2006 radio clock can’t be set

Interesting. I hadn't spent the time to research it yet but I expected as much, that at least MDXes of this generation and possibly other cars with the same nav system subcontractor would be affected.

The software that runs the system is on the nav DVD. Fixing this will likely require a new DVD. But it probably can't be fully explained without having a deep understanding of the nav system code and lookup tables.

Some aspects of the system are loaded on an OS DVD before the nav DVD is loaded. For my 2006 I did not have to preload an OS DVD before my 2020 nav DVD update.

It will be interesting if Honda actually comes through and provides a fix DVD at a small cost, versus either orphaning the system or charging the typical $100-150 DVD cost.

As of 2021 they had intended to orphan all nav system updates through the 2006 MDX. Some prior model years they orphaned years ago.

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Even Microsoft had a Y2K22 bug come up in their Outlook Cloud infrastructure, and they are a technology company with massive resources, so this isn't unique to Honda.

What I find most inexcusable is that we had just gone through Y2K, and knew what a problematic issue it was. A reasonable lifespan for vehicles easily exceeds 20 years, and storage of data is plentiful now (which historically expensive limited data storage was the cause of the Y2K bug). There was no reason not to write the code to in a way that would prevent any problem in 100-999 years.

It was just laziness and the "I won't be here when it becomes a problem" syndrome. But after it was done, it doesn't surprise me at all that Honda had no idea, and it was completely forgotten about 20 years ago. Very few companies document and prepare for expected problems that will resurface in 20 years.

Here is another article that identifes the likely problem. Someone went into the GPS diagnostic menu and found the date said May 2002. That is 1024 weeks in the past. This is also exactly 10 bits of numbers. It's also the way the GPS standard counts weeks starting from January 6, 1980.

The last rollover for GPS was in April 2019. The next is in 2038. So if it's the root problem, it still isn't clear why the Honda interface is displaying Jan 2002. It is probably some kind of numeric overflow problem.

Also for whatever reason even though Honda chose the same week scheme and limit as GPS, they didn't start their epoch on the same date as GPS did. So much stupid here.

They claim that this problem will self resolve in August 2022. If that happens I think it will also indicate that it was an overflow of the week counter, and in August the code will read the week counter as having rolled over fully zeroed out again.