Developer jailbreaks 2014 Renault to change car clock without proprietary SD card
A blogger discovered the navigation system requires an official map SD card just to access time settings, prompting reverse-engineering to bypass the restriction.
What to know
- Renault's 2014 Latitude navigation system artificially gates the clock settings menu behind a proprietary map SD card requirement, even though the feature exists in the firmware.
- A developer reverse-engineered and jailbroke the system to restore basic functionality after losing access to the outdated SD card.
- The discovery highlights how manufacturers can lock users out of trivial features through software restrictions, forcing dependency on proprietary media.
Developer (nns.ee blogger) Car owner and reverse engineerRenault Vehicle manufacturer
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage posts
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1
Story surfaces on Hacker News and Lobsters
The developer's blog post documenting the jailbreak gains traction on tech community forums, reaching 24 points on Hacker News and 138 on Lobsters within hours of posting.
“They mentioned that the car apparently needs this SD card just to change the time on the clock, but I didn't really find that believable…”
— Developer (nns.ee blogger) · source -
My car, a Seat Ibiza, also has one of these TomTom devices built-in and it was basically abandoned 2 years after the car rolled off the production line. It's so sad that a product built to last 20 years has to ride around with obsolete maps most of its lifetime. I imagine it's going to get way worse in the future now cars are basically spying…
2 more of the top 3 · 50 posts in this stretch
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I've been thinking about this for a 2016 Toyota in the family which has a quirky but decent enough idea for the main screen where a local DB file is consulted and a saved picture of the currently playing artist is displayed.Sounds great but there are some hilarious examples where the fuzzing of the name (best guess, I figure in case the name is…
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This is why I was excited about the Slate with it's bare bones premise. I can add whatever navigation device I want, or none at all.
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background
Developer jailbreaks car navigation system to enable clock adjustment — Unable to obtain the proprietary SD card and frustrated by the artificial restriction on basic functionality, the developer reverse-engineers the navigation system and jailbreaks it to restore access to the clock settings menu.
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background
Developer discovers Renault navigation system locks clock settings behind proprietary SD card requirement — A 2014 Renault Latitude owner finds that changing the car's time requires a map SD card, despite the clock settings menu existing in the head unit's firmware. The previous owner had mentioned this requirement; the developer initially disbelieved it, assuming it was user error.
What people are saying 21 voices from 2 sites · best of 50 · verbatim
- Nov 6
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Yeah they are good! And the Up GTI is quite close to an OG Golf gti I can't remember if they _all_ have no infotainment but the ones I've been in were like that
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> VW Up! Interesting! I'll be looking into it more, but it looks like they only made it for a couple of years. Was it actually any good outside of this cool feature?
- Nov 4
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It's also how LLMs thing (not accusing the author of slop here, just making a slightly unrelated observation).If I ask my Claude (Opus 5.5) about how some Claude feature works, its natural inclination is to start reversing its own binary with strings instead of looking at Anthropic's documentation. It will, entirely unprompted, try to figure out…
- Nov 3
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They make touchscreen smart mirrors that easily mount on top of your OEM rearview mirror. Half the display shows a rear camera that you mount by your license plate, this functions as your mirror. The other half of the display shows wireless android auto or carplay, so you can browse music and use Google maps nav. Phone connects to Bluetooth of…
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My 2008 Honda Civic has a old-fashioned set-it style clock, but from the factory, it's always ran about a minute a week fast. Which of a course is an excruciating kind of boiling the frog.Also, it now sometimes thinks my headlights are on and dims the display for a few seconds randomly which I guess isn't too bad after 15+ years. It doesn't seem…
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There's a certain sense in which competence in some domains repels competence in other domains. If Apple made a car the rear fender would come off just as you opened the drive side door.If I had to hazard a guess as to the mechanism as it would turn up in an automotive company it is that automotive engineers have the SAE to set professional…
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I own a 2013 Renault Megane with a TomTom navigation and TomTom *still* sells maps for it, so maybe the antipiracy efforts paid off in the end?
