Honda and Acura car owners have started the new year by discovering that the clocks on their cars have gone back 20 years instead of going to the year 2022, this is because of the famous Y2K22 bug. Many reports of problems with the digital watch have surfaced on the Internet, on the Honda and Acura forums. According to Jalopnik, the problem only affects older vehicles. It is still unclear which years are affected, but based on user reports, it appears the problem covers cars sold in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2014. And the problem does not seem to be a minor one, given that Honda has pointed out that a solution could even take months.
The Y2K22 bug reveals itself in the same way regardless of year or model: the navigator date has been reset to 2002 and the displayed time is incorrect by several hours. Some customers report that the radio (separate from the GPS navigator) also shows an inaccurate time and that even if they manually adjust the time and date, the system does not seem to save the changes.
Honda car, the Y2K22 bug affects the GPS system
According to Jalopnik, the problem could be caused by a glitch in the code. A Drive Accord forum user named Jacalar noticed after entering his navigation system’s diagnostic menu that the date on his GPS was set to May 19, 2002, which is 1,024 weeks ago.
The Verge quoted the Honda spokesman Chris Naughton who spied “Honda USA is aware of a potential concern with the clock display on some older Acura and Honda models equipped with navigation systems. We are currently investigating this issue to determine possible countermeasures and have no further details to share at this time ”.
Also according to Jalopnik, a GPS determines the date and time using a starting point, often known as an epoch. This data is provided to GPS devices in the form of a binary ten-digit string representing the current week, starting at zero and ending at 1.023, the number should return to zero at week 1.024. A rollover of the GPS week number occurs every 19.7 years since the initial week zero was established on January 6, 1980, with the first occurring in August 1999 and the most recent on 6 April 2019.
The site speculates that Honda navigation software may have failed to account for a rollover on New Year’s Day, possibly due to a coding error, causing navigation devices to malfunction. On New Years Eve between 2016 and 2017, Honda and Acura’s watches had mysteriously frozen at 0:00 at the very beginning of the year which coincides with the 40th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.