“Between 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software,” the Mazda statement said. “Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) has distributed service alerts advising dealers of the issue.”
The statement goes on to say that “dealers are currently experiencing parts delays due to shipping constraints” and that MNAO plans to “support impacted customers with replacement parts. These customers should contact their local Mazda dealer who can submit a goodwill request to the Mazda Warranty department on their behalf, order the parts, and schedule a free repair when the parts arrive.”
The Mazda representative did not reply to GeekWire’s follow-up questions about what actually malfunctioned in these vehicles and what parts would need to be replaced.
I've never seen a car stereo get a firmware update. Manufacturers seem to treat these as throwaway components. They're made once and forever sealed. Kind of crappy from the perspective of consumers and the environment.
I guess what I've heard about eg. Tesla is a counterexample.
Well hang on there! When the Camaro v5 first came out (2009) there was a pretty decent online community and what we discovered was dealers were completely unready to handle software updating and versioning. At the time, iPod/ iPhone/ general mp3 player software kept having breaking updates, so being able to obtain car stereo updates was important but impossible for large portions of the user base.
Which is how I wound up downloading 2 files from a person who apparently wrote the C# code for the radios and was saddened by the situation. The weirdest part was doing the upgrade: stick the files on two usb keys, turn the car on, stick the first key in the one port, remove it, open the driver side door as an indicator and then finish with the second key.
I've thought about that level of ... security every time I read about some malicious car hack.
That video made me laugh. It almost sounds like a parody of a reset procedure. Every time you expect it to be done, he comes back with another cycle of off for 2 seconds and on for 8 seconds.
It's also unfortunate that the dislike button stopped working on YouTube because I'd love to see how many people disliked that.
My Subaru has received at least two OTA firmware updates.
I think the reason most people don't think their cars get firmware updates is because a lot of cars hide the wifi connection dialogs and update download controls behind three or four layers of menus, so if you don't know to look for it (and aren't especially interested in poking around through the menus of your head-unit), it's off by default and you don't know it's there.
tesla doesn't have wonderful software updates though...
The fixes they make are controversial and many times make things worse especially wrt the infotainment system.
for example, the current system is just SO broken I don't know where to start.
Ok, the USB audio system. You can listen to audio off of a USB flash drive. This is great because they came out with an expensive high fidelity sound system a few years back, and allowing FLAC or ALAC supported high quality uncompressed audio.
Mazda owner here. When I go in for standard maintenance the firmware will get updated if there's something available.
What Mazda seems to discourage is owners bringing in their cars for the update only. They also can't really diagnose issues with the Connect hardware (they didn't build it) so doing a complete unit swap was their only established procedure for a system problem. They eventually added more diagnosis when all of the people hacking their units were bricking things and then asking for a free replacement.
I worked at a place that did headunit software for like 15m. My understaning, most of the headunit software updates happen over cellular and aren't covered under the customers billing, the company eats those costs so they like those updates to be as small and as infrequent as possible.
Tesla maybe gets around this by using wifi when it's in the garage? Or perhaps the contracts on the tesla says that customers bare the cost of firmware updates that happen outside the service center setting.
> Tesla maybe gets around this by using wifi when it's in the garage? Or perhaps the contracts on the tesla says that customers bare the cost of firmware updates that happen outside the service center setting.
Tesla uses Wi-Fi when possible, but for urgent updates they will push them over cellular at their own expense.
Also, they somewhat have users paying for this by having the monthly $9.99 "premium connectivity" feature package. Though, it isn't required for the cellular connection to function for basic maps.
Jeep Cherokee does so periodically, but Mopar is relatively well known for having a high quality infotainment system. This may be generally true for any infotainment systems running Android Auto / Apple CarPlay because they need to keep up with the features there, which almost necessitates having a developer team which will almost necessitate putting them to use sometimes
Can't or won't? Is it really impossible for them to develop a process to do a firmware update at the dealer? Even if that involves removing the radio... How do they program the radios at the factory?
My Kia's infotainment system got a firmware update, but it was not OTA. I actually had to pay to order an SD card with the update - but it was well worth it as it added CarPlay support.
This is really not true at all anymore. Mazda definitely does update their infotainment system. I actually upgraded my wife's 3 year old Mazda with CarPlay.
My Land Rover got an over-the-air update to add support for Amazon Alexa just the other day, completely out of the blue. It's not just luxury or tech cars that do this kind of thing these days.
Well, they're undoubtedly marketed differently, but IMHO it's a double-bluff.
Range Rover markets directly to upper-middle-class suburbanites, and show off the leather seats, fancy touchscreens and alloy wheels of shiny, clean cars.
Land Rover markets 'adventure', shows cars fording rivers and crossing deserts, and offers optional winch, expedition roof rack and ladder. But they still offer leather seats, fancy touchscreens and alloy wheels; and mostly sell to upper-middle-class suburbanites.
To me they seem like extremely similar products, predominantly targeting the same demographic, just with different marketing.
my focus RS had an infotainment upgrade. it even dropped a file back on the USB stick which i then sent back to ford and it registered that the unit had been upgraded.
It doesn’t even have to be an intern. You could set up a pirate radio station with a DAB/HD Radio transmitter on a frequently-listened station at an overpass and see what happens.
Apparently a normal firmware update isn't possible for anyone who already got hit by this, because it gets stuck in a reboot loop which prevents the firmware from being updated.
Also, nav is broken, and presumably emergency broadcast features are hosed as well. I wonder about backup cameras, and various driver assist things.
If a Model 3 had an analogous bug, then everything from the windshield washers to the climate control and rear view mirrors would be borked (I'd guess phone-based unlock would be too, at a minimum.)
Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into the radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.
Of course, what matters is how integrated all this stuff is in a Mazda. That, I don't know.
> Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into the radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.
Priuses can display powertrain data on the screen (such as which engines are operating, whether regen is happening, etc.) but I have never seen anything in the screen on any Prius that actually sends control data to the powertrain.
> If a Model 3 had an analogous bug, then everything from the windshield washers to the climate control and rear view mirrors would be borked (I'd guess phone-based unlock would be too, at a minimum.)
Actually it's possible to phone-unlock and drive a Model 3 with the screen completely turned off or broken. I've done it.
Well I used to be able to control the ABS on individual wheels with VAG cars (Audi, Bentley, Skoda & VW) in the mid 00's.
I could make a VAG car hand brake turn going into a corner all from a computer remotely, just by switching on the ABS braking on the rear wheel on the opposite side to a turn. I could control the throttle remotely as well.
Why are people shocked at the way these global corporations are treating security and privacy?
Advanced data services provide broadcasters with the ability to transmit information that may be unrelated to MPS, SIS or SPS. These services can carry any form and content that can be expressed as a data file or a data stream, including audio services. Examples of such services include (i) visual effects associated with MPS, SIS, or SPS services; (ii) multimedia presentations of stock, news, weather, and entertainment programming including audio, text and images; (iii) broadcast updates to in-vehicle systems; (iv) local storage of content for time shifting and later replay; (v) targeted advertising; (vi) traffic updates and information for use with navigation systems; and (vii) subscription or free-but-limited-access services using conditional access.
I don't know the technical details of how it's encoded, but digital radio stations can embed metadata in their signal that the car radio can display. That includes text, like the station name, and also images, like a logo, that's usually shown next to the station name. I believe it's part of HD Radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio.
In newer cars with video displays and HD Radio capability, the screen can show a small image next to the song information. It's typically album cover art for the song that is playing, but a lot of stations just put their station logo up and keep it there.
Satellite radio had this capability very early, and HD Radio seems to want to keep up with that.
The data itself is sent on a sideband data channel that rides along with the traditional FM channel. Lots of links to read up starting here: https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/HD_Radio_(FM)
What's interesting is that this traffic map is also loaded on Mazda cars, but shown in a different application. Somehow the system searches for a HDRadio signal in the background to update this map from an independent receiver.
I've had AM radio on for long periods and then load this app, and the traffic map is up to date. I've also driven to a different city and the map is now showing the new city.
If you asked drivers "would you like a brand icon shown on your screen for the radio station, the trade-off is a couple bucks more expensive car and more opportunity for bugs to crash your radio" -- who would say yes? Does anyone actually want this "HD Radio" technology, did anyone ask for it?
Who are the car manufacturers (and radio standards setters for that matter) working for?
"Would you like a car that updates its entire control panel, unannounced, with a software upgrade and will hide familiar buttons on you when you need them the most?"
Yes, my last car I specifically looked for HD Radio support. The metadata is nice to have, but the audio quality is genuinely much better. Especially on AM, where a lot of sports broadcasts still are, depending on the market.
And its where the stations hide their good content. it's no spotify of course, but a way more diverse offering on many stations hd2 and hd3 signals, still without ads on several as well.
I believe moving to digital also allows stations to broadcast more channels. For instance, KUOW, the source of this bug, has KUOW-2 and KUOW-3 only accessible via HD Radio that broadcast things like the BBC news feed and classical music.
Of course, maybe you'd like to have that option without being exposed to logos.
Yes, I want HD Radio. In Los Angeles, KROQ's secondary HD channel plays KROQ as it existed in the 1980's, including some old jingles and such. I think it's such a cool idea.
I'm surprised you haven't seen this before. Even as a consultant way back in 2012, many basic rental cars had this feature. It shows album art and other metadata about the currently playing track or show. I believe it's part of HD radio.
At least that's the case in the USA. I seem to recall seeing the same in European vehicles as well.
When I had a 2016 Mazda, I regularly downloaded their firmware, which at some point came fairly frequently.
Like other manufacturers, their dealer portal posts firmware upgrades along with other service bulletins, and occasionally the firmware leaks out from some of their dealers, so enthusiast would go on upgrade it by themselves.
Mazda’s response at the time was pretty disheartening too. Pay us for a firmware update and it’ll probably fix it. The owner said ‘no thanks’ because it was too expensive (and honestly ridiculous in principle in my opinion). Now Roman Mars, the owner of 99% Invisible, releases a separate version of every episode with “Mazda safe titles”
Seems like he should do the opposite, Only release versions with Mazda unsafe titles with a note "Doesn't work on Mazda. Contact their customer support here to complain"
It was the % in the show title that fouled up the Mazdas, so they were already doing that before the fix.
Even then it was a nearly invisible problem for the podcast itself, not something that would have been significant enough to investigate and correct for if that wasn't also content for the show.
The % sign broke mazda's infotainment system? That's really bad, I mean the % is even in the basic ascii character set. Unless they try to interpret titles as JS or HTML or something. That too would be bad.
You don't need to exploit it, at least you didn't before...
They used to autorun specifically named files on a USB stick.
Then some busybody journalists picked up on that and Mazda was forced to lock it down despite the fact that there is complete physical separation from safety systems, and that situations like this article are exactly where it helps.
Although I don't disagree with your thought here and that was actually the podcast host's/other contributor's original hunch too, this wasn't actually an issue with interpolation. I know it sounds bizarre, but the paraphrasing of the podcast hosts and comments from the infotainment system code author suggest that he was treating all strings as percent encoded[0] without any checks or guards in place. Since "% I" isn't a valid character reference, it chokes on it.
The % bug is a separate bug to do with a Podcasts's title, I suspect you just need a phone and an MP3 file with a suitably prepared title tag.
