Entering 2022, many owners of Acura – Honda’s high-end car brand – suddenly simultaneously reported that the clock and calendar on their vehicles were suddenly stuck back to 2002.
Reports said that when they got into their car on January 1, they found the clock on the navigation system had frozen at a certain time. That was January 1, 2002, 20 years ago.
Time is like going back to 20 years ago for Acura car owners.
The problem is widespread, affecting a large number of cars in the Acura and Honda product lines with navigation systems, models from 2004 to 2012. And the problem isn’t limited to the US, owners. Car owners in Canada and even in the UK have all reported similar problems. Some other Honda owners such as CRV, Accord also reported the same error.
“We are currently investigating this to determine possible countermeasures and have no additional details to share at this time.” Honda representative in the US announced.
However, on the CR-V Owners Club forum, the company representative said: “the problem will happen from January 2022 to August 2022 and then it will automatically fix.”
Meanwhile, UK car owners received the answer that: “Once a fix for this issue is available, authorized Honda dealers will be notified of the issue and may be able to assist with the fix at that time.”
The vehicle owner cannot correct this error manually.
In fact, it is not difficult to explain this “time warping” problem from a technical perspective. The problem lies in the GPS date and time setting system, related to how leap years are calculated.
Many GPS devices only work over a period of 1,024 weeks and will no longer show the correct date after this number of weeks has passed, no matter where that destination falls. And easy to trace back, 1,024 weeks ago was 2002.
A user on the Drive Accord forum went into the diagnostics menu of his Accord navigation system on January 2 and discovered that the GPS date was set to May 19, 2002, which is exactly 1,024 weeks ago. .
Some owners were able to turn off automatic updates and set the date and time manually, but then they found that this was useless. The clock will automatically reset to the incorrect time each time the vehicle is started.
Not everything on high-end cars is high-end.
This is not the first time Honda Acura owners have encountered this problem. On August 16, 2017, Acura models with navigation systems from 1999 to 2004 reset the clock to 0:00 and the calendar back to January 1, 1998. In all cases, the rollback period was up to 1024 weeks.
Honda did not explain the cause at the time, but the manufacturer’s solution was then to send the updated DVDs to fix the error. And it might be the same this time, but it’s eight months from now, when the annual map update is released. That’s why the manufacturer gives this “fix” timeline.
But the thing is, according to Honda’s website, the 2021 DVD is the last update that will be released for this system. So it’s unlikely that there will be an updated DVD in 2022.
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