Okay, picture this: you’re driving in Seattle on the afternoon of January 30th in your Mazda
that was built sometime between 2014 and 2017.
You’re thinking to yourself, “wow, my life is awesome, I love my 5-to-8-year-old-semi-luxury-sedan,
go Seahawks, time to listen to my local public radio station, KUOW 94.9.”
But then… disaster strikes.
As soon as you tune in, something in the signal fries your car’s infotainment center—your
car’s digital clocks, your bluetooth capabilities, your built-in maps: all broken, permanently.
Well, big surprise, what if I told you that this wasn’t just a scary story I made up,
but one that actually happened to a whole bunch of people in Seattle a month ago?
Because guess what: it did.
So let’s get into the nitty gritty of how it actually happened.
This is partially a result of how these cars were built, but it’s also a problem with
how this radio station broadcasts its radio signals.
You see, this ain’t your grandma’s radio broadcast technology—radio has actually
gotten a lot more complicated and messy over the past couple of decades.
Back in the 1930s, some people decided to start sticking radios in cars because hiring
cellists to sit on your dashboard was getting too expensive.
These radios, like all radios at the time, were pretty basic: they could be tuned to
pick up electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency, and changes in those waves’ amplitudes
would result in different noises.
Each station would broadcast their waves within a specific 10 kilohertz frequency range, and
tuning your radio to a number in their range would pick up their signal.
You might know this as AM radio, and it was great because it allowed you to listen to
songs and wouldn’t irreparably destroy your car.
Then, around the 1960s, radio stations began broadcasting in FM, and newer car radios could
pick up this second kind of signal.
These signals were broadcast at much higher frequencies and could carry 15 to 20 times
more information than AM signals, because the stations had 150 to 200 kilohertz to work
with instead of just 10.
This was great too, because it allowed for higher quality audio and also wouldn’t irreparably
destroy your car.
But the one big problem with both of these kinds of radio is that they can’t really
carry extra information about what they’re broadcasting—details like song titles, album
artwork, or exactly how many more seconds you have to suffer through Mambo Number 5.
So, in 2002, the FCC adopted a new standard called HD radio, which allowed radio stations
to broadcast a digital signal alongside their analog AM or FM signal; basically just a stream
of 1s and 0s that can be converted into audio, photos, or text.
In order to read these digital signals, your car’s radio needs a computer that can decode
them, and here’s where the problem comes in: computers are bad sometimes.
KUOW 94.9—the station that bricked all of those Mazdas—was, indeed, an HD radio station.
On that fateful Sunday afternoon, their digital signal was carrying image files to be decoded
by HD-compatible radios… but someone at the radio station made a mistake.
The files weren’t formatted with extensions—y’know like dot jpeg, png, or gif.
Most car radios were able to just ignore this oversight, but Mazda’s radios were built
different…
meaning worse.
The software in Mazdas from 2014 to 2017 was unable to recognize any file without an extension,
and any of those cars that were on the road and tuned to 94.9 would have automatically
downloaded and attempted to open those extension-less files.
Since the computer had no idea what to do with the files, it would freak out, reboot,
find the files in its cache again, freak out again, reboot again, and so on and so on…
forever.
No more navigation, no more bluetooth, and no more changing radio stations—just eternal
NPR purgatory.
And much like the family dog, the only way to fix these terminally ill car computers
was by shelling out for a new one.
That is, if you can actually get your hands on a new one, which you probably can’t,
because Jimmy Fallon needs more graphics cards to launder money through pictures of monkeys
or something.
Now here’s something you might find funny, unless you’re the social media intern at
Mazda who’s currently watching this video and having a panic attack: this wasn’t the
only time this happened to Mazdas.
Back in 2019, the computers in the 2016 Mazda 6 started crashing anytime anyone tried to
listen to the podcast 99% Invisible—it turns out that the car was using the string “%I”
somewhere else in its operating system, so it couldn’t read the title as plain text
and ended up crashing.
To fix this problem, 99% Invisible had to start putting out a new “Mazda-friendly”
version of their podcast where they actually spelled out the percent in the title.
“Well jeez,” you might be saying, “that sure does sound annoying, but at least these
software bugs were harmless and didn’t cause the cars to lock up in the middle of a highway
and almost get everyone in the car killed.”
Except… that did happen, just not with Mazdas; good job Mazda!
Now, look, I love EVs, and it’s not like I would make a whole video dunking on EVs,
but these sorts of software bugs are going to have higher and higher stakes as cars become
more computerized.
And that is, of course, your cue to start arguing about that in the comments below.
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