My first car was a hand-me-down from the mid 70s, and my family being cheap as they were it was also AM only. I didn’t find it as bad as all that- I was introduced to country music (not my jam but I always enjoy expanding horizons), a lot of oldies (“The Music of Your Life” was the station network) so I learned all the old crooner standards and some big band. Then at night on the way home there was “Bruce” giving out financial advice to callers which was as good a way as any to learn about that stuff. Long distance trips had Paul Harvey and farm reports. But perhaps I’m dating myself, this was all in the 90s, things are different now, if I find myself on AM radio it’s usually that I’ve found a source of Spanish language music that isn’t tex-mex/Norteño.
I saw other articles that apparently the station send out images on their HD Radio stream (I admit I’m not fully up on HD Radio tech) but the filenames didn’t have extensions so rather than either read the header to determine the filetype or ignore them, it bricked the radios.
100% on Mazda’s software for not having error handling.
This is how I imagine the future will be for all technology-driven vehicles. Juuuust a matter of time before something expires or blue screens.
im reminded of this: Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It | WIRED
Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.
eta: found a boing boing link
That’s the first thing that came to my mind as well, TBH. some chucklehead performing a field test of a remote access hack.
This is actually not an amusing problem at all; it’s a dangerous and distracting failure of the Mazda Infotainment System for which Mazda refuses to take responsibility.
Having the screen flash suddenly over and over as it cycles through an endless reboot, especially at night, is an accident waiting to happen. Not to mention the backup camera suddenly going black while in reverse—pity the pedestrian behind the car when that happens!
The entire unit must be replaced at a cost of $1200-1500. If ever there was an instance for a car maker to issue a recall, this is it.
When the FM went out on the radio in my old car, I started listening to a fair amount of baseball. For the most part, only one thing is happening at a time in baseball which makes it pretty easy to describe the action over the radio. I suspect that is part of the reason it was so popular in the pre-television days.
Would this be a good thing if the people affected usually listened to faux news? Being forced to listen to NPR for days could help.
Well, I read something very recently where car manufacturers are showing various add-on features such as remote starting from the key fob, adaptive dip-beams with matrix LED headlights will be by subscription, so if you fail to keep up the $50-100 monthly payment then you lose access to those features on the $80,000 car you’ve just bought. And probably those features wouldn’t pass across to anyone buying the car second-hand either.
BMW tried this little wheeze when they demanded £80 for access to Apple CarPlay, a feature that pretty much every other car manufacturer includes as a standard feature.
My job involves working with cars, and the obsession with touch-screen panels to operate practically every function in the car is a disaster waiting to happen - just attempting to adjust the heating and screen de-misting involves taking your eyes off the road to operate the system, as there’s no haptic feedback, no obvious raised surfaces to touch; I had exactly this problem this morning when I took a car out for a test drive fairly early and it was quite cold, I genuinely felt nervous trying to adjust the temperature, fan and direction while driving on a busy road with bends.
My own car I chose after driving literally hundreds of different vehicles over a period of a couple of years, and while it’s got an infotainment screen for satnav, radio, etc., it has actual, physical knobs for controlling fan and temperature, and station and volume for the radio, with steering wheel controls as well, so I can operate by touch without taking my eyes off the road; and it all works without needing a fucking subscription!
Some of us with 2016 Mazda’s don’t have the fancy UI audio touch interface stuff. Mine is nothing more than a radio/mp3/CD player. Other than the bluetooth having a delay it works fine.
… and you’re not going to tell us what it is?
Has anyone made a list of all the bizzare claims that is somehow the fault of 5G? 
I did, but the nano bots in the covid vaccine deleted it…
My car is a 2002 Miata (granted, Mazda, but pre-tech) and because these run forever, I can probably stay in the pre-tech band for a while while grinning my face off. 
Our other car is a 2017 Prius V, so it’s got lots of interactive doo-dads and I dread the day that things get glitchy on it, because it’s a sweet divemobile and hauler.
Bruce Williams had the greatest voice ever. And no matter what I was doing, there was no way I was turning off the car until Paul Harvey was over. If you’re into Podcasts, I actually listen to Tracing The Path because it “Paul Harvey-ish”.
So…if I never listen to AM or FM radio, I’ll be fine? 
Asking because I had wanted to buy a new car this year, which isn’t looking possible now. So maybe nevermind. 
That podcast was really frustrating, as a software engineer. They conflated runtime bugs with compile time bugs, generally misunderstood how text parsing and argument substitution works in programming languages, failed to grok the differences between compiling and interpreting code, and on and on.
At the end of the day, they didn’t figure out anything besides, “maybe percent signs do something weird to the software”. Well, yah. That was clear as soon as the problem was stated. The rest was witty banter from dudes in over their heads and acting like they weren’t. 
Oops, sorry about that, it’s a Ford EcoSport, but the interior setup is common across the Ford range, ie Fiesta, Focus, Kuga and Puma. The EcoSport is based on the Fiesta platform.
thanks, you saved me a frustrating listen.