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This is really hillarious to me since I have the exact same problem in my Renault Scenic, there's just no way to change it. But half of the year it's correct, the other half I just automatically deduct 1 hour. It's one of those problems that are on the to do list but realistically I'm never gonna spend that much time on it. Not really a good…
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> I don't understand how Subaru stays in the business. Just how.Not sure if relevant, but Toyota has been buying parts of Subaru over the years, in 2020 ~ they have roughly 20% of Subaru. I'm not sure if its one of those "Microsoft investing into Apple" or "Intel investing into AMD" type of moments (which tbh, I wonder if Nvidia should be trying…
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I got a new samsung smart tv in April and never connected it to the internet. Just noticed (likely because if the DST change) that the date and time was all wrong when it turns on. Could not unnotice it. I was very pleasantly surprised I could manually set it and no internet was required. I expected to be annoyed at it forever or to go down a…
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I've heard that some Subaru models have 3 clocks in the view of the driver, all on the CAN bus, one being the nav and another being a remote display for the nav, and one that's just there, of which none sync to each others. I've looked up how it happened, and discovered that to just to add insult to injury, at least one uses a uC that has RTC…
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My car came with a cheap low-quality aftermarket combination car stereo and GPS. It would only play music from discs (no USB support), didn’t even support variable bitrate MP3s, and the GPS didn’t know the car’s location half the time.I finally replaced the head unit with a plastic bracket and a standard old school in-dash stereo system. Much…
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My 2014 vehicle stopped updating it's time automatically a few years ago. I think some cellular technology was phased out or perhaps the cellular contract GM had for vehicle connectivity expired.Either way I just manually set the time twice a year now - I guess I'm thankful it still has that option.When I was playing around with the radio in my…
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I had a luxury car from 2001 where the time could not be manually changed, only set to specific time zones. Of course, all the time zone rules had long diverged from its rule set, and it had to be changed four times a year to show the correct time.This car also inexplicably forced you to manually choose a country, and then a time zone, despite…
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Yep. I didn't get into it in the article, but in reality the previous owner had already (accidentally) thrown the SD card in the trash, and was pretty much asking me if they want me for them to go digging through their trash to find it, and I told them not to worry about it. It surprised me too finding out much thought they put into the security…
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One possible summary: don't say no when someone offers you a custom SD card that they say is required to do basic things on your car. The jailbreak writeup is pretty good! It seems the navigation system was made with much more security than most modern commercial devices, which is interesting.
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Thank you so much for going through this experience and posting it. I can't remember the last time I read some article to this end that wasn't just "I threw _insert LLM model here_ at it and it did all the work for me." Just you, your skills, and some good old fashioned legwork which led to you taking back control of your hardware. Neat trick with…
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I've ended up not setting the time on my motorbike at all (so it's always wrong). As I disconnect the battery for each winter it means the clock also resets. I just can't bother to configure it when taking it from storage after winter, the UI is also just two buttons that are impossible to use. I have my phone anyway. Maybe I'm just lazy. Then…
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Yep, it's the same with this one. The clock is always at least accurate to the minute and doesn't drift, which I appreciate, but it'd be super cool if I could also set it to be accurate to the hour at least twice a year.
- Nov 2
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My Australian 2010 Mazda 3 could sync its time from GPS. Handy; sensible. Trouble was, it didn’t know about this thing that had been in place for about 40 years which affected more than half the population, called “daylight saving time”. You could choose only AWST, ACST or AEST, and so for half the year you’d have to set the clock manually…
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TIL Renault abandoned Carminat so soon! I've got dofferent model, also from 2014 (with a tad better radio) and R-Link _was_ updated to handle GPS rollover! It was a bit difficult to find correct update file (as R-Link 1 and 2 servers went down in 2024) and I was updating it in 2025, but possible nonetheless. Even to the point I've been able to…