for me unless the manufacturer puts out an update to be done at the dealership.
> 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.
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.
It seems absurd to me that cars needs a cellular connection to automatically set time, meanwhile 10$ clocks can get the time correctly from the radio signal that are broadcasted. More insulting the fact that the car itself has an FM and also an AM tuner that are capable of receiving time signal and decoding them while the radio is not in use. And that modern cars that use digital radio (DAB) have a standard to get the time. Come on, car infotainment is so outdated...
My 2014 Mazda 3 has two buttons directly under the clock: “HH” and “mm”. To reset the clock during spring DST I have to press “HH” once. In fall I have to press it 23 times. The clock is so accurate I think I realistically only hit the “mm” button when the battery dies.
Funny to see how even in 2014 things were diverging so greatly
Your tech expectation may be way too modern, could be some terrestrial radio clock being phased out. Back then some AM/FM alarm clocks would sync time over low freq radio. For FM, RDS can do it too.
Probably the 2G network, with the 3G network to follow; I've had my electricity and gas meters replaced the other day because they used the 2G network still to communicate.
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!
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 without confirming any time.
My 4 year old Siemens oven is like this, as is the one (can’t remember the brand) in the previous house we rented for a short bit.
I wonder if it’s a kind of child safety thing. It’s possible on my current oven to enable a child lock by holding the clock button for 5 seconds, preventing the turning of the knobs from having any effect.
After a power failure the oven similarly will not react to the knobs being turned until the clock button is pressed, but a mere second or so is good enough.
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).
Yes, please. I don't want a clock on my microwave, or my oven. If I'm not interacting with it, it should produce zero light.
(Some people use oven features that involve knowing an absolute time, such as "turn on at this time". That seems to be the uncommon case, and meanwhile everyone has to deal with a clock that's rarely right.)
Many Jewish people use the feature while home. There are prohibitions on lighting fire on the sabbath, which has been interpreted more broadly as a prohibition on "turning stuff on". That's why you can set your oven to be on all day on Saturdays, for example, but they are usually home while it's happening. Similarly, some elevators are configured to stop on every floor on the way up and down on Saturdays.
Do "many" Jewish people do this? It sounds like something only religious nutters would do, wasting energy etc. (Doesn't the bible/torah say people should take care of the earth?)
I don't have any stakes or interest in a debate about the validity of religious beliefs or the prevalence of believers. Suffice it to say it is a practice that exists, and technology exists to facilitate it. My oven has a sabbath mode, so it's not something you necessarily need to go out of your way to have either.
Eh, if you only have a clock on only the microwave or oven then you lose access to the current time when you're cooking something or convert it over to timer mode. Having some redundancy isn't a bad thing in this instance.
Or simply have a dedicated clock in there and turn off the display on all of the appliances.
There should be two kinds of devices in my home: those allowed to connect to the Internet and keep their time up to date, and those that are not allowed to care what time it is. My microwave and my oven are in the latter category.
My microwave defaults to no clock after a power outage. I prefer it that way.
I used to have a range, then microwave, then toaster oven, then coffee maker, all with different times. I tried so hard to get them in sync, but it was just not possible. Plus, the coffee maker clock would drift over time. Since that point in my life the microwave, toaster oven, and coffee maker have been replaced and only the microwave has an optional clock.
Oddly enough, the newer appliances are all higher quality than the ones they replaced. I guess clocks are added to things to give them more perceived value.
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.
Almost all hardware companies don't understand or care about software at all. They see "software" as just another line item on the BOM, like a screw or a gasket. You source it from the cheapest supplier and then attach it to the product somewhere on the assembly line. The idea that software is the interface to the user, a signal of quality, part of product differentiation, an ecosystem in which future products live... none of this even remotely occurs to most hardware companies, especially car manufacturers.
I'm european, recently went to Korea. The nav system was almost perfect, only complaint I have is that it signalled every single speed bump (I can see them, thanks). There probably was a setting somewhere to tell it not to, but I didn't care enough to try to find it.
I took a similar approach to this article on the MMI software for my 2021 Q5.
partial emulation of the user space on a near equivalent kernel. java backend w/ angular frontend for the UI.
