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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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).
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)
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
they sell SKUs with no nav and no remote display for the nav. and they still need a clock.
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).
The big advantage is when accelerating. It's a nice quality of life feature. I typically switch to AWD when I move to winter climates. It's not as safe though, _especially_ if you have little enough training that you're relying on intuition to make that conclusion that AWD must be safer.
Is this dumb in winter, or dumb generally? I was taught to do this.
Now if you happen to be really good at driving, it's even safer because you can recover from a slide faster, again because of the increased traction during acceleration. Once your tires have traction again the additional traction moves you out of the slide faster.
The only problem here is people going too fast which can happen with any car.
In Michigan, like clockwork the AWD SUV’s would go flying off the elevated freeways into the deep snow at 50mph in every storm.
Personally, I'm comfortable driving anything but a RWD pick-up truck with no payload in snow and ice, try to drive at an appropriate speed for weather conditions, and rarely have trouble.
Misconceptions like this are why people are lulled into a false sense of security.
Do you own an AWD vehicle? They outperform 4x4s on everything except rock.
The "weakest links in the chain" when it comes to snow driving are largely centered around putting motive power to the ground without breaking traction. Think like steep hills, crossing the piled up slush between lanes, getting moving from a stop, etc. Except inn rare circumstances, your "this feels decent speed" is attainable regardless of AWD so it's not like you go any faster.
If the previous hill was too close to the next, you've got a quandry.
Nobody has the slightest clue how to deal with ice.
I'm from the Northeast but happened to be in Seattle on a day when it snowed. Every road was a hill and every hill was full of sideways cars.
Seattle isn’t that bad in wet pavement, unless it hasn’t rained. Which only happens about four to six times a year but that’s still enough that people should pay attention.
I’ve seen two cars on their roofs on an uphill in Seattle. How the fuck do you even DO that?
And don’t get me started on the theft lane.
Past two winters I was in RWD too. Just exercise some throttle control and get proper tires.
(Snow I’m willing to acknowledge is trickier, but modern cars in wet roads shouldn’t be hampering any of you…)
These days I aim to replace my tires at about 50% wear and no later than 60%. New tires make you corner so well it almost feels like a slightly newer car.
Since this is not happening, we can infer that insurance companies believe the benefit to their risk profile is less than the cost to administer the program and issue discounts deep enough for customers to participate.
It seems counterintuitive that stopping distance is not that big a deal, but it must be true.
Certainly it would be cheaper for them to run a program where you take a photo of your tires every few months, vs. the program they all have where you plug a surveillance device into your car. So the true benefit from good tires must be far less than driving style.
The sting of losing two tires due to a mistake is a lot less than that of losing all four when three are still good. It’s one extra versus three extra tires.
They’re all a little different, but I’ve not once found myself in a situation where I noticed AWD really making a difference. Maybe in parking lots? Certainly not enough that I would ever make a purchase decision based on drivetrain.
Feels like everything I’ve driven has been modern enough to have great stability control, and that’s all that matters.
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.
maybe I'll get a outback instead next time, they are kind of the same to me though the hybrid on the forester I have def makes it a more pleasant less CVT'y ride...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the tip on fatsort, it does save me a bit of trouble.
Another drawback of the death of DIN aftermarket stereos is that they stopped innovating there, I last updated my stereo in ~2015 and not found a more advanced replacement since. So never got one to accept a >256GB drive, though trivial elsewhere today. Raspberry Pi level tech.
My car stereo, in theory, cannot accept a drive over 32gb in size. In practice, I have a 128gb drive in there. I used a third party utility to format it as a FAT32 filesystem to be 128gb in size. The car stereo only claimed a 32gb limit only because that’s the largest fat32 filesystem Windows will make from the GUI.
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.
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
Even so, I have a button in the battery settings which can start the preconditioning whenever I want to. It's been a fantastic car, but I am envious of your DCFC capabilities. But not of your ICCU. :-)
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'.
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.
Funny to see how even in 2014 things were diverging so greatly
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.
I'll gladly take setting the clock twice a year in exchange for the OnStar spyware ceasing to function.
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!
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.
P.S. Found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FYR72mr0E
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*
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.)
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-...
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.
Or simply have a dedicated clock in there and turn off the display on all of the appliances.
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
https://github.com/ea/bosch_headunit_root
If anyone feels like using that access to throw some tokens at various systems.
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!
"Hold on babe, the christmas lights have to finish installing a firmware update", is a real sentence that actual people are saying in 2026.
Sounds great but there are some hilarious examples where the fuzzing of the name (best guess, I figure in case the name is slightly wrongly typed - mp3 era) is far too loose. "Bayonne" is showing a picture of Beyoncé and "Steve Lacy" is showing a bald white guy. It has become one of those things in life where I get a bit excited to see who a brand new artist will get as the matched image, reminds me of childhood, honestly.
