Older Honda and Acura fashions hit by Y2K22 bug that resets clocks 20 years prior to now

House owners of older Honda and Acura fashions began up their vehicles on New 12 months’s Day, solely to seek out that their autos became time machines, in line with a report from Jalopnik. As an alternative of seamlessly transitioning to the 12 months 2022, vehicles’ clocks jumped 20 years again in time, and Honda says a repair might be months away.

As noticed by Jalopnik, stories of digital clock points have been popping up in Honda and Acura boards all around the web, with the problem solely affecting older autos with navigation. It’s not clear precisely which years are affected, however judging by consumer stories, it seems to be like the problem is prevalent in fashions launched from 2006 to 2014 within the US, Canada, and the UK.

Regardless of the 12 months or mannequin, the Y2K22 drawback manifests itself in the identical method — the date proven on the navigation system has been reverted to the 12 months 2002 and shows a time that’s a number of hours off. Some customers point out that the separate radio clock reveals an incorrect time as nicely, and even when they try to manually tweak the time and date, the system doesn’t seem to avoid wasting these adjustments.

“American Honda is conscious of a possible concern associated to the clock show on sure older Acura and Honda fashions geared up with navigation programs,” Honda spokesperson Chris Naughton informed The Verge. “We’re at present investigating this situation to find out potential countermeasures and haven’t any further particulars to share presently.”

A post on the CR-V Owners forum reveals a extra detailed response from each Honda within the US and the UK, with the US consultant noting that drivers might expertise the problem from January to August 2022 and that the system will “auto-correct” itself after this era. In the meantime, the UK spokesperson doesn’t present an actual timeline for the repair, however says that the “Honda technical division are at present engaged on this” and that “a service bulletin will probably be issued to our sellers from Honda UK on the right way to repair this.”

Based on Jalopnik, it’s potential that the problem might be brought on by a coding complication. Jacalar, a consumer on the Drive Accord forum, says that after diving into their navigation system’s diagnostic menu, they observed that the date on the GPS was set to Might nineteenth, 2002, which is 1,024 weeks in the past.

As defined by Jalopnik, a GPS makes use of a place to begin, in any other case often called an epoch, to find out the date and time. This data is distributed out to GPS gadgets in a string of 10 binary digits that represents the present week, which begins at zero and ends at 1,023 — the quantity is meant to return to zero on week 1,024. Ever for the reason that first week zero was set on January 6th, 1980, we experience a widescale GPS week number rollover every 19.7 years, with the primary occurring in August 1999, and the most recent on April 6th, 2019. It’s potential that Honda’s navigation software program didn’t account for a rollover to occur on New 12 months’s Day, probably attributable to a coding oversight, inflicting navigation programs to return to the start of the set calendar.

Apparently, this isn’t the primary time that the clocks in Hondas and Acuras have been affected by such a wierd drawback. On August sixteenth, 2017, a day that coincides with the fortieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s loss of life, the navigation systems on older Honda and Acura models failed fully and have been mysteriously caught on 0:00.