The original articles issue is a HD Radio (not DAB) issue to do with images, although it might still be a string parse issue of some kind as it apparently involves "image files with no extension", so presumably filenames? So the RF side can indeed be fun on consumer electronics with modern digital standards. Another example is this claimed RCE over DVB-T: https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1481963959532011520
My understanding was that the implementation was protected by patents.
And can one call something a standard if the codec is not documented and needs to be reverse engineered?
Like I said, it's the protocol that is standardized. HD Radio as a whole is not, because of the codec. I think it's absolute BS that the FCC went down the path of a proprietary format, but it's the way things are. And the fact is, we do have at least one FOSS implementation. Since it's not DRM, I believe (but IANAL) that it's perfectly legal to reverse-engineer it.
I doubt Xperi really cares, since HD Radio is a trademark so it's not like you could build, sell and market an "HD Radio" device without licensing from them anyway.
You're sort of on the right track if you're familiar with URL/percent encoding, actually. I have no idea why, but paraphrased comments by the podcast hosts from the code author (they contacted him) suggest that he was attempting to decode all incoming strings as if they were percent encoded[0] without any failsafes in place. Since "% I" isn't a valid character reference (or even hexadecimal), it chokes on it.
That’s right. When a podcaster forces their stuff to not work on my car, I spend my time contacting the car company to get collective action through for change. I don’t hit the next button and listen to something else. This is how I and most other humans function.
I have a Mazda, and it also parses ogg metadata strangely; if you have multiple fields starting with "ARTIST" then it will fill the artist field with all of them, but without erasing the buffer first.
When I first loaded my music collection, it stuck in a reboot loop, so I have a script that sanitizes the metadata for exporting to my car
My Citroen does that. If you connect to it with BT and play anything with Cyrillic characters in the title from Apple Music it trashes the display trying to render it.
My Toyota - a Japanese car - cannot display song titles in Japanese. I kind of assume this is a localisation issue rather than something that would happen in Japan though, although the car entertainment is terrible in many other ways too so who knows.
Most likely because the embedded system does not use UTF-8, just like the phones before iPhone, a Nokia phone sold in US sometimes cannot even be flashed to display CJK characters due to CJK support require more ROM space.
My Garmin watch is like that. If you want Japanese language support you have to buy the japanese model which is obiviously only for sale in Japan. So dumb that I can't just flash the japanese firmware on. Instead I have support for Russian which I have no need for.
Wow. Not many automakers can claim to have an infotainment system notorious enough to get coverage on local public radio and a design-oriented podcast.
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:5:14: warning: unknown conversion type character ‘ ’ in format [-
Wformat=]
5 | printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
| ^
test.c:5:10: warning: too many arguments for format [-Wformat-extra-args]
5 | printf("%99 Invisible", NULL);
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
which I would expect; you can't have a field width (the "99") and then the space-padding flag; flags go first. Also I can't find any coverage of %I (capital 'I', as in "Invisible") in the manual page for printf(3) on that system but that might just be an old manual page, GCC does seem to recognize it.
Removing the cruft and trying plain %In gives a warning, but I guess whoever built the car's radio UI ignores warnings.
I guess it's possible that the system doesn't use a standard-compliant enough C library, so it's printf() implementation does something ... creative with this string.
Anyway, classic case of the lovely foot-gunnery that is %n in the wild! Sorry for all the car owners, of course. :/
EDIT: A commenter pointed out that the above are "just warnings", oops. :) More oops on me for not spelling the freaking title correctly, of course it's "99%" and not "%99" .. .need more coffee, clearly. Sorry.
For people less used to C, the error here more or less seems to boil down to passing an untrusted string as the special "format string" for the printf() function. That function will interpret the contents of the string, and the percent symbol is how its special formatting directives start. Characters following a percent symbol will cause it to do stuff. The proper fix is usally to change
printf(string);
to
printf("%s", string);
or use some other I/O function altogether. The above simply says "here's a string", by using the programmer-selected string "%s" as the format, instead of the untrusted string coming from the outside.
You should also keep in mind that the string is essentially user input at runtime for the radio, so the compiler can't throw warnings or errors for it even if it wanted to.
So far, everything that my car replaces with a touchscreen that used to be a physical switch is a complete downgrade.
My car features a D-pad on the wheel that also works if you swipe over it, resulting in bad inputs and causing all kinds of frustration. It's my first new car and I'm feeling like I want my old car back. I seriously hate touchscreen controls and my only physical input is faulty
The biggest disappointment was manufacturers moving away from the DIN standard. Companies like Pioneer and Alpine (even defunct companies like Eclipse) have had highly functional and usable touchscreen DVD/stereo/GPS units since at least ~2005. Things like GPS, bluetooth and voice control all seem to work without fail on the units I've had (my only issue has been a folder limit on USB drives). They also focus on sound quality, so you can get higher quality audio from the unit via RCA jacks to an amplifier. All of this for <$500 with GPS, <$200 without GPS. If the car companies want tight integrations (things like OBDII tying into display, climate controls) an OEM developed touchscreen makes sense, but as a consumer, using a 20 year old OEM touchscreen is painful. Modularity (the DIN standard) solved this, by allowing easy upgrades, but I guess that doesn't help move newer cars.
Infotainment systems are one of the biggest selling points if you've seen any car ad lately. Why let the customer upgrade the unit and keep that same car for a decade, when you can make that impossible and then entice them with the latest infotainment system so they buy a new car every few years.
Right, and that is what I don't get. The "fancy tech" isn't really that great relative to alternatives available in the past, but everyone is somehow unaware. Aftermarket stereos were mainstream during the 80's-90's during the tape->CD transition, so more people knew that they could upgrade, but in the mid-late 00's, hardly anyone seemed to know that you could swap a stereo out relatively easily. For modern cars I've looked at, the dash kit for swaps makes it insanely expensive. Popular vehicles may have custom aftermarkets, but niche cars are out of luck. So many people just look for any reason to get a new car, I guess that is just a side effect of treating cars like replaceable appliances?
When I bought my last car (Honda Fit), I was stuck with the base model because it was the only one without a touch a screen.
I test drove the upgraded trim package. It was nicer in every way but the damn touch screen, which was a non-starter. I had to wait three months for a cheaper car to come in, instead of buying the upgraded package on the spot.
At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling manual controls as an upgrade.
Mazda already wised up and removed the touchscreen in their newer models, everything in the infotainment is operated by a little rotary/dpad-thing located near the gearshift. I think it's quite nice, input wise.
Software wise it's a complete mess. The software itself is actually pretty OK, the navigation is just very verbose and it's strange that I can't just update it myself. The startup is also quite annoying. It's an embedded computer in a car, it should be instant.
Android auto support is a trashfire. It occasionally (when i drive for more than an hour) crashes the entire infotainment system, forcing it to reboot (a 1 minute process). Thankfully it resumes from where it left off after the reboot.
Well that's disappointing. As I pointed out in another comment, as of March 2020, Android Auto became wildly unstable in my 2015 Mazda. However, I put the blame on it having a version of Mazda AIO Tweaks from 2018, and possible version incompatibilities with the Android Auto on my phone. But... perhaps there are software issues at a deeper level here, if even the newer ones which officially support Android Auto are so unstable!
For me, Android Auto will crash frequently if using maps or Pandora, and will almost always crash instantly if I try to use both. It wasn't nearly as unstable before March 2020, though.
I had this issue, too. It helped to replace the AA headunit module in AIO with a binary having this fix https://github.com/gartnera/headunit/pull/174.
Since then, AA works great for me
They've had those dials since their first touch screens. It's the biggest reason for my brand loyalty for mazda. Touch screens allow you to make really complicated interfaces, but if your screen can only be navigated by a dial, they can't. Which is way better than everyone else.
It is a touch screen, but the "touch" part generally only operates while stopped and in navigation. I think they might also allow touch for android auto/apple car play, but I'm not sure.
The touchscreen is still there on my 2020 model. but I always use the roulette to navigate. It's a bit akward at times but it's much better than taking my eyes off the road to try and line up my finger on the touchpad. It's disabled in Android Auto mode, and probably in CarPlay but I never used it.
I too had problems with Android Auto when using my old phone, it constantly crashed. When I switched to a Pixel 4a in 2020 I no longer had any issues. It works like a charm.
So I suspect it could be your phone, or something related (the cable, the type of USB plug, etc.).
For me, I tried a Pixel 3 and a Oneplus 7 Pro, with two different cables, and the instability issues were the same. So it's not clear to me that the issue is outside of the head unit.
For the first 2 months of me owning my car (it's a 2021 mx5), I had to force close spotify immediately before plugging the phone into the car (It was like a 30 second window) or the car would refuse to output any audio. Without any change to the cable or the car, and with the same handset, the problem suddenly disappeared. The only thing I think of that could have fixed it is an over the air update for my phone.
Either way, it's branded "Android Auto". I'm going to blame Google for anything that doesn't work optimally. If they cared, they could certify their product.
I misread your previous comment has the problem originating _inside_ the headunit. Just wanted to clear that up since my response probably seemed pretty superfluous.
No, you read it right. I mean - clearly I don't know the origin. My Mazda OEM head unit was slow and unstable out of the box, and continued to be so when I installed Mazda AIO Tweaks (with Android Auto.)
Specifically running Android Auto became more unstable in March 2020, without being the head unit updated. In other words, probably the phone (Android Auto) was updated. Possibly in a way that was backwards compatible with OEM Android Auto, but not the AIO Tweaks version.
That's a long of saying, there's probably multiple potential sources of problems and failure; not clearly the hardware/software of the head unit, and not clearly the Android Auto software. But a bad combination of the two.
But it's all guesswork on my end! When I see others having the same issues with OEM Android Auto, it does make it seem more of a clear Android Auto software issue. (And we haven't really ruled out idiosyncrasies of the handsets and USB cables.)
really! This definitely makes me note to be sure to strongly consider mazda next time i'm in the market. I don't want any of that stuff.
All US cars now come with a screen, because backup cameras are now legally required. So I guess most of them say if there has to be a screen anyway, of course it should be a touch screen with controls, or it's just sitting there useless when you're not using the backup camera.
I don't want a backup camera or a screen at all, but if I have to have one, at least don't make it a touch screen, please.
It's a real shame that "computerizing everything" meant taking all the shit we hate from computers, like long bootups, complex failure conditions, constant restarting, and complicated inferfaces and putting that into everything while making nothing better.
I'd recommend giving Mazda's infotainment a chance. It's not pretty, but it gets out of your way enough that you get to enjoy the car. That was kinda the point of getting a miata in the first place.
I once had a GMC (that was in most other ways terrible), that embedded the backup camera screen behind the rear view mirror glass. There was a direct connection between it and the backup camera. The backup camera was triggered by the backup lights, so no head console integration was required.
That was nice. Hopefully, some manufacturer will cater to the touchscreen backlash crowd,and it'll become popular.
like it replaced the rear view mirror, you didn't have a windshield-mounted mirror anymore when backup camera was engaged?
I guess that makes sense -- I'm kind of surprised it's legal!
although I guess the windshield-mount rearview mirror isn't actually legally required anyway, for instance in trucks/vans/other situations with obstructed sightlines to back of car.
