My wife has a nice new car that came with a built in GPS navigation system. While we find this to be a useful piece of technology, and the fact it has voice activation and all of that is rather amazing.
But I’ve identified something missing that should have been quite simple for the programmers to implement: Getting an updated time from the GPS system.
The GPS system keeps very good time because they have too in order to work. The GPS satellites know the UTC time to within microseconds and report it to any GPS device. As a side note, the GPS satellite system also has to keep track of the relativistic effects of their speed and location compared to the surface of the Earth.
Now, if the GPS device in the car is getting the UTC time from the GPS system with each update, how come the car isn’t programmed to update the CLOCK in the car via NTP? How come if my clock runs a little fast or slow it required human intervention to fix it? Additionally, the car knows where I am! It should be trivial to add a time zone overlay to the map in the navigation system so the clock can also automatically adjust for daylight savings time and when I drive across a time zone boundary.
Just a little request from the car makers for my next vehicle.
4 comments
Dave Hodson says:
18 February 2009 at 20:23 (UTC -7 )
If you think that’s bad, try buying a boat. Numerous onboard systems (GPS, radar, autopilot, TV, sat phone, radio, chartplotter, etc.), often made by an assortment of different manufacturers, and getting them all to interact smoothly can be quite the challenge.
Your suggestion seems simple and logical, but unfortunately it doesn’t surprise me that it doesn’t work the way it really should!
NeilD says:
18 February 2009 at 21:52 (UTC -7 )
My new TV sets the time through the cable box. Maybe you could buy a 50″ plasma for your dash?
NeilD
PhantomObserver says:
19 February 2009 at 7:32 (UTC -7 )
1. If the “clock” is attached as part of the stereo system, the GPS system might not be wired to connect to it. This is especially true if GPS is an option for your model of car.
2. The GPS display might have its own clock that could be displayable via changing the user settings. If that’s the case an external connection would be redundant.
Taliesyn says:
19 February 2009 at 13:49 (UTC -7 )
Phantom – In this vehicle, the stereo, clock, navigation etc. are all in the same computer, and use the same screen and controls for input. So methinks it is literally a software issue.