Owners of older Honda and Acura vehicles entered their cars early this month and were shocked to find that they had traveled 20 years into the past.
As reported by automotive website Jalopnik, the clocks and calendars in Honda and Acura models as old as 2004 and as new as 2012 are now stuck in the year 2002 due to what sounds like a bug in their navigation systems. The issue has since been confirmed by Honda, which shared a statement with the publication with little confidence as to when, or even if, the issue might be fixed.
“American Honda is aware of a potential concern related to the clock display on certain older Acura and Honda models equipped with navigation systems,” Honda’s statement reads. “We are currently investigating this issue to determine possible countermeasures and have no additional details to share at this time.”
My @Honda 2007 CR-V clock now useless in 2022; resets to 2:00 MST on 1/1/2002 after every startup. 32-bit signed integer overflow of yymmddHHMM? Would unsigned int fix it? This is time-critical. 😉 Thousands of us need a software update! pic.twitter.com/BSGCaxnMmx
— Sumner Hushing (@_______shushing) January 4, 2022
Owners have also reached out to Honda and received different responses, but none of them seem to include any indication of when Honda might have a solution.
“We have escalated the NAVI Clock Issue to our Engineering Team and they have informed us that you will experience issue from Jan 2022 thru August 2022 and then it will auto-correct,” a response received by the CR-V Owners Club forum reads. “Please be assured that we will continue to monitor this and will advise you if a fix is available before that time.”
Vehicles in the United Kingdom are also affected, as confirmed by the following response received by another user on the CR-V Owners Club forum:
We have just received some more information regarding this and were advised that the Honda technical department are currently working on this.
Once there is a fix for this issue Honda authorized dealers will be made aware of it and will be able to assist with this at that point.
A service bulletin will be issued to our dealers from Honda UK on how to fix this.As such it would be best to check with your local Honda authorized dealer for any updates as they would have the latest information for this and will be able to assist once the fix is released.
They can also contact the Honda technical department for additional assistance with this if necessary.
Research derived from more curious Honda and Acura owners who dove into their vehicles’ navigation systems suggest that the issue might stem from these systems not being programmed properly in-line with GPS epoch, as explained by Jalopnik. Trying to set the date and time manually is pointless, as the clock reportedly resets to January 1, 2002, one the vehicle is started.
Source: Jalopnik