Anyway, what you describe sounds really cool and subtle in a good way, like the kind of thing we imagined we'd get in the future, when we imagined the future would be designed well, instead of the hacky poorly designed terrible UX future we've got.
I had a rental three row SUV (was supposed to be a compact, but when the first two assigned cars weren't in their spots, they gave me something that was there) with a video augmented windshield mounted mirror. It would run during forward operation too, and it was kind of nice --- couldn't see much with that long of a vehicle and tinted rear window, but it was hard to use, because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird. Also, it was distracting because you could kind of see the actual mirror image if you looked at the mirror while your eyes were long focused.
> because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird
You don't normally find this a problem with windshield-mounted mirrors? I wonder what the difference is, and if you'd get used to it if driving regularly.
Could likely get used to it, but not in a few days. Once I turned it off, I felt a lot better.
I don't notice a focus change going from looking out the windshield to looking through the mirror. There almost certainly is one, but it's not as drastic, because you don't focus on the surface of the mirror... and, as you note, it's what I'm used to.
It makes sense. I wonder if a higher-res screen would also not have you focusing on the surface; shouldn't a high enough res screen be to your eyes just like a mirror? I'm just curious now why it's different!
I think you'd need a lens arrangement to make the image appear inside the mirror. It's not just related to binocular vision either, if you have focus a camera on an object appearing in a (flat) mirror, the focal distance is going to be pretty close to the distance from the camera to the mirror + the distance from the mirror to the object.
Now, I don't think you need to get this exactly right, but if you could make the video image appear at a focal depth close to to the length from the mirror to the back window, it would be a lot easier on the eyes than the image appearing at a focal depth of about a foot. I'm not good with optics though, so don't ask me how to do that! :D
I had a rental with a video rear view mirror (you could turn it off it and became a regular rear view mirror) and I actually liked it - the car had a small rear window so you got a wider field of view from the video, and it was clearer at night with less glare.
my similar system in a Toyota only replaces the left-most ~1/4 of the rear-view mirror, so it's still pretty usable as a rear-view mirror when it's active.
The rotary dpad thing is worse than a touchscreen IMO. instead of just touching the thing you care about, now you have to scroll around to find it, which is very dangerous when driving
> At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling manual controls as an upgrade.
Will they really?
Most consumers invest very little effort in researching most of their purchases, and are remarkably tolerant to specific kinds of annoyances. I wish that they invested more effort, but based on my observations of my friends and family (who will spend e.g. about 20 minutes researching their $600 phone purchase), they won't, with a few outliers.
An imperfect comparison might be the amount of effort that the average techie spends on purchasing a MicroSD card or USB drive (usually on Amazon). How many people, even programmers, will spend time looking for durability or third-party performance benchmarking numbers? How many will look for child/slave labor in the manufacturing of the device, or rare earth materials sourced from areas in conflict?
I, personally, know that I should do the above, but I don't - partially because Google is so incredibly bad at finding the information, but also because I know that because most other people don't care, a lot of the above information might not exist at all.
I think most people look at it in a cost/benefit way. If it takes them three hours to research, they've spent 3x $hourly_rate + $item_cost—which in many instances may be more expensive than just selling off an item they can't stand and getting a different one. (To the extent that people do this even when it would pay for itself, I think it's mostly the result of just being in the habit.)
I try to view it instead as being paid (albeit at a lower rate) for my off time. (And if you do this for everything, you'll tend to spend less, have more in the bank, and the amount you get 'paid' will increase over time.)
I think a car is definitely one product that the typical consumer does at least some research on, given that it's such a large purchase. Consumer Reports certainly grades infotainment systems and maybe that's having some impact in manufacturers choosing better options. Although maybe that's less impactful from the sales boost that comes from dealers showing off "neat" features of the touchscreen.
That's the same reason I bought the base model of my last car. Besides the steering wheel, you end up interacting with the center console the most. It really should be one of the top considerations in buying a car vs fancy wheels, a cool spoiler or a turbocharger, etc. After all, a lot of body components & engine modifications can be added after market. You're going to have a much harder time "fixing" that center console...
It’s too bad the manufacturers don’t just make APIs with swappable standard sized hardware instead of integrated systems.
An average car lasts 12 years. How many 12 year old tablets do people want to use?
My first car was a 15 year old beater with a tape deck. It was trivial to rip it out and put in an (at the time current) CD player. I pity the poor kids who are going to be stuck with these cars down the road.
It's probably reasonable to assume that car touchscreens are designed more to "look cool" at the time of sale than to actually be usable over the life of a vehicle. Car salesmen get to show off all sorts of high-tech bells and whistles, and that's more immediately impressive to buyers than the long-term practicality of physical knobs and switches.
One off-the-shelf touchscreen... vs. lots of little custom-molded and printed analog parts that have to be assembled by costly robots or costlier humans. Big savings, I think.
Whatever the case, it sure isn't because people like touch controls in their cars. Holy shit, what a universally reviled "feature."
Touchscreen engineer here. There is no such thing as an 'off-the-shelf' capacitive touchscreen.
There is always custom engineering to match the customer's housing and bezel, tune the analog characteristics to the electrical environment, and handle other requests like a safer/thicker cover glass, optical bonding to the LCD, and low friction or hydro/oleophobic coatings on the surface.
No one is denigrating this work, but it's obviously easier to consistently get right than the fiddly processes GP describes. There is a rectangle of a particular size, and various substances are applied to it.
You didn't mention UI design, which is the worst aspect of this technology.
I think this is part of it, "iPhones are cool, and this is like a giant iPhone!", but I think a larger part of it is that it's easier to design/program for and actually possible to update after the fact if that's required. There's probably something here for using the same parts across a whole line of cars, too vs testing and fitting buttons.
Hopefully, those same customers will know better when coming to buy their next car after that, therefore reducing desire for touchscreen controls and hopefully, their extensive usage
I doubt that'll happen. It'll probably take the same trajectory as (smart) TVs: these crappy designs become the industry norm and it becomes very difficult to find alternatives.
I'm of the opinion that the only touchscreen that belongs in a car is a barebones non-networked Apple CarPlay / Android Auto pass-through for sound and navigation. All other controls are physical.
Also, why can't we just have a fucking shelf or a bracket.
Ever since radios stopped being a standard rectangle, and the dashboard was filled with kevlar sacks and explosives there's nowhere to put anything down.
As of 5-6 years ago some (many? most?) cars still had a good old standard double-DIN slot for the infotainment unit, if you popped off the dashboard's plastic cover.
No clue if that's still true; I think it has become less true over time for sure.
There are benefits to automakers for retaining that standard form factor. Most factory-branded infotainment systems are made by a handful of OEM manufacturers like Bose. Bose makes systems for multiple automakers. So the double-DIN form factor has persisted, it's just hidden.
Problem is, for most cars, the climate controls and shit are all bundled into that infotainment system. So you can slot a standard double-DIN stereo into most modern cars, but you need a replacement dashboard panel and fairly elaborate kit to replace the OEM climate controls and whatever else.
My wife has a 2019 Subaru Crosstrek that gets this exactly right, IMO.
There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.
But for everything else, there are big grippy analog controls. There are also analog volume and prev/next controls for the touchscreen. I believe the interior was designed with the concept of, "everything should be operable, even if the driver is wearing gloves."
> There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.
More importantly, federal law requires that new cars must have back-up cameras. Car manufacturers are doing the obvious analysis of, if we need to have a screen in there anyway, may as well make it a touchscreen. And if we're going to make it a touchscreen, may as well save some money by eliminating a bunch of physical controls.
I don't like it—I plan to drive my 2002 Tacoma into the ground specifically to avoid getting a car with a huge touchscreen UI—but I kind of understand it.
Yeah this is how my Hyundai Kona (2020) works and I think it's a good bridge between both. Touchscreen for CarPlay navigation, knobs on the dashboard, and additional buttons on the steering wheel (volume up/down, skip, mute, answer call).
Why is this? You'd think these massive corporations could afford the best SWE's in the world. And yet, the average infotainment system in a new car today is literally worse than an iPad from 2010.
I worked in infotainment for an Automaker. The engineers are fine. The hardware is often limited (because of expense or contacts), and the development timeline is 2-3 years.
Also, infotainment is not a make-or-break feature of the car. It might nudge people a little, but it’s not the thing, so it’s not as high a priority.
I will say for my former employer that I could get a better salary at almost any software company than there. The work was interesting though.
Ditto here, I used to do infotainment flashing and testing. It's quite an interesting industry. These days I mostly work on sensor packages for development vehicles, so my infotainment knowledge is a bit stale.
A lot of automakers leave too much to their suppliers, and take too much on faith. The testing and validation is often happy-path only, show that it is capable of functioning properly, not that's incapable of functioning improperly. Pathetic but thrifty, as long as there are no standards for these things.
Mazda's gaffe here is that the boot-loop prevents the rear-view camera from working, which is a NHTSA requirement. So their 'courtesy replacement' is an attempt to avoid the shame of a true recall, as I understand it.
SWEs working at these companies are probably hamstrung in what they can do.
From cheap economobiles to six figure luxury cars, I've yet to see an infotainment system that works better than CarPlay.
The last bastion for factory infotainment systems is that CarPlay/Android Auto doesn't integrate with factory HUD or instrument panel displays (whether the instrument panel is a big LCD itself, or a small one nestled between the gauges). But I hear even this is changing in some recent models. Once that revolution is finished, then I don't see why I'd ever use the factory infotainment software ever again instead of just CarPlay.
It seems like the manufacturer is responsible for 'integration' of CarPlay into their systems. On a recent 2021 Hyundai Sonata rental, the Carplay system crashed multiple times while driving and forced me to pull over, unpair the phone and reconnect to get it working again. I don't think I have ever used any Apple software that was this glitchy. Makes me think that there is some screwups the manufacturer can still do despite Carplay coming from Apple.
Car companies do a lot of revenue, but margins are slim. When you actually have to build something out of metal and glass you have to be fixated on cost cutting.
Which is crazy, I've never chosen a car because it costs 1k more or less, but I have ruled out several manufacturers because their UI is awful, and I'm sure it doesn't costs $1k to put half a dozen real switches in
I drive a 2005 stick shift that sits on a Toyota Corolla block. It has a dumb radio with real buttons, and no power windows or power locks.
It's amazing. Maintenance is cheap, stuff works. I have a Bluetooth FM radio dongle, and the audio quality is less than ideal, but my speakers are crap too, so who cares. I threw on a dash mount for my phone to do navigation and music, and it's wayyyy better than even decks with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (particularly since most of that stuff, until very recently, required you to plug in a cable).
I'm going to drive the thing into the ground. Really not looking forward to the idea of buying a car full of computers to replace it.
That being said, fuel economy isn't _great_. If the odometer is to be trusted I get around 25 mpg, but I don't drive all that much, and I just don't think a hybrid or electric vehicle is worth the price, both upfront (particularly in this market) and maintenance (for the hybrids only, electrics seem to be maintenance-free).
25mpg definitely doesn't sound right for a Corolla. That's roughly what I can get in my fullsize car if I try not to "stretch its legs" too much ...and it's got a big V8.
That is essentially what Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are. The phone generates a secondary screen with a simplified UI and projects that to the car. The car displays it as a video and returns touch events to the phone.
