Some Honda and Acura clocks are stuck in 2002—and there’s no fix yet

Something strange started happening to certain Hondas and Acuras on Jan. 1 that have their drivers wondering if they somehow stepped into a scene from “Back to the Future.” When these confused drivers got into their car, they discovered their car’s clock stuck at the wrong time, and, even stranger, the date jumped back 20 years to Jan. 1, 2002.

Some affected car owners jumped online to figure out whether they were seeing things or if this time flashback was a shared experience.

Twitter users Sumner Hushing and Steven Tender shared images of their automatic clocks being stuck “Back in Time.”

“I thought I was going crazy because my 2007 @Honda CR-V is now always 4 o’clock,” wrote Tender.

But this tech glitch has nothing to do with a time-traveling scientist and a rock ‘n’ roll-loving teenager trying to change the past and save the future. It appears it might be a computer programming issue in older models of Hondas and Acuras, from 2006-2014, that came with a navigation feature.

Honda’s response was to tell customers they are aware of the issue and working on it, according to the automotive website Jalopnik. However, it appears engineers don’t have a fix for the issue yet, and the auto manufacturer recommends waiting for the issue to fix itself — which could take months.

“We have escalated the NAVI Clock Issue to our Engineering Team and they have informed us that you will experience issue from Jan 2022 thru August 2022 and then it will auto-correct,” Honda said in a response to the CR-V Owners Club forum. “Please be assured that we will continue to monitor this and will advise you if a fix is available before that time.”

A few tech-savvy owners affected by this programming bug, nicknamed the Y2K22 bug (as a throwback to the Y2K or Millenium bug people stressed about back in the ’90s), started digging into the issue. One 2007 Honda CR-V owner shared a theory on the crvownersclub.com discussion group.

“It hasn’t been in the news much but yesterday the date was written by many computers as 2201010001 (YYMMDDHHMM),” wrote user CRV-32. “Many older computers that store the date this way cannot handle any number bigger than 2147483647, so as soon as the year began with a 22, it fails and can no longer register the date/time correctly. I can’t prove this for certain, but the timing is not likely to be [a] coincidence. It’s basically like the millennium bug on a smaller scale.”

As of now, Honda says the issue does not affect either the car’s operation or the functionality of the navigation system. Owners of affected vehicles should contact their local authorized Honda dealer for updates to the issue and to schedule an appointment for a repair, should one become available.