hey guys.. they are working on a patch right now

=)

read this!...


MOD.. make this a sticky... people will be asking a lot about it

http://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/pubs/SN/A07030A.PDF

 

That is so lame. The law changed in August of 2005. I can see why they needed to patch the '06 versions, they probably were starting to produce them when the law changed, but there is no excuse for the 2007 DVDs and NAVIs to not have been built with the right algorithm in the first place, and no excuse for not having the patch for the earlier models available long ago.

Alpine sucks.

 

was just about to say the same thing... HFLame

 

I see that bulletin contains the predicted, annoying "set your time manually" workaround, which completely defeats the purpose of automatic, GPS-based time and time zone detection (and which was one of the reasons I upgraded to a 2005 TL).

Now that the bug has truly hit, does anyone have knowledge of when Acura will get around to releasing a true fix in the form of a firmware patch?

 

Was kinda wondering about that this morning.

 

Is it me or are our posting to thread times off as well? (the time on the left that says when we post)

Can a moderator comment on that? Was I suppose to do something to my account settings when the DST hit?

 

I called Acura Customer Service. I really called to find out what Acura was doing going foward, so that we do not have to continue to manually fix the clock.
The person that answered my called was clueless. He insisted that:
1. If you manually update it now, the problem will not re-appear.
2. The change in DST problem only applies to now, not in Nov 2007, and not again next year. This is a one-time event.
3. There was no supervisor that I could talk to.
4. This event was a surprise, and Acura did not know about it.
5. This situation does not require a patch/fix/upgrade, because it is not a problem.

It was like talking to my cable company's customer service rep.

 

Haha!... When I call my cable company when my internet is down... Did you try to clear you browser cache? Did you try to delete your cookies? Look the freakin light on the modem shows I don't have a connection.... OMG!!!!

Clueless customer service
Cable Companies
Cell phone companies

Should we add Acura to the list?

 

It would be nice that our clocks changed yesterday. But it only takes 1 minute to adjust yourself. Also when changing the time turn auto DST off, so your clock doesn't change in 3 weeks.

 

I agree that it's only a 1 minute fix...for now, but that's not the point.

I expect that the customer service rep to be better informed today.
I expect that a car with so much technology, would have a 'fix' available.

 

Yea right! Clearly you expect too much

1. Customer Service Rep should have been more informed.
2. Auto manufacturers have not had to go back and free upgrade customer interfaces until recently. It is obvious that they have not thought everything through yet. At least they did put the manual overide in the system.

 

IMO, this 1 min fix is shamed.

I enjoyed that my car could update its time wherever it is across the states.

I don't want to change 4 times a year or twice a year.

With this type of "high" tech vehicle, Acura isn't doing the good job on their products, Acura should fire their CIO and project managers.

 

As BATMACURA said in the now closed DST Patches thread, it is embarassing that GM has a fix for this and Acura does not. Of course, GM being an American car company might have something to do with this since Japan is obviously unaffected by changes in US DST policy . . .

 

It was only 1 month ago I had a car that I had to adjust the clock manually myself. This isn't much of a big deal to me. It took me about 1 minute to do it manually.

 

My Linux PC also showed the time as being an hour behind. I keep it pretty well patched, but there may not have been any recent updates for this. Maybe Acurazine was hosted on a similar system. Then again, Linux is a free OS supported by volunteers and the TL is a $35K luxury car with good customer service ...at least partially designed in a country which does not practice DST.

P.S. The website appears fixed now. (11pm Monday night)

 

Oh, I know, but when people know more about the car their buying then the sale rep selling it. A CSR, we can be lucky that they can answer the phone.

If this was a d/l navi system sure. But it's DVD based and Acura gets their product from others. Also North America is the only one's who changed DST, a small portion for Alpine.

 

The fact that TL navi requires software patch to deal with DST is an indication that TL GPS is not set up to receive system clock from the GPS but instead generates timing info by itself. Many of us may have noticed that our cell phones were imediately updated with new DST and that is because they are in sync with GPS timing. I only hope that there is no clock jitter in the TL. If there is, timig info may be inaccurate.

 

On Sunday morning, my cell phone showed the correct time, so I though just like my cell phone, my TL would receive the correct time when I started her up. I was a little disappointed that I had to manually fix it myself. I didn't realize that the time was generated by the vehicle internally, instead of receiving a time update signal via the GPS. It's not that bad, but it's something that should have been addressed by Acura.