"Simplified UI"? I think you mean the confusing UI that isn't the one I learned before I was trying to switch lanes on the freeway.
Some day, I hope a lawyer will team up with a UI researcher, and then sue car manufactures for "safety theater" features like this that endanger people.
One of my favorites? The click through legal disclaimer that blocks my view of the backup camera screen every single time I pull out of a spot in a parking lot.
A runner up is "we can't let the passenger type a destination into the navigation system because the vehicle is moving"
Unfortunately, the devil is in the details of that "essentially" and "simplified UI". CarPlay seems magic (though admittedly I don't own an iPhone), but Android Auto has been riddled with problems around whether the deck or the phone has control, weird memory leaks, and critical controls or settings missing from the "simplification". Every time I've used it as a passenger, I find myself unplugging the phone, fiddling with the Maps or music UI on there, and then plugging it back in (often only to find out that the pairing got reset somehow and the car needs to be put in park before I can complete the onboarding again).
I had a rental with Apple CarPlay, it worked well but I still got the impression that the system in the car played a big part... it was an interface but I'm not sure it wad driven by my phone. That of course means it could be at the whim of some silly car infotainment type setup. At least that's the impression I got.
It's 100% driven by your phone, what you're seeing is just a video stream from the phone. The infotainment system essentially acts as a dumb terminal. The phone feeds it video, and it feeds the phone X,Y touch coordinates. It also feeds the phone some data about the car, but there is no way for the car to directly modify the interface since it's literally just a video stream.
Some car companies are trying to charge a subscription fee for heated seats, too. They obviously control whether it's enabled or disabled, but my point was that when you're using it the car doesn't control the interface.
To reduce all inputs to a single button that you tap in different patterns to trigger different functionality or to remove all physical ports (including the fuel tank inflow) with wireless equivalent that only work with approved hardware? The folks I want to get into the car game are mechanics from the 90s that believe a switch with a nice deep "click" for feedback is the best thing ever invented.
I think touchscreen controls are fine as long as the car also has voice commands that work well so you don’t even have to look anywhere else while driving much less touch the console
I have a 2016 CX-9. It’s been years since I looked into this, but the Mazda infotainment system is running Linux. You used to be able to login to it over the USB port, but they locked that down at some point with a firmware upgrade so that you could only get to it over a serial connection that you could get to if you were comfortable removing the console.
The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript based.
(I retrofitted CarPlay support to mine via an upgrade Mazda offered a couple years after I got the car and I think that closed off access to tweaking, but I forget. I’m generally happy with the UI but I wish it booted faster. It’s a good 1-2 minutes after starting the car before it’s responsive.)
If you have a navigation SD card inserted (that you likely don’t use due to the CarPlay), try removing it. It sped up my boot times significantly. I also have a usb full of music that I plug in sometimes, and I notice it is slower to boot with that inserted as well.
Could be fsck or could be searching the whole drive for media files to index it every time it's inserted or the system rebooted. I guess a reasonable test of which without better access to the thing would be to have two drives of the same size with one mostly full and one mostly empty.
I drive a 2016 CX-5 with the stock in-dash software. If I'm bored enough at some point I might test the hypothesis on that.
My 3 is a 2015. Got it used in 2017 and after a few months, I loaded Android Auto on it using Mazda AIO Tweaks.
Notably, the UI was sluggish and unstable before (and after) I installed Android Auto.
With Android Auto installed, I got a good two and a half years out of moderately reliable use, but just as the pandemic started in March 2020, Android Auto got remarkably unstable. It might run OK for a few songs if I only did one thing, i.e. Pandora OR Google Maps, but doing both almost always caused a freeze within seconds, required the three button salute to reboot the system.
I thought it might be due to the phone (Pixel 3), but I tried a different phone since with the same result (OnePlus 7 Pro). I suspect something changed on the Android side, but Android 9 was six months earlier and Android 10 was six months later. The updated Android Auto design had been out for several months (summer 2019) before I started having issues. Since I haven't driven much since the pandemic started, I still haven't tried to fix it. (I suspect maybe an updated install from Mazda AIO Tweaks might help.)
I did the same. Wouldn't want to miss it on my 2018 model.
Edit:
By the way. Thanks for reminding me. I looked at the site and they now have support for wireless Android Auto. So I might just be able to ditch the somewhat unreliable connection with the cable.
I got to meet with some guys who worked on that system at my last job. At the time, they were called OpenCar, and the system was recognizable as what ended up in the Mazda. I do recall that in spite of the name, nothing they were doing was open source.
Ford is using an HTML-based interface in the Mach-E (and vehicles which get infotainment systems derived from that new generation of infotainment system). I've seen rumors that Ford is using React to power that interface, but I wasn't able to pin down any real sources.
This explains to some degree how Tesla is able to have such a buttery smooth UI on such terrible Intel Atom hardware (until recently.. they're switching to much better hardware now). At the same time, the Mach-E interface is not very smooth at all, but it is functionally pretty good. I think Ford should have a leg up on rapidly improving their infotainment interface, given that I would expect React to make some things easier than Qt... but Ford has so far failed to demonstrate that they can effectively distribute OTA updates, regardless of early promises. Hopefully they get that figured out soon.
"Buttery smooth" with complicated React UIs is entirely possible if you design it right. Unfortunately too many people just assume that whatever they throw at it will be fine.
Yes, but... it is difficult to do that on underpowered hardware. Modern browser engines seem to take a lot of resources to do anything at all, which gives you even less headroom before you write a single line of code. I don't think the Mach-E is equipped with a very powerful chip for the infotainment system. Since I can't find any reference to what it is, I would assume it's nothing to be proud of -- some kind of really old ARM chip, maybe.
If they equipped the Mach-E with a reasonably powerful SoC for the infotainment system, then I would agree 100% that a React-based UI could be implemented in such a way that it operates smoothly.
I've written fairly complicated React SPA UIs (certainly much more complicated than anything I've seen a car infotainment system other than, say, map rendering specifically) than run fine on relatively ancient phones and Chromebooks, so I think you're excusing just plain bad design a little too much here. I have to think they'd have the same issues regardless of platform, or if not only from using something that takes away control of the kind of things that can cause lag issues in React.
> “Between 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software,” the Mazda statement said.
"sent image files" is an HD Radio function, and HD Radio is also known as NRSC-5, the standards document that describes it.
There's an NRSC-5 encoder floating around on Github, if you want to try your hand at it. Notably, it was implemented by an infosec firm, presumably because more garbage code like this is lurking everywhere, and it never gets proper testing because HD Radio is proprietary and its creators never intended an open-source encoder to exist. (To the point of hiding all sorts of details about the codec, but some educated guesses and comparison to similar codecs seem to have paid off.)
So, in this case it just crashes the radios so they boot-loop, but how long until someone figures out a payload that can do more damage?
At some point, I think we have to start asking if the addition of non-critical features like having a favicon for each radio station is worth the increased attack surface.
Mixing the car radio and actual critical systems (backup camera) doesn't seem like a great idea. Especially when the car manufacturer doesn't control the entire system. I know nothing about the supply chain for car radios, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was all made by some secondary supplier, so Mazda doesn't even necessarily have the code to the section they need to patch.
But, I'm honestly more surprised that it's a Mazda specific issue. I would have expected for the same bug to hit multiple infotainment systems.
At least in my car (2013 Chevy Volt), the backup camera is on an internal KVM-type switch.
The moment I switch into reverse the camera forcibly takes over the infotainment screen. You can occasionally see the signal flicker when the switch happens.
But also… a backup camera is hardly critical equipment. It’s there for situational awareness (and a good idea), but doesn’t replace the mirror. And since nobody drives in reverse at high speed, stopping is always an option if it malfunctions.
On many newer cars, the backup camera is approaching critical equipment. With the rising safety standards, the visibility in cars, especially out the back, has gone down significantly. Incidentally, this is very apparent on the Mazdas that I've owned. My old old Protege had good visibility out the back, an early 10's 3 had passable visibility out the back, and the now handful-of-years-old 6 has atrocious visibility out the back, to the point where more than half the field of view is obscured.
That’s still not critical. The backup camera is not used as a rear view mirror replacement and the ability to back up, let lone back up safely, is not required for safe operation of the vehicle.
Brakes are critical, steering is critical. Reverse and everything that entails is not.
That’s not critical ffs. Federal law requires all kinds of things that are not critical (I.e. does not even result in a fine for operating it on the road with it broken). Side curtain airbags, reverse, a rear view mirror, etc are all not critical nor legally required to operate a vehicle on the road.
Manufacturer mandates for general safety have only a small overlap with what is critical.
Federal law also requires manufacturers to use too little water in all your home appliances. That’s clearly not “critical.”
Edit: I really don’t understand why I’m getting downvotes on this. Is it because people are so glad the federal government is in their bathroom making these “critical” decisions for you?
My point is that the federal government makes all kinds of decisions that are obviously not “critical,” and that includes in the auto industry.
The camera is "critical" to manufacturers by definition because it's the subject of regulatory compliance - it's a must have for the manufacturer to clear a gate.
We also know that people have been driving in all sorts of conditions and in all sizes of cars without backup cameras for decades upon decades and cameras are obviously not critical to the act of driving the vehicle. They undeniably help: the field of view is often wider than your mirrors, you can drive backwards at high speed while ducking to avoid bullets, You can see directly behind the bumper of your car to wedge yourself into tighter parking spots and avoid backing over tiny people, etc. I don't believe a functional backup camera is required to resell the vehicle.
If you never learned to drive without a backup camera, it may be more "critical" to you individually.
Emissions systems are a completely different story. Critical to manufacturer and required for resale of the vehicle (technically critical to owner), though who's going to check for that $400 bypass kit? ;)
I’m not trying to get any authority nor questioning the government’s authority. You are saying that every law the federal government has passed is critical?
> Brakes are critical, steering is critical. Reverse and everything that entails is not.
The statistic is that every year, in the U.S. alone, over 2000 kids are run over by vehicles reversing. I had to read what you wrote a half-dozen times, but in hindsight the dissonance makes perfect sense.
In the vast majority of the US, being able to safely back up _is_ required for the safe operation of a vehicle. I recall my drivers license test included a driving-in-reverse section. You will also frequently need to be able to back out of a parking spot, or a driveway. Even if its not critical, its as close to critical as can be. When your rear view mirror and your side mirrors combined cannot give you enough visibility to safely back up, a rear-view camera quickly becomes critical.
Backup cameras are great for avoiding things low to the ground but do give a false sense of security. I managed to back into a fan box at about head level in a parking garage because I became too reliant on the camera alone. If I had turned around to look behind me I could have avoided a thousand dollar repair.
The Netherlands used to have national championships reverse driving for many years on the official race track at Zandvoort (part of the Formula 1 circuit).
My Seattle Mazda was hit by this bug. The backup camera still functions for the most part, although it does flicker and occasionally blank for a second or two (presumably while the system reboots). Annoying, but not horrible.
> I know nothing about the supply chain for car radios, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was all made by some secondary supplier, so Mazda doesn't even necessarily have the code to the section they need to patch.
You are correct that in general the automotive OEM's farm out the various components of the vehicle to suppliers. In that case, they probably also have some sort of support contract in place that ensures the supplier will address issues like this in a timely manner for the duration of the warranty period for the vehicles it is included in.
