When the calendar showed January 30, there were a group of people in Seattle, a city in Washington, who were traveling in Mazda vehicles produced between 2014 and 2017, unaware of everything.
They were surprised when their car suddenly broke down. How could this strange event, which seemed like a mystical event, have happened?
They just wanted to have a pleasant journey by listening to the radio.
On a Sunday afternoon, drivers in Mazda vehicles were listening to an HD radio station called KUOW 94.9. While they were making their journey more enjoyable with music, the car’s Bluetooth, navigation and radio systems suddenly crashed.
Of course, the drivers did not understand anything at first. How could they know that the same thing was happening to Mazda drivers other than themselves? It later turned out that the problem was caused by radio station KUOW 94.9.
A radio station error affected hundreds of Mazdas.
The digital signals carried image files to be decoded by HD-compatible radios, but KUOW had made a mistake. Folders; It was not formatted with extensions such as “.jpeg, .png, .gif”.
Most car radios were not affected by this bug, but Mazda’s radios were designed differently than other cars. We could even say that it was poorly designed.
The software in Mazda vehicles from 2014 to 2017 could not recognize any files without the extension.
So, when any of the cars on the road, tuned to 94.9, tried to automatically download and open these extensionless files, the computer system in the car was surprised.
He went crazy not knowing what to do with the files. It rebooted the system, searched for files in its cache, and rebooted again. To do this; This continued until systems such as navigation, Bluetooth and radio all collapsed.
And this wasn’t the only thing that happened to Mazdas!
In 2019, 2016 model Mazdas were crashing again when they turned on the podcast “99% Invisible”. The reason was that the car’s operating system tried to use the “%I” part of the name “99% Invisible” elsewhere!
99% Invisible has begun releasing a new “Mazda-friendly” version of their podcast, with the percentage number clearly stated in the title.
Incidents like this also raise questions about cars equipped with advanced technologies.
Yes, cars that feature new technologies and take care of everything themselves, leaving the driver with virtually no work, truly provide great comfort. However, as with Mazdas, these high technologies can sometimes get confused and cause such problems.
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