 

how they they dun know about it!!

look at the 1st post =)

they made a bulletin themselve! LOL

 

that is not true...

the TL's GPS is programmed... to receive Greenwich Mean Time off the SAT.

the software itself is suppose to determine the timezone based on the range of cordinates we are in.

and hard coded when DST is... the general rule...

but since they pass the law to change that.. the system doesn't know until software is updated...

just like WINDOWS XP or watever.. if you realize.. there is a patch for new DST =)

 

http://www.in.honda.com/Rjanisis/pubs/SN/B07030A.PDF

Has the same information as Honda Service News except you have the Acura logo.

 

TRUE!!! I drove from Cleveland (EST) to Chicago (CST) some time last year, and as I crossed into Central time zone the clock automatically adjusted -1 hour. On my way back that same night, the clock again adjusted +1 hour at approximately that same location.

The TL's clock is adjusted by GPS satellites depending on the car's location.

 

My impression is that a lot of IT people think that the new DST dates are a one-year experiment. At my firm, for example, the IT people keep saying, "This year Extended DST is in place." Wrong: It's just plain DST, and the law is permanent UNLESS Congress changes it back. The law does require a study of whether the new DST dates save energy, so it's possible that we might go back to the old way in the future, but for the time being, the new dates are to continue. It seems to me that a lot of IT people are ignoring that part of it and acting as though they need a one-time patch to tell computers to start DST on March 11, 2007, and end it on November 4, 2007, when what they should be doing is programming computers to start DST on the second Sunday in March and end it on the first Sunday in November.

(How times change....I don't remember any sort of fussing back in 1986 when they changed it from the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in April, but I guess in those days of DOS we had to set all the clocks manually anyway.)

 

Just to clearify your statement. GPS sends out one time to everybody (UTC/GMT). You unit in your cars makes offsets based on location (it knows what timezone you're in) or what the DST settings should be makes makes the offsets. GPS does not send individual time to each user. This is impossible because your GPS does not transmit to the satellite and only receives time (UTC time).

 

This manual change the time stuff on a car with NAVI is complete IMO. Its about as useful as a visit from our friend Mr. Hanky...the Christmas Poo.

 

It's cool that you don't mind this, you're lucky, and don't have anything to worry about with respect to this change.

Some of us, however, do mind it. One of the reasons I upgraded from a 2000 to a 2005 TL is that I feel it is ludicrous for a clock that is connected to a high-end computer navigation system to require any manual intervention. It gets the exact time from the GPS constellation, and knows where it is, so it can apply local time zone rules. This worked great until Congress changed the Daylight Saving Time rules in 2005.

Now, I either have to regress to manually controlling the time, or live with it being wrong about four weeks out of the year. I find this unacceptable, as do some others who care about this level of detail. I also purchased and installed a navigation system update DVD about two months ago, which gave Alpine well over a year to incoporate the new rules, and they failed to do so.

I think it is entirely reasonable of me to expect Acura and/or Alpine to fix this in a prompt manner, without additional cost to me.

 

These analogies to cell phones are misleading. Cell phone signals are short range, and come from local towers, so the transmitter and receiver are in the same time zone. The cell network therefore tells your phone the local time, and the phone doesn't need to know anything about time zones.

GPS is fundamentally different. The constellation of GPS satellites (there are about a dozen) are each extremely accurate clocks which are continually broadcasting a time signal as they orbit the earth. Since they pass over the entire planet, this time signal is not local, and must share a standard global time reference, known as Coordinated Universal Time. The GPS receiver unit picks up the signals from all visible satellites, and by solving a bunch of simultaneous equations is able to deduce the precise current time, as well as the distance to each satellite, given how long it takes the radio signal to reach it travelling at the speed of light. That's how it figures out where you are. (Also notice that the TL navigation system is a pure receiver; the GPS satellites don't know where any receivers are, they just keep on telling the world what time they think it is. A common misconception is that GPS receiver units somehow communicate back to the satellites.)

Of course, the GPS notion of the current time is only valid for the strip of the globe that includes the Greenwich Naval Observatory in London (and only when British Summer Time is not in effect). All calculations to display the current local time have to be made by the software in the navigation system, based on its knowledge of your current location, and tables of rules about where the time zones boundaries occur geographically, and when in the calendar changes like Daylight Saving Time adjustments occur.

Those tables became out of date this year because of a law passed in 2005, and need to be updated for the system to be correct. We are looking for Acura or Alpine to produce updated tables and provide us a mechanism for getting them installed in our cars.

(As an aside, even phones can need an update if, like my Palm Treo, they have a calendaring system that needs to be accurate even as you travel to different time zones. Palm released an update months ago so I was able to install it before it was needed. Acura, please catch up soon!)

 

There's much more going on in the world or my life to worry about then the extra minute it takes take change my clock. If this had something to do with the function of my engine, then I would be upset.