I figure with the game decompilation news I'm seeing the reverse engineering of the firmware (or at least the DB format) would not be a significant challenge, and it would mix in some fun other tasks like compiling (and signing?) a new DB with tons of images and names, and then figuring out how to avoid bricking a vehicles computer while doing so. But... like I assume many others here... I've got enough projects on the go right now so maybe in a few months.
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.
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...
I'll probably post a follow up if I get anywhere with this!
How can I find the time to go down rabbitholes such as this in my own life (and not get bored and get distracted in the process)?
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)
(edit to be clear: not all places use 1 hour offsets)
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.
The Web is a universal platform very capable in 2026.
> When I bought the car, the previous owner asked me whether I wanted a "navigation map SD card" with it.
Why would they even ask?
> Since the maps on the SD card were apparently very out of date and didn't function properly, I decided I didn't need it and the previous owner tossed it.
WTF? My 2016 Mazda has an out-of-date SD card too. I removed it because it slightly speeds up how fast the system boots without it, but it's in the glove box for any future owner when I sell the car. I just can't understand tossing it. It's not like it takes up any room.
(My Mazda also sets its time via GPS, but I can get to the timezone offset and DST checkbox regardless of the presence of the SD card.)
Edit: available for $30 these days. Apparently the card gets locked to the VIN on first use.
https://www.amazon.com/Navigation-KR9D66EZ1B-Select-Mazda-20...
I still drive a car from 2011, but my headlights / fog lights / any other front lights that are not my emergency lights stopped working, super expensive to get it all reviewed by Toyota here in Florida (apparently Florida is the worst for these sort of things - already $250 down and they couldn't figure it out), and so left it with a relative who is a mechanic, and electrical problems are up his alley (I believe he studied this in particular too).
Both fuse boxes (driver side) and engine bay side are messed up (not enough voltage going into the engine bay one, after I replaced the driver side one with one found at a junkyard by a buddy for $80 compared to $1200 that Toyota bills for the part mind you).
Anyway, so I'm borrowing my moms much newer 2024 Toyota RAV4 (or whatever year), lots of neat things, but there's this really annoying feature I had no idea new cars have where the engine shuts off when you're stopped, I knew people did this to save on gas, but I always thought it was silly and a waste of time, and it felt really rare, until I realized why I hear engines start back up at red lights more frequently nowadays, if I have to floor it I dont want to wait, so I push the button depending on if I'm in frequent stop and go traffic.
My coworker drives a much newer (2026) SUV from VW... Apparently the button became like 4 screens in the touch-screen tablet the car comes with, just to force people to stop hitting the physical button, and you can't just disable it permanently.
Well.. unless you jailbreak the software, which he will likely do once his warranty runs out. Why do we force these ridiculous things on cars? It's no wonder something as ridiculous as Brabus exists... Since they're not a manufacturer they can remove all these things, and sell you a "performance" car, but its really mostly just the car restored to its normal state as it would have been released 10 years ago? or whatever.
Why do we have to go through so many hoops for things we "own" and why is it that the reliability of cars has gone backwards? Don't get me started on Nissans newer engines.
Who can make me a normal car that isn't a slug on Florida highways or turning off every time I hit the breaks? (Being dramatic, but its exhausting how much nonsense goes into cars now) Please, you'll have a customer for life.
Also - when it comes to getting parts for Japanese cars, I thoroughly recommend rockauto.com, a US colleague put me onto it, and I use it from NZ because a) it has parts I struggle to find in NZ and b) even with the international shipping, parts are cheaper from there than locally.
> Well.. unless you jailbreak the software
Maybe this is locked on VW, but given that Audi and Porsche share a lot of the same software, methodology, etc., I feel "decently confident" that this can be disabled via an OBD scanner (obdEleven, for one, was built around the VAG brands).
I was able to disable it in my fiancée's entry trim 2017 A4 in about 20 seconds, and no manual "long codes".
It's not an option needed on my RS 5, but I've done a few other things via the tool, and the dealership didn't have an issue with it - when I brought my car in for some other issue (water ingress into a sensor/light), all they said was "Are you okay with the tech resetting any changes you've made if they need to for diagnostics?" (they didn't), and "Do you accept that there will be a diagnostic fee if the tech doing a reset of changes resolves your problem?"
Also, it now sometimes thinks my headlights are on and dims the display for a few seconds randomly which I guess isn't too bad after 15+ years. It doesn't seem to have any other problems except for worn out suspension and leaking exhaust.
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.
https://www.josephecombs.com/2026/09/08/coding-an-audi-batte...
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.