That is wrong. Some states no longer have daylight savings. 22 other states are trying to opt out, but it's held up in Congress. My 2011 Mustang 'remembers' my radio presets, even with the battery disconnected. They do make something called an atomic clock. It works off a radio signal. It sets automatically. They are very pricey. The 30-sec it takes to set the time is not worth, adding to the price of a car.
Daylight savings is stupid, it shouldn’t be a thing. That said, I disagree that it would add anything to the price of the car. First and foremost, the onboard computers in these cars are running Microsoft Auto for all the Sync support and whatnot. An operating system that has full support for time control, DST recognition, etc.. Other auto systems on the market running OS’s like QNX also have all those features. Honestly, I don’t know of one that does not at this point. The amount of hardware already included in these vehicles is already more than necessary to facilitate any of these functions to be automated. It’s a software implementation issue.
There is absolutely no reason the onboard computer does not set time and manage local DST observation through it’s standard network connectivity. This isn’t even lazy design, it’s just outright ignoring a feature that is standard everywhere else these days. I connect my phone and it can sync contacts, calendars, text messages, music, but can’t be bothered to sync the clock? The vehicle is always connected to 3G where available and I can remotely lock/unlock, start the car, see my tire pressure and fuel level and GPS location, but it can’t use the embedded time and location data in the 3G cellular signal to set the clock? The Nav system tells me where there is road construction and accidents and gives traffic flow data, but the system can’t adjust the clock when I cross a time zone or DST transition happens?
We don’t need an atomic clock receiver or anything that is not already in the vehicle. I have other vehicles that automatically update the clock based on date, location, cellular, phone sync, etc.. Ford does not. I know it’s not a big deal to many people and takes just a few seconds to go into settings and make the change themselves. But for someone like me who regularly does interstate drives and crosses time zones and sometimes between states that do or don’t observe DST, it’s one of those little things where you just think how stupid it is they don’t have the functionality and how simple it would be to implement.
I’m an embedded systems and software engineer. Yes, really I am. Maybe that’s the ultimate source of my frustration because of how simplistic it would be to implement this functionality. The functionality is already there, they just have to utilize it. And why I sit here scratching my head as to why they don’t...
I have not looked to see if the clock updates via Apple CarPlay as many do.