The change in DST isn't final. If the Government finds that it made no change in the savings of energy they'll reverse it. S if Acura/Alpine DID make the change and the government reserves it, then you'd be in the same situation again.

The d/l to your Palm is a software change to you can do. When did Palm release it? I'd say not over a year ago when Alpine/Acura were updating the new Navi disk you're talk about.

Sometimes you just have to go with things.

 

You're free to feel that way, and more power to you, but you have no place telling me how to feel about my own investments of time and money! I wouldn't spend this kind of money on a car if I did not care about having details like that correct. I mean, why bother building a system that is supposed to keep the time right without manual intervention, and then let it be wrong?

 

That's speculation. Given how many millions of dollars have been spent in adjusting computer systems to accommodate this change already (and I'm intimately familiar with that, since I had to help build a patch for one of our own software products and help our customers understand who was affected and how to apply it), and the fact that changing back would incur that same hit of time and effort all over again, it will be hard to argue for the value of reversing it.

We couldn't afford to count on that, or let our customers suffer problems until the hypothetical future law change. So I don't see why Alpine and Acura should get away with being lazy either.

 

Now that I think about it more, I bet they can't change it because the clock memory is on some flash chip separate from the main Navi, that can't be upgraded.

 

Even beyond this, there are other things that the GPS software doesn't necessarily know. Indiana changed their law such that the state is now observing DST for the first time, but I have no idea whether the Navi previously adjusted for their old law such that it would now be out of whack, or whether Indiana TL'ers previously had to override it.....

Then you have local conventions that the software programmers don't take into account. For example, the town of Phenx City, Alabama, is right on the Georgia state line and across the river from Columbus, Georgia. Georgia is on Eastern Time and Alabama is on Central Time, but almost everyone in Phenix City uses Eastern Time because so much of the area's business comes from Columbus. The Navi almost certainly cannot account for this. Then you have the legendary Australian Central Western Standard Time, an unofficial time zone observed along the Eyre Highway at UTC+8:45. (Notice the graffiti on the bottom of the sign shown below.)

I wonder if the TL would update the time accurately if you shipped it to Australia (setting aside the unofficial time zone....say, if you took it to Sydney). I assume that it updates correctly for Atlantic Time if you go to Canada's Maritime Provinces and for the half-hour offset in Newfoundland (can anyone confirm this for certain? I haven't been to the Maritimes since 1989 or Newfoundland since 1982), so I would assume that it ought to work anywhere, but I don't know how the software is written.

 

If it's flash, it can be updated (that's the whole point of flash) although it might require a trip to the dealer; if it's ROM, it can be replaced, which would clearly need a service appointment.

Whatever it takes them to do it, I'd certainly appreciate some public statement that they are working on it, and an estimate of when it will be available.

 

Thanks for the great picture!

Yes, it's definitely a complicated issue and they opened a big can of worms when they decided to support auto time updates. Keeping up to date with law changes is probably something they forgot about, it will be an interesting measure of their customer service dedication to see how they cope with it. Since this is a national change, they will hopefully take it seriously.

The US navigation system only claims to work in the contiguous 48 states, so I would not be surprised if Australia was too much for it. Canada would be nice, but I'm not counting on that either.

 

FYI... cellphone towers do indeed transmit timezone data... itz part of the packet =)

you have to enable AUTO-TIME ZONE on your phone... =)

 

Good point, and yes, my Treo does know what time zone it's in as I move around.

This just emphasizes how cell towers, unlike GPS, are able to convey local information.

 

I meant ROM. If it required service for either, Acura isn't going to worry because not enough people will complain and they won't want to pay for it to be updated.

In a few years maybe all car makers will have something like OnStar were a d/l can be done.

 

You may be right, but I hope not, because I'd like to be able to continue being an Acura customer.

They're already doing things with traffic information downloads via the XM satellites. They could do firmware updates that way, although my security reflexes get a little twitchy thinking about things like that.

 

Ah! I long for the good old days when cars didn't have clocks. My first eight cars had neither clocks nor radios. Pure bliss!

 

The mapping works in parts of Canada, and it's happy to lay down breadcrumbs elsewhere, but what I'm getting at is, does the built-in GPS receiver understand longitudes beyond the area for which the DVD provides coverage such that it can determine the proper offset from UTC? That is to say, even though it doesn't have a map for Nova Scotia, would it know that the correct time there is UTC-4 (ignoring DST for the moment) because that's a standard GPS feature? Or is its capability in this regard limited to the areas covered by the mapping?

If someone here has a Navi-equipped TL in Hawaii, or has driven one to Alaska, I'd love to hear the answer.