I was exploring ripping out this terrible workflow of not being able to change the user profile unless the car is started, which means I'm often stuck craming myself into my wife's seat preset to star the car lol.
the f/w uses dm-verity however so I'm not sure what flashing would entail. I'm also afraid to try.
I'd rather try to get privilege escalation on the car itself.
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.
I hate to laugh but the thought of you constantly rejecting the EULA for weeks on end, to finally give in one day, press accept and come to terms with it, only to get in the next time and have it pop up.
I can only imagine the amount of expletives that were said at that exact moment.
Me too, but it's more a love/hate relationship, because aside from this issue, and a few other annoyances, I love this car to bits. I've been driving for over 25 years, and this car is my favourite of all of them, including some newer and fancier electrics. I think it's the throttle response. Nissan just nailed it.
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.
> 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.
Legacy automakers are still using the "ship it and forget it" approach. If I want my 2023 Hyundai to have the same features as a 2025 (manual battery preconditioning, Google Maps directions on HUD, wireless Android Auto, etc), I need to root the head unit and install a bunch of vibe coded packages from randos on GitHub.
Although to be fair the vibecoded packages are probably higher quality than what Hyundai would've shipped.
Correct. Without root, the only way to heat the battery was if you use the cars built in nav to get directions to a fast charger
The problems being:
1. It didn't always recognize a destination as a fast charger
2. The built in nav is missing recently opened fast chargers
3. It only does this if you have the "preconditioning" setting enabled, but the car has a bug where if you use the (maybe only US version) Hyundai app to change the AC or DC charge limits it unchecks that setting.
> well designed modern cars have great info-tainment systems which get regular updates. My Tesla gets regular software updates
And tracks you everwhere you go, resulting in that data being available to hackers, marketers, and any sleazeball that wants to extort you by suing you.
Not unique to tesla, of course, but a property of all those 'well designed modern cars'.
> My Tesla gets regular software updates, has upgradable hardware, and won't be subject to these kinds of issues for decades.
Teslas from four years ago with Intel Atom processors and HW3 are already getting different and lesser updates than new Teslas, without any hardware upgrade plan in place.
A Tesla you buy right now is running HW4 which is inferior to current Cybercabs and HW5 has already been announced.
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.
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 can confirm. My Subaru 2023 forester's infotainment unit got replaced after 1.5 years due to it randomly crashing, and Carplay being unstable. On a long road trip, if you go to get gas, unplug your phone, and try to replug, just wouldn't connect. Even rebooting it. Nothing.
Also had my 2 front speakers stop working, which mean handsfree didn't work since phone calls are routed to front speakers only. Had to unplug the car battery, wait, and then the speakers worked.
Does anyone know why the mini display on the top, lags so much when changing music tracks or even Radio stations? It even sometimes doesn't update the radio station, and just mixes up data from 2 different stations. Replacing the infotainment unit didn't fix that or the lag. It's like purposely designed to be annoying.
indeed, i have had several subarus in my life from a bone stock 98 impreza RS through to the newest STI, and while i love them and will probably never buy another brand, the infotainment (and speakers) absolutely suck in all of them.
I will never buy Subaru because their infotainment garbage had a phantom power draw causing dead batteries left and right. Subaru refused to acknowledge it, so I spent $1k out of pocket to get it fixed to have a usable car.
Then I got a notice in the mail that Subaru agreed to replace and compensate people for the phantom power draw issue, except I wouldn’t be eligible because I couldn’t prove it since I already fixed my issue…even though Subaru knew all the VINs with the problem.
Who cares about carplay or androidauto when plain ass bluetooth does most everything you should be caring to do while operating your vehicle (which you should in fact be 100% focused on and not touching your damn phone or other screens or anything else.)
At least Android Auto supports integration with steering wheel buttons and center console display on many cars — I imagine CarPlay too — this means you can can keep your music and navigation (favorites and such) in one place.
I don't know, my Volvo supports both and I pretty much never bother using Android Auto, it's just such a faff. The built in interface(sensus) works great and the navigation is really good. Like, what do you use either of those two systems for?
