Wow that sucks… in my car the time is off by an hour half the year because I never bother to update it for daylight savings. I assume it keeps a timer running somewhere to keep it on track

I’d be out of my mind, too, if the time was off. Luckily, I can set the time. It’s just the date that’s fully auto / out of my hands.

Honestly I barely look at the car time. I usually use Apple drive or Android Auto

Not to rub salt in the wound, but the GPS signals are hitting the car’s GPS antenna unless you’ve disconnected that wire, pulled the fuse to the receiver, or only drive inside hardened RF shielded bunkers. When I was futzing with a little GPS breadboard module the time is what I looked for first, because if you’ve got that time signal from GPS then you know the thing is working. (PEDANTIC EDIT: The signals will hit the antenna if you’re outside unless you’ve shielded them somehow, even if you disconnect the wire.)

You could use GPS signals to synchronize clocks across the entire planet to within a microsecond while your car could be used to prop a stick up to make a sundial.

I’m going to wager there’s something else going on there. If you have a working GPS receiver, a working display (you said you did), a working “clock” that counts seconds and can give something time-like to the display to show (seems like you do), then a switch might be flipped in software and you have a data point about why GNU does what they do.

Thank you for your input. That might be a bit beyond me at this point, but I’ll keep it in mind.

I was told it has something to do with Microsoft SYNC / GPS. There were some forum posts, too, about it but nothing that lead to a fix. I may try to update the system again in the future (it’s been several years since the last), but my understanding is that it’s not a fix on my end or one that can be done at all.

The date actually reset back to probably the earliest date it had and is continuing on from there. Fun… Lol. Again, thanks for your concern!

Thank you for your input.

No problem. Hope I helped.

I do have a followup question. Will the car’s navigation/display work? As in does it know your position? If you’re able to have it give your directions then that’s enough for a “yes.” The reason why I ask is if that’s the case, then the GPS system is working, handing data off to the infotainment system saying “here’s your position and the time of day,” and your infotainment system is saying “thanks for that position but the time is for suckers.”

Yep. Nav works just fine (though the maps are a little out of date in some areas). It’s just the date that won’t set itself anymore. The date and time display are separate from the nav screen, for what that’s worth.

Then here’s the bright side: in any emergency you wouldn’t have to cut up your car and fashion it into a sextant to know where you are!

Joking aside, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t fix something like that. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s working fine for them for data gathering purposes:

• cnbc.com/…/ford-we-can-use-gps-to-track-your-car-…

I guess I don’t understand what design decisions led to a clock that can’t be adjusted manually by a user, and won’t update from a working GPS receiver. They’re the experts.

Other sources like wikipedia/youtube have GPS covered better than I can explain it, but here’s something maybe a little different:

• www.rfwireless-world.com/…/gps-nmea-sentences
• learn.adafruit.com/…/overview

Thanks for following up. I appreciate all your interest (and the links)!! I’ve put it on the back burner for now, but I hope to look at it again sometime.