Backup cameras are going to become critical beyond "learn to drive properly" very soon. My college aged son has literally never driven a car without a backup camera. I taught him to use his mirrors after checking the camera for obstacles the mirrors can't see but I'm sure he's already developed the habit of simply relying on the camera. I'm pretty much there and have 30+ years of driving without them.
Where I live you could fail your driver's test if you look at the rearview camera while reversing. You can glance at it before you start the manoeuvre but if you take your eyes off the road while the vehicle is in motion, you get the silent note taking.
Some cars are designed around having that camera in exchange for rear visibility. Generally for better aerodynamics. It likely pays for itself in fuel pretty quickly.
I know BMW turn signals are a meme (with good reason...), but I've noticed the exact same behavioral trend with Lexus drivers as well. It's really just those two makes in particular.
Great, another feature that will save dozens to hundreds of lives (disproportionately of young children) every year, while adding only a few bucks to the bill of materials for cars that already have a display screen.
I do wish parents would stop teaching kids to take the short route over the carpark on the way to school. They save a couple of meters but walk behind cars backing out of the car garages... The back camera is handy but you won't see them if they walk on your side of the lane, too close to the 90 degree edge of the car.
And to make it more fun, our car has an overlay on the left edge with a top down view of the sensors around the car. That one blocks the view completely in that edge. And has a black background window that slowly fades away.
I think parents who have lost their children to cars backing out of driveways while children are playing on the sidewalk would disagree with your description of 'unneeded'
It wouldn't be an issue if we went back to making cars small enough you could see out of them. Legally requiring a certain level of rear visibility would be a good thing (and, sure, in some cases a camera might be the best way to achieve that) - and throw in some pedestrian collision safety requirements while you're at it. Legally mandating the expensive gadget-based way of doing things seems horribly shortsighted.
You'll never come close to getting the visibility that you can with a backup camera. With a decent backup camera the only blind spots are actually underneath the car itself. You can't possibly match that without a camera on anything other than a motorcycle. Setting the legal requirement of visibility without mandating a camera would either make it completely impractical to avoid a camera or you'd be sacrificing visibility by making the mandate achievable with only mirrors and windows.
> Legally mandating the expensive gadget-based way of doing things seems horribly shortsighted.
Your perspective is biased. If the backup camera had been invented before you were born and the automobile after you had been born than you would consider it only logical and familiar to see backup cameras on the wagons and horse drawn carts that you were used to but you would consider automobiles to be 'the expensive gadget-based way of doing things [that] seems horribly shortsighted.'
If backup cameras weren't expensive gadgets then I wouldn't consider them expensive gadgets, sure. But they are, so I do. When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do?
That's classical victim blaming. We are all humans and make mistakes.Some mistakes only result in some property damage or money lost and some, like running over a person (doesn't even have to be a child, don't forget that there are handicapped people who might not be able to react fast enough to get out of that situation), can't be corrected afterwards. Handwaving that away because some people like to save a few dollars is not a great idea.
By your logic we could also hand everybody heroin and an assault rifle and abolish most laws, people watch TV after all and therefore can be taught not to do bad things.
This is true. Any kid who is capable of naming themselves has also opted out of child safety. The two characteristics are irreversibly linked.
In addition, the existence of kids who are capable of naming themselves must mean that other kids should be bumper mush. This is the only way to preserve the American Way.
Actually, it’s the shareholders, who have to bear the costs of these expensive lawsuits from the parents of these irresponsible children! Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
Wouldn't the entire rear of the car and the rear seats have to be glass to exempt a car from having the camera?
A bigger rear window wouldn't have let me see the toddler who'd wandered a short distance off from his parents in a car park and was standing right behind my car.
Look at the split rear window on the Prius; it does exactly that. If the driver is tall and turning their neck, or short and using the center mirror, the sight-line from the driver's seat extends below the rear seats and down into what would ordinarily be the tailgate.
You can't see the pavement under the bumper, but you can see a kid on a tricycle right behind the car.
Personally I find rear view cameras to be quite disorienting. The view is quite distorted by the wide-angle lens and it's not clear where it can see and where it can't. Do I still have blind spots if I look at only the screen? Where are they? With a mirror I get an intuitive sense of what it can and can't see. Also, I expect the view to move when I move my head like in a mirror, which is part of what makes it so easy to get a sense of where the mirror can see. I suppose someday I'll get used to cameras, but today is not that day.
I used to pride myself on my ability to fit into small parking spaces and parallel park even big vans pretty precisely, and a backup camera blew all that out of the water because I can fit anywhere now.
My little GTI with a backup camera made me an invincible parking machine.
Also demanded by customers. A well implemented backup camera is much better than trying to use a small rear view mirror or twisting around to look out a small rear window. The backup camera can give you a wider field of view including low down where a small child might be. It is also much brighter in the dark than your eyes normally see.
This doesn’t mean that I am not also checking the surroundings but the backup camera is such a big improvement that I would not buy any car without one.
I've read that people ride more dangerously, and are tested by car drivers less carefully, when wearing a cycle helmet. Perhaps there's a similar effect here -- I think we do tend to rely on safety equipment and ignore due diligence.
Electronic KVM switches are pretty ancient tech. So getting access to the screen/input between different hardware modules shouldn't be that complicated. They just don't want to pay for the parts and additional complexity.
I'm less worried about somebody attacking more radio and more annoyed that radio stations have taken to using an information mechanism designed to tell me what I'm listening to and used it to serve ads.
Unless we are calling serving unwanted ads as an attack.
But in a broader sense, I am absolutely unsurprised that there is terrible security on automotive hardware and software. Things like this are one of my major personal concerns about self driving cars.
I think press releases say "replace hardware" when often they mean "you have to bring the car in and we're going to flash new firmware".
Sometimes though, firmware can't be flashed by dealers (due to not booting), and then they'll swap the unit, and the old unit will be flashed and given to someone else.
Might be worth hiding an airtag taped to the circuit board!
Asking every customer to come get a firmware upgrade is also called a "recall", which sounds like they have to stop selling the car and literally ask you to give it back. A lot of confused people were making fun of Tesla for that recently.
I mean, yes, but at the same time, album art is a pretty normal thing to have along with music. And actual cellular data is just radios, but on different wavelengths and whatnot. So it’s not really a stretch to imagine sending arbitrary data along with music over a radio wave. And some of that data is actually very useful, like the track name or artist name.
I don't know if that is true. Considering one of the issues with Mazda is text parsing. My ford doesn't transfer all the epg data from the radio module to the media unit and it requires a several hundred mb update when radio stations change their logo as people now expect radio station images since it is part of the dab standard.
The idea that an embedded system would validate files sent over the air using a filename extension is baffling to me. Extensions as a separate field from the name are a relic from the 70s. How much can checking the file for identification bytes really cost you?
I'm thinking somebody forgot a "." in their station logo and this is the result.
>Station Logos use file-naming conventions with version numbers (this is accomplished in the image client). This is useful for storing and cataloging station logo images in the receiver.
> It is critical that the station call sign be transmitted correctly. Station Logos follow a file-naming convention that includes the station call sign. This way the receiver can quickly read the call sign and determine if the Station Logo is already archived for immediate display. The filename for a Station Logo includes the station call sign, the program number, and the version number.
Sounds like they didn't sanitize their inputs. This is going to be a huge hassle for everyone involved.
I think someone might have found a way to deliver malware over the air just like tv's can get updates over the air. Unless you have a SDR listening and logging you wont spot the hacks, but digital transmissions make it easier to deliver multiple signals so you can deliver fake radio stations, tv programmes all sorts.
Hacking digital equipment is a very creative job as many will know and the one's who have the most experience are the military, been doing to other country's before consumer electronics made it possible to hack their own population.
I cant even say follow the money because alot of countries can and do print what they like.
Seems like the receiver should use values it can trust to index the logos. Some kind of simple hash would be trivial to implement and likely as effective.
If this is what could happen when you omit a dot, good luck if there's a malicious payload. Infotainment systems generally won't get the safety critical audits/oversight that other car systems would get.
For those curious, I skimmed the transcript and basically a "%" followed by a "I" in an audio file name cause a weird shutdown behavior on the infotainment system.
It’s just bad code and even worse error handling. The program runs a heartbeat that lets the rest of the car know all is well when things are running smoothly. When the program hangs, the heartbeat stops. When the heartbeat is interrupted for long enough, it’s programmed to reboot. With that in mind, when the owner queues up the podcast the system attempts to decode an unsanitized string (the podcast title) as if it were percent/URL encoded. When it encounters an error because “% I” is not a valid character reference, it hangs.
The worst part is that the car owner was told that a firmware update would “likely” fix it but they would have to pay for it.
Despite the fact that he confirmed it’s not C code and despite the fact that the failure case has spaces in it which make it invalid? What am I missing here?
I have a different model car and I've been noticing a similar thing since getting a new phone, where sometimes it will just freeze and reboot when bluetooth is being used, and I can't quite figure out why. I thought it was random but am now wondering if there's a pattern I haven't noticed yet.
Growing up in mid 90s Seattle the debate was always between KUBE 93.3 for hip-hop or 107.7 "The End" for alternative (KNDD). This debate destroyed friendships. Getting stuck on KUOW would be a kafka-esque purgatory.
Can you explain your objection? It looks like a sample area that the population has very little diversity and the station has more diversity then the population.
I don't get how you're reading that there's little diversity.
What I get from the bar graph is that not listeners skew male, educated, old, affluent, etc relative to the population. But I'm not sure how this even relates to the original question of whether there's something for everyone... even if there were no skew, what matters is what percent of the population listens. If it's less than 100%, there must not be something for everyone. Or if you look at it from another perspective, no demo is completely missing from the listener base therefore there's something for every demographic.
Run by Nathan Hale I remember it well. My buddies and I at Lakeside were inspired by this to try to get our school to run its own station, when that got denied we looked at options for building a pirate radio station but ultimately decided against it. We ended up building a recording studio at Lakeside instead.
I read a lot of people in these sorts of threads mention how they hate their car infotainment systems, and how they just wish it were Android Auto or CarPlay. I wanted to offer a little insight into it. I worked for an Auto Manufacturer for 7 years.
Infotainment systems are developed as a partnership (usually) between a vendor and the auto company. The hardware is often developed by a different company, I like to think of them as old-school stereo manufacturers: Bosch, Pioneer, etc.
The development cycle is somewhere between 12-36 months, and that's still quite a bit before the vehicle actually rolls off the assembly line.
Many customers like CarPlay or Android Auto. Both represent a cost to the manufacturer, and require ceding the design space to another company which is very visible to the customer. Brand is a big deal for car makers, and giving that space up is hard.
My most recent auto purchase is approaching 20 years ago. At the time, a dealer option was to have a GPS installed. That would have cost well north of $1,000 and occupied most of the available glovebox space.
My reasoning in rejecting the option was:
- That's a lot of money, and a lot of maps.
- External hardware (a smartphone, laptop, or tablet) is far more likely to provide both that functionality and be independently upgradable.
Instead I opted for a standard mains electrical outlet, which has proved its worth in recharging (or powering) any electrical device, even before USB charging became prevalent.
I feel much the same way with entertainment systems.