Subaru's bluetooth implementation adds multiple seconds of delay, so your navigation instructions will be so late that you'd miss turns if you relied only on audio.
And their engines have struggled with gasket issues and oil consumption for a long time. People here love the AWD, though (my state enshrines AWD as a special class in law, artificially driving some demand).
Every manufacturer is struggling with oil consumption. They switched to too soft piston rings (to try and reduce friction), which causes more oil to end up in the combustion chamber.
My smart fortwo has two clocks, one on the radio, one in the driver’s dashboard;
Both go wrong over time, but both in two different directions, so the trick is to calculate the „average“ between both, and you end up with roughly the correct time.
My '97 Range Rover has an analogue clock with a quartz-controlled movement, and a button to set the time.
It gains anything up to an hour a day, particularly when my six-year-old is helping me clean the car and he pushes the button to watch the hands go round really fast.
It's fine. Time is time, we get there when we get there.
Who said anything about getting there faster? What if you are stuck in traffic and need to know if you will be on time or late? What if you see a fuel station and want to know if you have enough time to top up your tank? There are actually quite a few valid reasons that you need to know the time while travelling in a vehicle
If you’re stuck in traffic and you know you are goung to be late, you can phone ahead to let them know! This won’t be possible without knowing the current time, something which a reasonably accurate timepiece will inform you of
MOE: How long has that been in the soup, froghead?
CURLY: About uh--- [Looks at the three watches on his wrists.]
MOE: Hey! What’s the idea of the three watches?
CURLY: That’s the way I tell the time.
MOE: How do you tell the time?
CURLY: This one runs ten minutes slow every two hours. This runs twenty minutes fast every four hours. The one in the middle is broken and stopped at two o’clock.
MOE: Well, how do you tell the time?
CURLY: I take the ten minutes on this one and subtract it by the twenty minutes on that one. Then I divide it by the two in the middle.
MOE: Well, what time is it now?
[Curly grabs a clock from the inside of his jacket pocket.]
CURLY: Uh, ten minutes to four.
MOE: Hmm so it is!
[Moe grabs the clock from Curly and hits Curly on the head with it. The clock breaks.]
My first car, a Hyundai i10 I bought back in 2010, was very basic and had few features. It only had a simple radio with an FM/AM tuner and a CD player, no navigation system.
What surprised me most was that the clock adjusted itself automatically whenever daylight saving time started or ended.
There was no calendar or date setting, so I assume it must have received the time either via RDS (I don't know whether RDS supports this) or through a built-in DCF77 receiver.
All my subsequent cars had far more features, yet none of them had this one.
I also wonder why cars with built-in GPS navigation don't synchronize their clocks using the time from the GPS signal. Heck, the car could even determine your time zone from your GPS coordinates, so there'd be no need to configure anything manually.
Checking wikipedia, there is optional support for transmitting time and date in RDS, with an explicit usecase of updating the clock in cars.
> I also wonder why cars with built-in GPS navigation don't synchronize their clocks using the time from the GPS signal.
GPS doesn't transmit timezone information, nor does it transmit leap seconds. It transmits a very, very accurate UTC minus 18 seconds, but without access to the internet for timezone database updates or (until recently) leap seconds, it's a bit useless for updating a clock.
I'm not sure if you guys read the article, but OP's car does use GPS for the time, applying a user-settable offset (or in OP's unfortunate situation, a fixed offset).
It did in the 1999 Mercedes-Benz S-Class I purchased after 15 years of insane depreciation.
I thought I broke the clock with a DIY repair because it too couldn’t be manually set (aside from enabling a +30 min offset). Luckily it fixed itself after driving out of the garage when it found a GPS signal.
It's not just cars. Our house alarm had two clocks, one in the alarm itself, one in the display/control panel, and the two didn't talk to each other, not just for that but everything else as well, for example motion sensor names.
It's now in an e-cycling waste bin somewhere, replaced by an ESP32 I/O board and Alarmo in Home Assistant, at 1/20th the cost of the original PoS alarm.
