Hacker News Reader

Comment by somehnguy | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

> the cellular contract GM had for vehicle connectivity expired

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.

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.

https://www.onstar.com/support/faq/2g-network-sunset

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.

Based on memory of the timing and my vehicle year I think it's extremely likely this is what happened.

I'll gladly take setting the clock twice a year in exchange for the OnStar spyware ceasing to function.

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.

In 2019 there was a GPS week number rollover, another possible cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover

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.

Someone below pointed out the 2G sunset: https://www.onstar.com/support/faq/2g-network-sunset

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!

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com