This is really bad from an optics perspective if you’re Honda and Acura. The Register is reporting that owners of older Honda and Acura cars are seeing the dates on the clocks being set to 2002 after New Years day:
With the onset of 2022, Acura and Honda customers began reporting on various online forums that their dashboard display clocks reset to January 1, 2002 when they restarted their vehicles.
A reader wrote in to alert The Register to the problem.
“Since New Year’s Day my Honda CR-V has been unable to tell the time,” the reader said. “When I start the car it just says it is 01:00 and though the time then continues from there, restarting the car resets back to 01:00 again.”
“After a few moments searching I discovered it is a known issue with some Honda models with built-in sat nav. It seems that at midnight they switched from 2021 to 2002! Apparently there is no fix. :(“
You read that correctly. There is no fix. And I confirmed that when I took a quick look at Honda Canada’s Twitter feed:
And The Register had this to add:
Honda representatives, it’s claimed, have acknowledged the clock errors and suggested the bug will resolve itself in seven months, at the end of August.
“We have escalated the NAVI Clock Issue to our Engineering Team and they have informed us that you will experience issues from Jan 2022 thru August 2022 and then it will auto-correct,” a company representative supposedly said in a reply to online complaints. “Please be assured that we will continue to monitor this and will advise you if a fix is available before that time.”
This however is not a statement Honda is willing to officially acknowledge at the moment. A company representative declined to confirm (but did not deny) the above statement as an official response, saying it may have been something a customer service representative said.
Honda, we were told, has not yet issued a formal advisory to owners at this point – in other words there are legal implications that follow from official declarations. In a statement email to The Register, a Honda US spokesperson confirmed the company is investigating the issue but could not provide further detail about the cause of the error.
The optics of this suck for Honda and Acura because waiting until August when things will “auto-correct” itself isn’t a winning strategy. What is a winning strategy is to actually figure out what the bug is and fix it via a software update. Assuming that you can perform a software update on these cars. All I know is this, if I owned one of these cars, I’d be pretty mad. Both with the issue and the response from Honda and Acura. And that would make me much less likely to buy a product from Honda or Acura in the future.