> I don't understand how Subaru stays in the business. Just how.
Not sure if relevant, but Toyota has been buying parts of Subaru over the years, in 2020 ~ they have roughly 20% of Subaru. I'm not sure if its one of those "Microsoft investing into Apple" or "Intel investing into AMD" type of moments (which tbh, I wonder if Nvidia should be trying to invest in Intel or AMD since they're doing so freaking well its horrifying).
But then the base model with only one clock would need a clock that reads the can bus, and something putting the time on the CAN bus. Instead they just put a cheap ass standalone clock in the base model. And this clock trickles up to the models with more features.
IIRC at least one of the two other displays optionally take turn-by-turn remote guidances from the nav. So it can easily have a time data type added to that data, and they didn't. Though, all I researched for was for an outdated model of a car, and it seems one of three desynched clocks appear to be not be present anymore, and the desynced clock count must have gone down by one, unless they compensated for the loss by adding one.
The Legacy is famous for going fast (especially the twin turbo one, when the second turbo kicks in, it feels like when a plane applies take-off thrust), and having great handling, they're still frequently used in rally racing in my country for that reason.
They're also famous for being incredibly expensive to replace the spark plugs in due to the engine's boxer layout meaning you need to remove the engine to get at the plugs. But so much fun to drive.
Depends on which Legacy you mean. I had an '05 Legacy GT wagon (EJ255 STI engine with smaller turbo / intercooler). I did plugs myself maybe 4-5 times. It was always a pain, taking 2-3 hours, but I always did it with the engine in..
There's a certain sense in which competence in some domains repels competence in other domains. If Apple made a car the rear fender would come off just as you opened the drive side door.
If I had to hazard a guess as to the mechanism as it would turn up in an automotive company it is that automotive engineers have the SAE to set professional standards and that software "engineers" have nothing [1]... And if an organized group has a fight with a disorganized group the result is predictable.
[1] the ACM is a professional associate for computer science professors.
> There's a certain sense in which competence in some domains repels competence in other domains. If Apple made a car the rear fender would come off just as you opened the drive side door.
This feels like a logical fallacy but I'm having a terrible time disproving it at anything near large company scale
How old was the Tesla? I have a 2015 Tesla S and the problem with these older ones is that the CPU and RAM are just not enough to run a modern browser. In fact even the very out of date browser on mine is occasionally killed by the OS to reclaim resources.
231 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadHow 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)
This contributed to me in my very early years of dabbling in software development being oblivious to time zone considerations and would do really bad things like make sure the web server was setup with the correct time zone so that the ASP Classic output would show the correct time.
That wouldn't have worked.
Grid-tied synchronous clocks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_clock) were once ubiquitous and did derive their timekeeping stability from the grid frequency, but that is only suitable for keeping time once set. It works because electric grids are frequency-controlled and stabilized, where deviations from the reference frequency are corrected over long intervals.
In principle you could send power at 59 or 61Hz to adjust these clocks, but there are two problems:
1. The grid frequency isn't arbitrary, it's also directly coupled to the rotary inertia of every turbine that powers the grid. This is why power fluctuations cause frequency changes: temporary oversupply or undersupply causes these turbines to slow down or speed up respectively, using their inertia as power storage. Potentially screwing up every other piece of mechanical equipment tied to the grid for the sake of clock changes is... a poor optimization.
2. A one-Hertz difference isn't enough to change the clocks in a timely way. To change time by an hour you need to gain or lose 3600 * 60 = 216k cycles, but a 1Hz change gains or loses one cycle per second. It'd take about 2.5 days to complete a one-hour change via this mechanism.
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*
My takeaway: You should have just gotten the SD card and trusted the previous owner. Sometimes "simple users" do know. ^^
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.
In any case, glad it took you on the wild goose chase that led to the write up!
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.
It has no over-the-air update capability so it seems like this sync-with-GPS feature is now broken for me unless the manufacturer puts out an update to be done at the dealership.
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.
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://www.onstar.com/support/faq/2g-network-sunset
I'll gladly take setting the clock twice a year in exchange for the OnStar spyware ceasing to function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover
Funny to see how even in 2014 things were diverging so greatly
I didn't note down exactly when it stopped updating but this seems extremely likely based on my memory.