A tuner by itself is compatible with an external device having a small FM transmitter dongle. With 3.5mm or 6.35mm audio connector, any line-in device can feed the audio system, with controls on that device used. Bluetooth pairing is somewhat more complex though mostly works. It's about the extreme level of intelligence I'd want, and I'd avoid it if at all possible.
The present level of complexity is a major regression.
> are developed as a partnership (usually) between a vendor and the auto company.
Depending on the manufacturer this is true for most of the car nowadays, right? I watched an engineering teardown of the new all-electric Mustang Mach E recently and they even used different vendors (which produced parts of vastly different calibers of quality) for the rear and front motors[0].
Point taken about ceding the branding power to the vendor, especially when that vendor is big and scary like Apple or Google.
>Depending on the manufacturer this is true for most of the car nowadays, right?
I believe so. I was thinking specifically of the OS work and how it would be contracted out to a provider, and the hardware for the Infotainment would go out to another.
> I watched an engineering teardown of the new all-electric Mustang Mach E recently and they even used different vendors (which produced parts of vastly different calibers of quality) for the rear and front motors[0].
One of the interesting things about EVs is that a lot of traditional OEMs don't have the expertise in-house, so things like motors (which would normally be something in-house) end up being designed and manufactured by someone else.
Manufacturer custom infotainment systems are like the system on smart TV's: Crappy UX, buggy, abandoned (no updates) after a few years. Just like we all use Roku, Apple TV, or Fire, CarPlay and AA are preferred to a built-in infotainment sysem - better UX, loosely coupled to the car, etc. Discrete manufacturers should not try to become domain experts in this area. Get the basics done, let the user BYOD.
I'm constantly surprised by comments on a tech-savvy site such as HN by people who'd rather live in a slide rule world. I enjoy infotainment systems because I can listen to Spotify and podcasts and easily call/text people safely while driving on long haul drives, which I often find myself on. I have zero complaints about my system other than not having the level of customizability a nerd such was myself desires.
Me too, after using Android auto on one car it's a must-have on any new car for me. Better nav system, Google assistant, Spotify, podcasts, messages. Turns my car into a drive able phone.
My car has CarPlay and I've found it to be very disappointing, so much so that mainly I now do as you suggest and simply use the iPhone with a dash mount. I get the audio over Bluetooth, which seems to work well enough - it seems the Bluetooth implementation is older and better debugged.
The car's Bluetooth is satisfactory for taking calls.
Part of the problem is the car's unit, as it's Android and it crashes a lot when it's running CarPlay.
There is one amusing bug which might be related to this in Mazda 2018. If you add the same station twice to your favourites(easy to accidentally do) and then you click the station lower in the list the UI kicks you up and down in the list endlessly. This is because on each render it checks your station state and just pick the station with the same name randomly in the list.
Not that big a deal, just need to find the UART port and get out your old reliable RS232 cable, reverse engineer the device, then you should be able to change the radio station.
I think people have even managed to side load electron apps on it.
Mazda’s CMU may be the closest thing to DD-WRT in a car that you can get, but confess I’m not too familiar with what else might compete for that title.
Does it now support non ford based models as these are of Mazda's own design and at least the infotainment is not comparable to ford sync which runs qnx (or Windows CE embedded for older versions). The relationship ended in 2015 afaik.
My radio in my 2005 Chrysler Crossfire has a weird bug where if I set it to 92.5 KQRS it works fine for about a minute and then suddenly changes station to some country station ~105 that I don’t have as any sort of preset. It’s done this since I bought the car in 2010 and never had a similar behavior with any other stations. It’s really bizarre.
Sounds like an RDSB issue where the station is broadcasting an alternate frequency AF and the radio is switching to, because the field strength of that AF is stronger than the one you are coming from. There are three fixes:
* You enable "LOCAL" mode, this should ignore those AFs broadcasted by stations which would switch to another station broadcasting a different program (it's actually more complicated, for brevity simplified). Not all head units HU offer this setting.
To add another bit of anecdata, if either station has their PI mis-configured, you can get handoff without being in the AF list. 1st and 3rd character matching rings a bell.
Seen it happen in the UK with RDS and head units tuning to the higher powered (mis-configured) station.
I have a Ford Ranger 2020 and I never listen to radio, always listen on Bluetooth. For some reason it switches to an AM station (that I never listen to) from my Bluetooth and shows a TA icon (even when TA is toggled off, and it's not even used in my country, and the AM station has nothing to do with TA).
After reading this I started to wonder if it might be something similar/related.
I even thought of removing the antenna as I never use radio anyway. Have you done anything about your issue that you can recommend?
I'm certain the TA toggle is broken in my 2019 Hyundai i30N. Disabled every radio-related setting, somehow an FM station managed to force the system to switch to it from Android Auto every 5 minutes. TA is also not used in my country. Infuriating.
Interesting… I wonder if maybe they are wrongly broadcasting an alternate frequency. I wonder if there’s an easy way to inspect the radio stations “metadata”.
I have done some basic fiddling with SDR but am not at all competent.
I have to ask, why do Americans always refer to radio stations with a 4-letter code? Most places are just the frequency and the station name (94.2 The Rock, 98.8 Radio Hauraki, etc) but I'm pretty sure every single time I have seen an American refer to a radio station they say something like "KUOW 94.9".
The FCC mandates that stations have either a 4 or 3 letter call sign. Ones on the west coast start with K, east of that is W. Since they all have to identify themselves to the FCC with these call signs, it's convenient to advertise the channel with that name as well. Not every station does this, some like to not talk about the call sign at all in their name, but most advertise with it for simplicity.
>Since they all have to identify themselves to the FCC with these call signs, it's convenient to advertise the channel with that name as well
Not just that, it's required by federal law to announce the callsign once an hour, in both radio and OTA television. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#United_... (If you watch sports broadcasts on OTA TV you might notice a subtle overlay pop over the content at the top of the hour)
Made more sense in the analog era, when tuning was done by twiddling a potentiometer and you never quite knew exactly what frequency you were on.
Though the identification you hear may be that of the originating station in the case of a simulcast.
Many years back Clear Channel would simulcast hurricane coverage across most of their stations in Florida, resulting in them all identifying as "Newsradio 610 WIOD Maimi". (Though a YouTube search suggests iHeartMedia now pitch- and speed-bends to say all the legal identifiers very quickly.)
> Other stations downplay their call letters, in favor of an easily remembered slogan. This is also the standard practice in most other countries.
I have NO idea what the radio call letters are for any radio in Romania. Nobody I know does. We just know them as RockFM, MagicFM, EuropaFM, RadioZu, whatever.
It probably has to do with the US requirement to announce the call sign at least once an hour. Regular listeners will associate it with the station due to this.
There's probably a good reason for it but I don't work for the FCC so I couldn't tell you. Iirc TV stations have to do the same thing every hour by showing the station name briefly.
Not all American stations have names aside from their call sign. In the Seattle Area, KUOW is just KUOW. The dance station at 89.5 calls itself C89.5, and almost nobody uses their call sign of KNHC.
On the other hand, the dance station in the Miami area calls itself "Revolution 93.5". It really depends upon the station and the market.
In many places you can't even use the frequency as a reference because it changes depending on region. On my regular 100-km drive in Belgium Classic21 gets three different frequency. But it's just Classic21, it doesn't have a code name.
I recently went car shopping and the only aspect of the software I was interested in was how hard it was to activate Apple CarPlay. My assumption is that Apple/Google will have infinitely higher software quality standards than any car manufacturer, so I’ll outsource to them as early as possible.
Apple CarPlay had a recent bug for a few months that broke wireless connection unless you did a full reset (recently patched). Great when it works though.
It's interesting because this is all over this thread, but it's not actually a string interpolation issue. It's an issue with percent encoding[0]. They talk about it likely being an interpolation issue at first but end up ruling it out.
The page reads "A few weeks ago cellphone companies — and KUOW — switched to a 5G signal." What's the link between 5G and an FM radio station, anyone has an idea?
Per the geekwire article linked above, one of the local Mazda dealerships blamed 5G for causing the issue. Apparently that's the popular thing to do these days.
Tangentially related, an old ham radio operator related his advice for putting up an antenna on your house: "Put the antenna up, but don't connect it to anything for a few weeks. Don't even run the cable yet. When people complain about it making their fillings vibrate or garage door open or whatever, you can show them that it isn't even connected to anything. This helps filter out the people who have nothing better to do than to complain."
It has nothing to do with 5G, which is a cell technology. 5G has low (600-900MHz) medium (microwave) and high ("mm wave"), and is far away from broadcast FM frequencies (USA is 88-108MHz)
My wild guess would be that there's something in the HD broadcast causing the issue. Something as simple as a metadata field being too long could trigger a bug in the headunit firmware. The HD broadcast spec seems non trivial and largely closed off so it wouldn't surprise me that there'd be buggy implementations.
Growing up in the 90s you could tell when digitification came in - radios and tvs started to take forever to change stations. Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.
I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.
More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?
I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast, it's surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some sort of warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment system while it's booting up. This Kia has none of that. Audio is immediately present and tuning to other stations is immediate as well. It's almost a little unnerving how quickly audio comes out since we've always been used to slower FM radios, CD players, satellite radio, and music streaming apps that just take short moment to go to the next station or song.
Also, one thing to remember is that FM radios have been "digital" for quite some time. I'm not talking about HD radio or DAB receivers. FM demodulation chips have existed for a long time (TDA7000 came out in 1983). They handle tuning, demodulation, and amplification all-in-one. The only slow part would be whatever microcontroller has to manage the interface in the receiver. You can even get FM transceiver chips dirt cheap like the one that is in the infamous Baofeng ham radio. It's got one chip doing all of the radio work.
My Toyota does the worst of both worlds -- the audio portion comes up immediately, with whatever volume setting it had when it was shut off.
The volume knob doesn't respond until about 8 seconds later.
I'm sure you can imagine situations (like in a driveway such as mine, where the neighbor's bedroom window directly overlooks it) where what was appropriate at 3pm when I got home, is not appropriate at 3am next time I start the car...
This is even worse on my Dodge. Like yours, the audio comes in immediately, and the volume knob may or may not work for a time. The bluetooth takes absolutely forever to connect so it defaults to another input, typically FM radio. The bluetooth input also has no volume boost setting so I have the volume turned up quite a bit, thus the radio is loud as hell.
All in all, this means that I regret it if I forget to turn the volume down when I get out of the car.
Sounds like the same system as in my Subaru. I don't even know how you can design a system to emit audio and and not be volume controllable for like millions of CPU cycles. And you'd think with like about two dozen buttons on the steering wheel, one of them would allow you to mute control the phone mic when your are on a conference call.
> I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast, it's surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some sort of warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment system while it's booting up
They simply never power of the Head Units, even if they go dark. And I am not talking of the constant power feature head units head since forever but the CPU actually doing stuff. Most of the time the satellite data is held fresh to give you an immediate position fix if requested.
If you completely detach it from power you would notice that there is a startup time.
It does. I have a Subaru with a head unit that stays powered on, and it has ran itself down more frequently than any other car I've had. The explanation I got from the dealer was that the residual drain on the battery is much higher, so there's less capacity to start the car. I keep a lithium ion jump starter charged and in the car, and I've had to use it a few times. If you can keep each and every OTHER draw on the battery down, it's fine.
