Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time
blog.nns.ee
blog.nns.ee
That must be one of the most iconic HN sentences ever.
If I ask my Claude (Opus 5.5) about how some Claude feature works, its natural inclination is to start reversing its own binary with strings instead of looking at Anthropic's documentation. It will, entirely unprompted, try to figure out how its environment works in Claude Code cloud and reverse–reverse-engineer Anthropic's Rust binaries to figure out why things happen the way they do, and what it needs to do about it.
However Claude and I did write code all the day long and a long job went down from 2+ hours to 30 minutes, same final output.
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!
Now, that they are in their 80s, having their clock set correct the entire year is terribly confusing to them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the previous hill was too close to the next, you've got a quandry.
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.
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.
I can see AWD allowing better engine-braking than FWD in some low-traction situations, but I don't think it would make much difference if trying to stop quickly. I think for modern cars, using engine braking would almost never provide quicker stopping, or more controlled stopping than brakes alone.
Regarding three pedals, you could downshift in an two-pedal automatic too couldn't you?
Are you saying that when when cornering at a constant speed, if a slide starts, the vehicle will rotate differently to a front-wheel-drive or rear-wheel-drive vehicle?
Or that when cornering, if you accelerate enough to spin the wheels, then an AWD vehicle will rotate around the middle?
For the 1st case, when you slide because there is not enough traction available for that speed, on that surface (e.g. driving too fast, or encountering ice), I wouldn't have thought the axles that power is delivered will make a large difference to how the vehicle rotates. Either the front loses traction, or the rear, or both. Wouldn't the weight distribution be more relevant than the driven axles?
For the acceleration example, again I think of either the front losing traction, the rear, or both. Front-wheel-drive would lead to the front losing traction, RWD the rear losing traction, and AWD ... I'm not sure. With some systems, it's plausible that neither the front or rear would spin until both lost traction simultaneously. I tend to think a 4 wheel slide would be similar to understeer in a front-wheel drive car, but perhaps a little more like sliding sideways out of the lane, rather than plowing straight ahead. This doesn't seem to me like rotating around the middle, so I feel like I'm missing something.
To be honest, the idea of AWD making the vehicle rotate around the middle (and rear-wheel-drive making the vehicle rotate around the...front?) seems like the persistent and widespread idea of AWD allowing a vehicle to corner faster at a constant speed. My thought is that it's a misconception, but I'm happy to be wrong!
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.
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.
I love driving up to Tahoe in a blizzard. I'll happily be doing 25 mph going uphill as it's roughly the safe speed for the conditions. I'll constantly be passed by AWD SUVs going 40-50, while going uphill.
Then we summit Donnor Pass. I'm still cruising along at 20-25. You can see the fear in these SUV drivers' eyes as they start sliding down with their "all season" tires. Invariably, they'll then slow to 5mph with their flashers on in the right lane and I can cruise down t 25mph and pass all the cars that flashed at me or gave me a look going up.
It is baffling to me that CA loves to enforce chain control but exempts AWD without actual winter tires from it. It's almost never the 2wd drive cars with chains that pile up, it's always the AWD SUVs. If you're going to enfore chains, at least do it usefully and only exempt actual winter tires. Then it would be useful, not just a massive slow down.
In a very long winded way, couldn't agree with you more!
I'm struggling to come up with a reason why the faster acceleration itself would be a safety issue (maybe trying to get out of the way of a truck that can't stop or something? it seems niche), so let's instead look at the increased control during acceleration (from less force on the steering tires).
When does that matter from a safety perspective?
In a straight line, it doesn't. Let off the gas and try again. No matter what you do, you're going to go in your intended direction of travel or stay put.
So that brings us to accelerating around a curve. Don't do that on public roads in normal cars in winter conditions. The risk profile is terrible. If you misjudge it just once you're in a ditch.
Even your slide example seems strange. Could you describe the conditions of a slide where applying power helps you gain traction faster than not applying power? The only thing immediately coming to mind is reducing the yaw force in certain oversteer scenarios with a counter-steer and a bit of power, but in that case whether AWD helps or not is extremely situational and depends on the exact build of the car.
But aside from all that, I think there is a scenario where applying power can help gain traction faster. In a FWD, if someone has gone into a corner too fast, or encounters a more slippery surface than expected, and the vehicle starts to understeer straight-ahead, I have heard of the idea of accelerating to get the vehicle to continue around the corner. The turned front wheels, while still not gripping properly, spin and pull the front in the direction of the corner more than would happen from just braking or maintaining speed. I'm probably not explaining that well, and it doesn't sound safer than just braking! I am fairly certain I remember seeing something which I think is related, in the Owner's Manual for some old front-wheel drive Japanese sports car. Something like an old Honda Prelude or a Toyota Celica. They played up the safety of FWD "pulling you through" the corner. None of this makes the case for AWD though. I can only see the advantage I wrote above about accelerating earlier/harder, and I think you already addressed that.
Is this dumb in winter, or dumb generally? I was taught to do this.
- Smaller turning circle because the front wheels can turn further without complicated engineering.
- More traction when accelerating on a wet surface, due to weight transfer backwards. (1)
- Usually better weight distribution due to engine layout.