Interesting about the radio based time though!
I wonder if it’s a kind of child safety thing. It’s possible on my current oven to enable a child lock by holding the clock button for 5 seconds, preventing the turning of the knobs from having any effect.
After a power failure the oven similarly will not react to the knobs being turned until the clock button is pressed, but a mere second or so is good enough.
(Some people use oven features that involve knowing an absolute time, such as "turn on at this time". That seems to be the uncommon case, and meanwhile everyone has to deal with a clock that's rarely right.)
Indeed. "Please create fire hazard exactly at this hour when I'll not have time to do it personally".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath_mode and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator
Or simply have a dedicated clock in there and turn off the display on all of the appliances.
I used to have a range, then microwave, then toaster oven, then coffee maker, all with different times. I tried so hard to get them in sync, but it was just not possible. Plus, the coffee maker clock would drift over time. Since that point in my life the microwave, toaster oven, and coffee maker have been replaced and only the microwave has an optional clock.
Oddly enough, the newer appliances are all higher quality than the ones they replaced. I guess clocks are added to things to give them more perceived value.
This is a oddly important feature for Asian market rice cookers, which have a backup battery to retain the time and is not user-replaceable.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Zojirushi+Rice+Cooker+Model+NS-...
"Hold on babe, the christmas lights have to finish installing a firmware update", is a real sentence that actual people are saying in 2026.
https://phrack.org/issues/7/hackers-manifesto
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.
TDD was an invention of Chrysler.
partial emulation of the user space on a near equivalent kernel. java backend w/ angular frontend for the UI.
I was exploring ripping out this terrible workflow of not being able to change the user profile unless the car is started, which means I'm often stuck craming myself into my wife's seat preset to star the car lol.
the f/w uses dm-verity however so I'm not sure what flashing would entail. I'm also afraid to try.
I'd rather try to get privilege escalation on the car itself.
this was maybe a few hours one evening.
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.
I can only imagine the amount of expletives that were said at that exact moment.
God, I hate modern cars.
Me too, but it's more a love/hate relationship, because aside from this issue, and a few other annoyances, I love this car to bits. I've been driving for over 25 years, and this car is my favourite of all of them, including some newer and fancier electrics. I think it's the throttle response. Nissan just nailed it.
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.
Although to be fair the vibecoded packages are probably higher quality than what Hyundai would've shipped.
The problems being:
1. It didn't always recognize a destination as a fast charger
2. The built in nav is missing recently opened fast chargers
3. It only does this if you have the "preconditioning" setting enabled, but the car has a bug where if you use the (maybe only US version) Hyundai app to change the AC or DC charge limits it unchecks that setting.
4. I prefer Google Maps to the built in nav
And tracks you everwhere you go, resulting in that data being available to hackers, marketers, and any sleazeball that wants to extort you by suing you.
Not unique to tesla, of course, but a property of all those 'well designed modern cars'.
Teslas from four years ago with Intel Atom processors and HW3 are already getting different and lesser updates than new Teslas, without any hardware upgrade plan in place.
A Tesla you buy right now is running HW4 which is inferior to current Cybercabs and HW5 has already been announced.
Except for maybe the '58 Thunderbird, but that was rectified in '61 in my opinion.
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.
Does anyone know why the mini display on the top, lags so much when changing music tracks or even Radio stations? It even sometimes doesn't update the radio station, and just mixes up data from 2 different stations. Replacing the infotainment unit didn't fix that or the lag. It's like purposely designed to be annoying.
Then I got a notice in the mail that Subaru agreed to replace and compensate people for the phantom power draw issue, except I wouldn’t be eligible because I couldn’t prove it since I already fixed my issue…even though Subaru knew all the VINs with the problem.
https://www.subarubatterysettlement.com/
Plus I have had to replace bearings and control arms within 50k miles…which I expect better on even American brand cars much less Japanese.
Both go wrong over time, but both in two different directions, so the trick is to calculate the „average“ between both, and you end up with roughly the correct time.