The biggest thing that helped was realizing that the battery dies when the key fob was hung up with our other keys. Coincidentally, this was exactly the right distance for the car to constantly wake and sleep itself as it thought the key fob was entering and leaving its vicinity. Between adequate key fob faraday cages, making sure the interior lights are in the automatic or off position, and making sure all the doors are closed we haven't had a dead battery in a while.
You’re totally correct. I just wanted to clarify the various ways that radio can decode FM digitally. Please correct me if I’m mistaken. I’m still real new to this world.
Does your by any chance have remote onlocking or nearby unlocking features (or are the radio modules installed by default)? Some cars start the boot sequence well before you enter the key/car for the infotainment systems.
Maybe you're thinking of a different chip for digital FM? The TDA7000 chip is completely analog, with R-C filters, oscillators, mixers, a variable capacitor and varactor diodes for tuning, and so forth.
> I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.
I don't think that's much of a contributor. It's just really easy now to bring your own music (or podcast, or audiobook, or...) to the car with you via your phone, and I suspect people generally prefer to listen to their own curated music (or music a streaming service has curated for them) rather than putting up with radio ads, songs they don't like, etc. Just about the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music, but you can do that with streaming services too. I guess some people like to listen to talk radio (NPR and the like), but most of that stuff is also available online.
I still have a fairly old car with an analog radio, and I haven't used it in at least 5 (but probably closer to 10) years.
Ditto for TV: the on-demand experience via Netflix (etc.) is just so much better than watching regular network or cable TV. Why would I subject myself to having to be in front of the TV at a particular time on a particular day to watch what I want to watch? Honestly, it baffles me that the standard cable TV model still even exists. Obviously the Comcasts of the world still make enough money off of it to make it worthwhile to sell, but it just seems like an entirely poor experience no matter how you look at it.
I have to agree with epivosism about the TV experience. Waiting for the digital decoder to catch an I-frame slows down browsing immensely and it's just a lot less fun. Tivos are better, because they have multiple tuners and can scan the channels above/below the one you're on, which helps a lot. But it's still not as good as pushing the button on an analog tuner's remote and getting a new signal in < 1/15 of a second.
Maybe your comparison of live vs streaming TV is skewed because it takes so long to start a new stream that it's hard to imagine browsing content directly, instead of trying to imagine the content from movie posters.
Streaming video doesn't need to use I-frames for sync, there's a technique called intra refresh they can use to limit the error. That also helps with the nasty "pumping" artifacts you get on static images.
Some codecs do reorder frames for efficiency though (H.264 can be 10 frames out of order but realistically only goes up to 3), which means you have to decode a few before displaying the start frame.
That said, I recommend listening to college radio wherever you are. I truly love the station from my hometown, WHRW broadcasting from Binghamton University. What a strange and beautiful melange.
As a counter-point, I also have an older car with an analog radio and 100% prefer to listen to it while on the road than to listen "to my own music from the phone" (tangentially, I don't even have my own music on the phone, nor a Spotify-like subscription).
I found out that listening to the radio gets you lots of excellent unknown-unknowns when it comes to music, especially if you listen to public radio (which, in my country, has almost no ads). For example, during my last trip I remember that tuning in to the arts-oriented public radio station got me the chance of listening to some great tango classical music which I would have never thought of purposefully listen to.
I'm 100% with you when it comes to TV, the cable signal broke or something (some decoding stuff, can't tell) a couple of years ago and I didn't bother calling in the TV cable guys to look at it and fix it. It is quite excellent. We do have Netflix, which we spend some time on but not that much lately, plus I do have a TV-sports station subscription which I use for major events (like the Olympics right now). For sports I have to be careful though not to visit any sports website that day in order not to have the results revealed too early (I generally do not watch the events live).
The mindless chatter of radio hosts is still enjoyable for me. After a long day of work, getting to listen to replays of which ever prank call they made in the morning while trying to merge through traffic is a nice way to unwind and begin the evening. Plus I appreciate their small attempts to get community together for events and do ridiculous giveaways.
Jeff Gilbert, of Brain Pain fame, is the only DJ I ever enjoyed listening to. He was always giving away tickets or albums via a contest. One of his contests was "what is your name?" The next week, he announced that was too easy, and he was going to amp it up with "spell your name". His fake commercials were great comedy.
I tracked him down one time, and asked if his shows were recorded. He said nope. I had made a few recordings of his shows, and sadly the rest is surely lost to history.
I can't count the number of times I had to stop in the middle of an interesting NPR story because I'd arrived at my destination and didn't exactly have time to sit around in my car until it ended. I never looked back from podcasts once I got into them.
I have one very good use for analog radio, which is the 50kW AM radio station that does traffic notices in my city every ten minutes. It's often more accurate and better described than looking at red lines on Google maps for traffic jams, and provides other unique local knowledge of construction, temporary detours, etc.
A lot of people say this has nothing to do with it. But for me personally, even when I started watching TV on the computer - which was always a specific Show or Movie, I would still "channel surf" the regular TV as a way to kill time. But once the digital boxes came out in the late 90s/early 00s, it would take 1-2 seconds to switch stations. Longer than I would have been on that station at all while surfing. This completely ruined it for me and I never channel surfed again.
I stopped channel surfing the day we got a digital box. I used to be pretty fast on the remote with the keypad, and could cycle through a number of channels. I forgot how disappointing that digital box was.
I channel surfed right up until getting my first TiVo box (probably around 2002?). That killed it dead for me, by completely changing how I consumed TV (for the better).
> Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing.
Frustratingly, my Toyota Corolla will start up the radio immediately, but the on/off/volume control doesn't work for several seconds. If someone in my family left the radio blasting, I'm left mashing the button repeatedly until it kicks in. Ugh.
When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx Company (you Seattlites know who that is). Their ads all sounded exactly the same, and I grew to hate TSC. I switched to listening to KNHC which never ran ads because I hated TSC. I stopped listening to the radio entirely when I could play cassettes, and later USB sticks.
Fast forward to today, and I recently bought a streaming radio component for my stereo. I programmed in the local station URLs, turned one on, and was aghast - TSC was still running the same goddamned ads, again and again and again. For 40 years.
So much for streaming Seattle radio stations. Blech.
P.S. You people from California know what I mean. Remember Cal Worthington? He drove me away from watching late night TV. I moved to Seattle to get away from Cal Worthington. Then he opened up a dealership in Seattle. Oh, misery. The DVR kept me out of the insane asylum.
I couldn't stand the Cal Worthington commercials, but I'll remember them fondly because a sweet, elderly neighbor with dementia misunderstood the repeated phrase at the end of the song, and would loudly sing along with some rather improper words that were VERY funny to a kid.
In addition to our friends in the diamond business, we also had Jack Roberts Appliance who was less offensive than the others.
For some reason I never minded Jack Roberts. I can't explain it.
But I dearly loved the old Ivar's commercials. That man knew how to advertise. I'd always go out of my way to eat at Ivar's just because. He was always "fresh" :-)
Rainier Beer also knew how to do ads right. I always picked Rainier because of their amusing commercials.
> When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx Company (you Seattlites know who that is).
That's the trick. Everyone in the country knows them, but thinks they're local because the ads are so boring. It's a chain!
The main "friend" phrase sounds exactly the same as 40 years ago.
I know he sounds like a nice guy. He probably is. But overdoing anything becomes torture after a while. I'll never buy anything from his company, and I won't listen to any radio stations that incessantly run his ads.
The same thing happens when hit radio plays the same hit song 3 times an hour. It isn't long before one starts to hate the song. Decades later, I still hate those songs. I used to like the new "Rasputin" cover. Radio killed it dead for me.
Can you imagine being one of those aging rock bands on tour, and all your fans want to hear are the songs you played 50 years ago? I'd slit my throat.
> More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?
This is the natural end result of a totally free market.
Step 1: Competion, therefore consumers are looked after
Step 2: Some companies are "winning" the competition more than others, some of them buy the "losing" companies.
Repeat until there's just one big player and they can charge whatever they want for whatever they can be bothered making available to people.
You have to hope the FTC steps in and stops one company just buying all of its competition forever.
I stopped listening to the radio when I realized I was spending half the time listening to commercials. (99% Commercials are complete mind rot or appeals to emotion btw; if any advertising moguls read this, no one wants to listen to bad jokes and jingles. Just tell me about the product and I might buy it)
The worst are the radio ad with car horns. I'd say they should be illegal but my local police dept is now running anti-DUI ads on the radio complete with 'police are pulling you over' siren blips. So that ship has sailed.
I absolutely hate when I get an ad with a siren or car honk, just makes my anxiety shoot way up. It’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve stopped listening to the radio from time to time. Even if I’m not driving… :/
It really is awful, and it seems like most people just don't care, or don't even know that they could care. Perceived latency was a bit motivation for me to ditch macOS last year and go back to Linux. I haven't got benchmarks to prove how it felt to me, but it felt like everything has become spongy and asynchronous. Even with a decked out iMac and fast SSD, it feel like applications don't launch immediately. There's enough lag time that I sit for a second thinking 'did I double click or not? Did it launch and then crash? Oh, here it comes'. Keyboard input feels laggy.
I hate that more and more things are becoming software controlled. "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" is not a law that I want to apply to machines that can and should continue to function instantaneously.
After the digital TV transition in the U.S. I didn't use my set for a few years since I didn't have a converter and didn't care enough to do anything about it.
One night we were hit with some severe storms and I decided it was worth it to have an antenna and converter for emergencies. Did some research, purchased a box from a friend and a decent antenna, hooked everything up, turned it on, and 5 minutes later tore it all down again.
I'd gone too long without it and lost all tolerance for commercials.
The "free ad-supported television" offerings are actually pretty decent. It's a first-party software profit-center, so the teams making them have every incentive and capability to give them a halfway decent UX. Then on the flip side no-one actually advertises on them, so instead of ad breaks you get 2 minutes of relaxing music and nature montages every 15-ish minutes. Honestly preferable to Netflix's "go-go-go, don't-miss a beat, quick -- next episode is starting!" style.
(My experience is with Vizio's WatchFree+, but the shows are syndicated so I don't think there's much difference from one offering to the next)
When you got to a new town, I seem to recall pulling a booklet out of the glove compartment, finding the right page, finding the right frequency for the station you're after, and tuning manually to that frequency.
"Punch a button" was only an option once you'd already saved that preset - no difference to the later digital version.
Even some 70's era stereos had that capability -- my grandparents had a mid 1970's Cadillac with an analog tuner, but it also had a button you could press and you could watch the tuning needle scan until it found a a station.
I was looking for a link to one, and it turns out that even some 1950's radios had a "wonderbar" signal seeker:
> punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.
I think you're missing the part where the day to day changing conditions mean you have to switch the station then either accept the static or fine tune the station every couple of days. The switching was instant, but I still had to spend time tweaking it and count that as latency-to-ready.
Especially in the cars, without the automatic fine tuning you needed to adjust the frequency depending on where you were at the time.
The way you make money on the way down is different than the way up. Radio was a sleepy backwater medium that was mostly advertising for record companies. When deregulation happened, it became a hot, disruptive market where talk and new music genres grew and grew.
The train slowed down in the late 90s and consolidation of syndication and station ownership picked up. Now a few companies own everything and they’ll pump every dollar until the spectrum is turned over to cellular.
