“Jailbreaking my car’s navigation system just so I can change the time”
A car owner had to jailbreak the navigation system of his 2014 Renault Latitude just to change the time, finding the system locked down and unable to be modified without a specific, DRM'd SD card.
The owner, Rasmus Moorats, first backed up the internal eMMC using the dd command.
He then located the date and time settings in the file /mnt/flash/settings.dat, which uses a custom binary format.
Through reverse engineering, he discovered the unit does not have a concept of timezones and instead stores the local offset as a number of minutes.
He changed the offset from 180 to 120 minutes to fix the timezone.
He just wanted to change the goddamn time.
Software lock-in
This process highlights the increasing software complexity in modern vehicles, where user-facing software is becoming more locked down.
The owner warns that requiring jailbreaks to fix basic software problems may make whole generations of cars harder to sell in the near future.
This could crater the used car market as people are not willing to put up with unfixable software issues.
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