It gains anything up to an hour a day, particularly when my six-year-old is helping me clean the car and he pushes the button to watch the hands go round really fast.
It's fine. Time is time, we get there when we get there.
I don't really care about what time I get where I'm going, I get there when I get there.
(theeheehee, I’ve got an old Land Cruiser, there's a bit of a friendly rivalry)
How long does it take you to fill your tank?
How does any of this need you to know the time right now?
The analog clock is accurate enough that I don't fuss with it other than to reset it for DST (I have no similar children).
My solution to the lack of synchronization: turn off the radio clock (which is fortunately an option).
CURLY: About uh--- [Looks at the three watches on his wrists.]
MOE: Hey! What’s the idea of the three watches?
CURLY: That’s the way I tell the time.
MOE: How do you tell the time?
CURLY: This one runs ten minutes slow every two hours. This runs twenty minutes fast every four hours. The one in the middle is broken and stopped at two o’clock.
MOE: Well, how do you tell the time?
CURLY: I take the ten minutes on this one and subtract it by the twenty minutes on that one. Then I divide it by the two in the middle.
MOE: Well, what time is it now?
[Curly grabs a clock from the inside of his jacket pocket.]
CURLY: Uh, ten minutes to four.
MOE: Hmm so it is!
[Moe grabs the clock from Curly and hits Curly on the head with it. The clock breaks.]
What surprised me most was that the clock adjusted itself automatically whenever daylight saving time started or ended.
There was no calendar or date setting, so I assume it must have received the time either via RDS (I don't know whether RDS supports this) or through a built-in DCF77 receiver.
All my subsequent cars had far more features, yet none of them had this one.
I also wonder why cars with built-in GPS navigation don't synchronize their clocks using the time from the GPS signal. Heck, the car could even determine your time zone from your GPS coordinates, so there'd be no need to configure anything manually.
Checking wikipedia, there is optional support for transmitting time and date in RDS, with an explicit usecase of updating the clock in cars.
> I also wonder why cars with built-in GPS navigation don't synchronize their clocks using the time from the GPS signal.
GPS doesn't transmit timezone information, nor does it transmit leap seconds. It transmits a very, very accurate UTC minus 18 seconds, but without access to the internet for timezone database updates or (until recently) leap seconds, it's a bit useless for updating a clock.
Then just let the user override TZ offsets or the like if they want.
I thought I broke the clock with a DIY repair because it too couldn’t be manually set (aside from enabling a +30 min offset). Luckily it fixed itself after driving out of the garage when it found a GPS signal.
It's now in an e-cycling waste bin somewhere, replaced by an ESP32 I/O board and Alarmo in Home Assistant, at 1/20th the cost of the original PoS alarm.
Not sure if relevant, but Toyota has been buying parts of Subaru over the years, in 2020 ~ they have roughly 20% of Subaru. I'm not sure if its one of those "Microsoft investing into Apple" or "Intel investing into AMD" type of moments (which tbh, I wonder if Nvidia should be trying to invest in Intel or AMD since they're doing so freaking well its horrifying).
they sell SKUs with no nav and no remote display for the nav. and they still need a clock.
Uh, presumably you understand that the core value proposition of a car does not hinge on timekeeping, right?
Subarus are famously long-lived and reliable. That's how they stay in business.
The Legacy is famous for going fast (especially the twin turbo one, when the second turbo kicks in, it feels like when a plane applies take-off thrust), and having great handling, they're still frequently used in rally racing in my country for that reason.
They're also famous for being incredibly expensive to replace the spark plugs in due to the engine's boxer layout meaning you need to remove the engine to get at the plugs. But so much fun to drive.
If I had to hazard a guess as to the mechanism as it would turn up in an automotive company it is that automotive engineers have the SAE to set professional standards and that software "engineers" have nothing [1]... And if an organized group has a fight with a disorganized group the result is predictable.
[1] the ACM is a professional associate for computer science professors.
This feels like a logical fallacy but I'm having a terrible time disproving it at anything near large company scale
The Web is a universal platform very capable in 2026.