Freaking incredible. You could physically switch to any station instantly.
punch a button and the new station would immediately start playing
The digital-enhanced FM stuff in cars now, like what's being referenced in the article, isn't laggy in my experience. Not quite as instant as a full analog radio, but it's as snappy as any other digital FM tuner dating back to the dawn of digital FM tuners in the 1970s or whatever.
The FM signal is still analog; there's just some digital metadata embedded in it that receivers can optionally demodulate. In my experience the audio starts playing immediately and then the digital metadata (track name, thumbnail) pops up a bit later. So you can still flip through stations with little perceptible lag.
FWIW, I'm the type of guy who keeps CRTs around for his retro systems because he enjoys true zero-lag gaming.
Growing up in the 90s my experience was that you turned a knob until you heard what you wanted to hear, and as you traveled you occasionally had to jiggle the knob as the signal shifted. I don't remember any time where a delay was introduced for terrestrial radio.
I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.
While I usually don't bother scanning for new stations when I go to a new town, that's because I'm listening to music (or podcasts) with my phone. I don't even listen to broadcast radio in my home town.
About the only time I listen to broadcast radio is in a rental car and that's only because I don't bother pairing my phone with the car unless I'm going to be in it for a few days (and I always unpair and/or reset the pairing settings when I return it).
There was a great period in the mid-late ‘90s where TVs just worked when you connected to cable or antenna, no set top box, tuning was near instantaneous and there was enough enrichment that even station ID and program info could come in with the broadcast.
Pity it was a complicated modulation and waste of spectrum.
I remember those analog tuners and I hated them, you could never get the frequency exactly right and over time it would "wander" so you had to retune. I will take digital FM tuners over analog ones any day, perfect tuning, no wandering, easy channel changing and much better quality.
Also I own a 2012 BMW and its infotainment system works just fine. If the car is coming from deep sleep it takes like 5 seconds to start but it shows the BMW logo and it's a nice touch. With a warm start it's on immediately. Channel changing is also fast, not instant but with the benefit of not hearing any static in between.
Not to say all cars are perfect, I have seen cars with terrible infotainment systems which are slow and buggy, that's just a thing to keep on your list to inspect before buying a new car.
Did they do that in order to make room for the Internet? I assume the channels switched instantaneously because they were broadcasting every single one to your home simultaneously. But maybe they wanted more room on the existing wires to store Internet traffic? So they changed the channel change button to ping a server to ask for the other channel to be broadcast. Could anyone confirm if my understanding is accurate? Either way, it definitely ruined the TV viewing experience. But for the Internet, it was worth it.
Digital over-the-air TV works similarly to analog over-the-air, but it's slower to change channels because the TV has to wait for a frame that isn't a delta from a previous frame to display a coherent image. That's just sort of par for the course with modern digital compression, you could increase the number of such frames but then the compression gets less effective and you'd still have more of a delay than with analog.
Oh I didn't know that over the air TV broadcasts use MPEG. I'm surprised that digital over the air even decodes at all considering how poor I remember the quality being in my childhood. I was referring more to cable.
> I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline
In all fairness its partly because of the compression algorithms used like Forward Error Correction FEC and progressive frames vs. immediate frames which simply takes some time to construct an audible / visible representation of the digital data.
The degradation in responsiveness happened, but not for the reasons you state. In the 90s and 2000s, consolidation of media company hit a breaking point where one company owns the vast majority of stations in each metro area, they go on commercial at the same time, and you can't surf the way you used to.
It would be very cool to replace the stock radio with a software-defined radio receiver. I really doubt vehicle manufacturers would be interested in offering that, though.
SDR is not really the answer. To make a good radio requires high quality RF filtering, whether it be an SDR or a discrete design. The SDR part only replaces the IF stage and Detector.
If you say so. I'm having a lot of fun with a bottom-dollar setup. There is no perceptible tuning delay and there's a lot of functionality in such a small space. The parent comment was referring to the lack of responsiveness as a result of the digital age, and a lot of the real-time thinking behind SDRs can be applied to take back control and be able to read different competing radio formats and receive on various bands. The problems with the data parsing are sometimes baked in to ICs and software, but the whole idea behind SDRs is to separate the act of receiving radio and decoding it so that there is less friction to changing how it works.
It's also expensive. The infotainment is the gateway to whatever you'd likely want to do and with the emergence of CarPlay and Android Auto, your "radio" is updating constantly.
The actual circuit to make a radio work is also tiny. Some early smartphones included a radio tuner in the hardware.
The problem however is the RF interference generated by the central processor and the display. Adding an AM or FM radio is easy. The hard part is adding the necessary shielding.
It can't be that expensive. The Pioneer Supertuner III came out in the 1980s and it is considered a state-of-the-art receiver even today. If they could put it in a < $500 head unit 35 years ago, it should cost a nickel today.
47 CFR § 2.1(c): Harmful Interference. Interference which endangers the functioning of a radionavigation service or of other safety services or seriously degrades, obstructs, or repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunication service operating in accordance with [the ITU] Radio Regulations.
As someone who just traded in their 2019 Mazda CX-5, this doesn't surprise me at all. I couldn't wait for my lease to end. The car was great, but the infotainment system was horrible. It would take 5+ minutes to boot up from a cold start during which time you couldn't change the volume, mute the radio, change inputs, or even change the station. I learned quickly to always change the station off Howard Stern when exiting the car in case my daughter was a passenger on the next trip. On long trips you would have to three finger reset the head-unit because it would just stop responding, play at full volume, only play out of one channel after a GPS announcement, and other random oddities. I brought it back to the dealer multiple times to get firmware updates only to be told "Yeah that's how it was designed".
Folks are saying the radio station transmitted side-band data that resulted in the effective bricking. Others are saying that's not the issue, it's the software/firmware in the radios.
On page 20, We see that images need not have an extension, because the transport stream is required to specify a mime-type. If one can prove that somehow that mime-type was not set, then perhaps the radio station and/or the technology provider for their broadcast transmission equipment could be held liable. I'm not sure how the process of discovery would look for something like that.
Seems more likely Mazda could be in the position to sustain significant warranty claims in court if their hardware is found to be defective, or their testing & QE procedures to be lacking.
I see several comments expressing that they haven't used the radio in years. I still use mine every time I get into my mid-2000s Honda! I'd be cursing the tech gods if they locked me into a single station! I guess I'm not the only one or nobody would have noticed the bug.
My knowledge and following of music is spotty, so radio is key to my discovery of new songs. On long road trips I tend to find good new (to me) songs, as well as get amused by some weird ones. A few highlights from the odd but fun stuff:
- Driving through rural Ohio at midnight I randomly seeked to a station playing "Clean Up the Ghetto by the Philidelphia International All Stars.
- On a Sunday morning in southern Mississippi I heard some happy old dance music accompanied by the jolly but incomprehensible New Orleans drawl of the DJ.
- Driving through West Virginia I heard "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" 3 times on the same morning on different stations.
I don't road trip extremely often but surfing the radio is something I look forward to when I do! I usually get a taste of the local culture and a window outside of my urban tech bubble.
My initial bet would be that something is causing a kernel panic in the control plane side of the radio. This is then leading to the UI not being able to pass any messages before the system locks up. Watchdog timer expires and resets everything.
This is based on the line "...causing radios to reboot when they connect to KUOW’s 94.9 FM signal."
The 5G twist is pure BS. These cars (Circa 2016) have no modem that connects directly to the head-unit, and if they do are a separate module that's 3G only.
My theory is that the radio station sent some unicode characters on their RDS feed that crashes the system, it probably cached it (These head-units run on Linux, and is well known in some hacker circles), so now it's in some kind of loop.
It won't be the first time that RDS feeds with some unusual combinations crash the head-units.
If Mazda has a new firmware, these can be upgraded via the USB ports by booting into a recovery mode.
Apparently the radio evaluates image files based on the extension on their name, and not by looking at the image headers. If you send a radio station logo with no file extension it gets stuck in a permanent reboot loop. :-(
This is an example of how Tesla gambled and won in developing an integrated information display. One might think making an electric car is challenging enough that not relying on an outside supplier for the entertainment system is foolishly enlarging the problem. Instead it was legacy car makers with many separate systems with separate hardware and software that ended up victims of a chip shortage and lack up OTA upgrades.
A remember a problem in the past where use of % in metadata would bork some car radios due to an unescaped string being passed to printf.
The Sirius menus on my wife’s Subaru have been broken for years due to some problem with the guide format changing. Sirius don’t care because you can still tune to any of their stations with the dial, but there are hundreds.
>A few weeks ago cellphone companies — and KUOW — switched to a 5G signal. But many cars are still only equipped with 3G and glitch when faced with the newer 5G
Sorry but what? FM radio station switched to 5G phone standard? And supposedly the 3G receiver in the car is affected? shakes head
It’s not what happened in this situation, but it’s not hard to imagine one that might. Perhaps the receiver software requires a regular data update via the 3G network, and when 3G shuts down the receiver doesn’t work anymore?
Honda Ridge lines ( older style) navigation system's clocks went out to lunch in January, 2022 and will not show correct time until GPS satellites do some sort of time sync in August. No fix until that happens.
We own a 2014 CX-5 near Seattle, and it doesn't appear to have been affected. Perhaps you needed to be tuned to that station in that time-frame to get the bug.
Oh come on, it was more as a joke. But there are certain kind of people who buy Mazdas, usually upper middle class that appreciate the quality Mazda provides. Their cars are reliable and most ergonomic of all. It's not hard to see that most of these people listen to NPR. No?
Definitely a safety issue IMHO. It's common on the road to see signs that say "accident ahead, tune to XXX AM" or similar emergency warnings. If you can't tune in to be warned of danger ahead it's a bit of a problem.
These are conveniences. Yes, backup cameras have been mandated for ~7 years now in the US. One can surely still drive safely without looking at a screen.
A backup camera is more than a convenience. It gives you visibility that you simply cannot get without it. Unless the rear half of your car is transparent, every time you back up you do so with a blind spot directly where you're driving. There's a reason these cameras are mandatory on new builds.
Funny you suggest that -- I ran into a similar frustration with a Ford running Microsoft SYNC (voice command system) in 2008. If you hit the phone button while a phone was not set up via bluetooth, that would disable the rest of the sound system (i.e. anything other than telling you it can't find a phone). No matter which button you pushed, it couldn't switch away from the phone.
Only by stopping and restarting the engine could you get out. [1]
I thought by purchasing a car that I owned it but boy was I wrong. It will hopefully be the last time I spend more than 40k just to rent something from the manufacturer.
If something like this was present on a web app it would have 10 different tests so it wouldn't happen. How come the car/infotainment system isn't subject to the same requirements like other softwares? Is there something obvious i am missing?
This is the first time I’ve seen “a web app” used as a shining beacon of stability.
In short, you can’t test a negative. It’s easy to test “when the car receives a transmission in X format, Y happens”, but not “there does not exist a transmission format X such that when the car receives it, Y happens”.
Memory safe languages can help here, as would fuzzing. But the only true test would be a formal verification, which is a real pain (and even then you’re only testing against a single Y).
What you really want is “there does not exist any transmission that could result in any bad behavior”, which can only really be tested in that large scale fuzzer we call Production.