There are other downsides in addition to what you mentioned:
- Any scenario where you will definitely lose traction, then rear-wheel drive becomes harder to control. There was an old Top Gear episode with a steep grassy hill, and drivers of the RWD cars could not get up it. (2)
- The transmission tunnel required for RWD
- Reduced fuel economy due to having to turn the power 90 degrees (assuming the engine is mounted in the front). (3)
1) This one may sound like unnecessary acceleration, and it probably often is, but there are situations where it can arise, especially if you prefer older cars. There is one particular hill I used to encounter frequently, where you are trying to turn onto a main road, so you want to accelerate fairly briskly to avoid waiting for a huge gap in traffic. On economy tires, in the wet, you can easily reach the limits of FWD. I would see many cars time a gap, and then have to rapidly decide to give up on it when their acceleration was much slower than they expected due to wheel spin. I think there may have been bus lane paint on the road too, but I'm not certain. Obviously AWD is even better than RWD for traction, but at that point, that is usually only when requiring rapid acceleration.
2) I suppose with perfect/computer assisted driving, RWD would out-perform FWD.
3) I once searched, and had a very hard time quantifying this, but it is almost certainly a few percent, and perhaps more. There are also weight differences involved because of the long drive-shaft, but I think the effect is larger than that. It is very hard to find an apples-to-apples comparison.
If you want to maximize speed through a curve plus straightaway, you should pick a path through that curve minimizing curvature at the end so that you are able to accelerate out the end of the curve. As a reasonably good approximation for normal driving, your tires have the same traction regardless of the direction of the load being placed on them. That gives you a budget of net force you're able to apply. If you're near the sideways force limit going around a curve and add acceleration (or braking -- always do your braking before you enter the turn, or gradually reduce it as the curvature increases), the wheels with those extra forces will break traction. The solution is to apply that acceleration at a point of milder curvature.
Taking that idea back down to safe driving speeds, the same idea exists when considering crossing a margin of error rather than the ultimate slip threshold. All else equal, accelerating as you come out of a curve, if you've chosen your path through the curve correctly (really important to get that right; there's a curve back near my hometown which has taken out half a dozen people over the years because its curvature increases at the end and they haven't planned for it), will minimize your time through the curve and the following straightaway at your chosen safety threshold.
However, all of that is predicated on minimizing time assuming perfect knowledge and perfect driving. The acceleration itself is actively harmful from a safety perspective. In FWD, the wheels losing traction are the ones connected to your steering wheel. That's not ideal. In RWD you're prone to oversteer and spinning out of control. In AWD you can get either or both of those failure modes. Moreover, navigating typical curves, you're so far from slippage that the technique of accelerating at the end just means you'll go from the speed limit to something greater. For winter curves, the margin of traction uncertainty is so great that you can't gain much from accelerating out the end anyway (and have a pretty bad risk profile -- accelerate on a straightaway and slip a bit and with a bit of training you're basically fine, slip off a curve and you have a really bad rest of your short life potentially).
Safely accelerating in a curve is a learned skill though, and most people don't care that much about driving. Unless it looks like they're interested in more depth, my advice is always to brake before the curve and accelerate afterward. It's safe, fast enough, and easy to remember.
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?
I've never been "stuck in traffic", so the problem has never arisen.
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
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
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'.
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.
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.
In practice, nobody in their right mind would design a device's firmware that poorly, unless they were deliberately trying to force users to stay within the bounds of the device's QA test procedures. I don't have any examples of this. There are devices that will misbehave with such a card, however: for example, the Nintendo 3DS will happily use an oversize FAT32 card, but the Data Management screen will take way longer to load for some reason.
Also fun fact: the first time you plug a correctly formatted SDXC into a Nintendo Switch, it "downloads an update" and restarts. Presumably Nintendo wanted to save money on exFAT licensing fees so Nintendo is only paying for each unit that actually uses the exFAT library?
2- The slowdown usually comes from scanning the FAT to count the free space, with the PSP being notorious for this
Another related point is the varying support for the "semi-official" 64K cluster size, which gives a curious effect on the 3DS: in GBA mode (officially only used for 10 games only distributed as compensation to those who bought the original model at full launch price), a strip of "junk" (coming from the virtualized GBA's VRAM, IIRC it's just wraparound) will be shown at the bottom of the screen...
I seriously doubt compute is an issue for a music player in the last 20-30 years (and more).
I'm finally putting 2 years of undergraduate German courses to use... Yay?
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.
I'll gladly take setting the clock twice a year in exchange for the OnStar spyware ceasing to function.
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!
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.
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.
P.S. Found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FYR72mr0E
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.
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.)
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
However, climatism has devolved into its own, irrational, new religion. Followers of it believe, for example, that the apocalypse is nigh unless they drink from paper straws, while the very rich can fly in private jets so long as they pay a tithe to the priests of climatology.
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-...
https://github.com/ea/bosch_headunit_root
If anyone feels like using that access to throw some tokens at various systems.
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.
"Hold on babe, the christmas lights have to finish installing a firmware update", is a real sentence that actual people are saying in 2026.
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...
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.
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'll probably post a follow up if I get anywhere with this!
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.
A cheap RTC clock chip would have costed a few cents, but Car manufacturers depend on GNSS timing for insurance purposes.
I don't get this attitude, I see it in many people to doubt by default when you should bookmark it mentally and think "what's the reason for this?"
And as usual, someone got bit ;]
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.
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)?
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?"
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.
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.
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.