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Okay, picture this: you’re driving in Seattle
on the afternoon of January 30th in your Mazda

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that was built sometime between 2014 and 2017.

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You’re thinking to yourself, “wow, my
life is awesome, I love my 5-to-8-year-old-semi-luxury-sedan,

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go Seahawks, time to listen to my local public
radio station, KUOW 94.9.”

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But then… disaster strikes.

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As soon as you tune in, something in the signal
fries your car’s infotainment center—your

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car’s digital clocks, your bluetooth capabilities,
your built-in maps: all broken, permanently.

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Well, big surprise, what if I told you that
this wasn’t just a scary story I made up,

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but one that actually happened to a whole
bunch of people in Seattle a month ago?

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Because guess what: it did.

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So let’s get into the nitty gritty of how
it actually happened.

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This is partially a result of how these cars
were built, but it’s also a problem with

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how this radio station broadcasts its radio
signals.

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You see, this ain’t your grandma’s radio
broadcast technology—radio has actually

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gotten a lot more complicated and messy over
the past couple of decades.

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Back in the 1930s, some people decided to
start sticking radios in cars because hiring

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cellists to sit on your dashboard was getting
too expensive.

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These radios, like all radios at the time,
were pretty basic: they could be tuned to

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pick up electromagnetic waves of a certain
frequency, and changes in those waves’ amplitudes

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would result in different noises.

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Each station would broadcast their waves within
a specific 10 kilohertz frequency range, and

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tuning your radio to a number in their range
would pick up their signal.

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You might know this as AM radio, and it was
great because it allowed you to listen to

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songs and wouldn’t irreparably destroy your
car.

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Then, around the 1960s, radio stations began
broadcasting in FM, and newer car radios could

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pick up this second kind of signal.

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These signals were broadcast at much higher
frequencies and could carry 15 to 20 times

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more information than AM signals, because
the stations had 150 to 200 kilohertz to work

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with instead of just 10.

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This was great too, because it allowed for
higher quality audio and also wouldn’t irreparably

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destroy your car.

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But the one big problem with both of these
kinds of radio is that they can’t really

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carry extra information about what they’re
broadcasting—details like song titles, album

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artwork, or exactly how many more seconds
you have to suffer through Mambo Number 5.

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So, in 2002, the FCC adopted a new standard
called HD radio, which allowed radio stations

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to broadcast a digital signal alongside their
analog AM or FM signal; basically just a stream

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of 1s and 0s that can be converted into audio,
photos, or text.

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In order to read these digital signals, your
car’s radio needs a computer that can decode

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them, and here’s where the problem comes
in: computers are bad sometimes.

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KUOW 94.9—the station that bricked all of
those Mazdas—was, indeed, an HD radio station.

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On that fateful Sunday afternoon, their digital
signal was carrying image files to be decoded

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by HD-compatible radios… but someone at
the radio station made a mistake.

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The files weren’t formatted with extensions—y’know
like dot jpeg, png, or gif.

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Most car radios were able to just ignore this
oversight, but Mazda’s radios were built

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different…

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meaning worse.

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The software in Mazdas from 2014 to 2017 was
unable to recognize any file without an extension,

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and any of those cars that were on the road
and tuned to 94.9 would have automatically

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downloaded and attempted to open those extension-less
files.

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Since the computer had no idea what to do
with the files, it would freak out, reboot,

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find the files in its cache again, freak out
again, reboot again, and so on and so on…

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forever.

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No more navigation, no more bluetooth, and
no more changing radio stations—just eternal

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NPR purgatory.

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And much like the family dog, the only way
to fix these terminally ill car computers

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was by shelling out for a new one.

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That is, if you can actually get your hands
on a new one, which you probably can’t,

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because Jimmy Fallon needs more graphics cards
to launder money through pictures of monkeys

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or something.

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Now here’s something you might find funny,
unless you’re the social media intern at

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Mazda who’s currently watching this video
and having a panic attack: this wasn’t the

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only time this happened to Mazdas.

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Back in 2019, the computers in the 2016 Mazda
6 started crashing anytime anyone tried to

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listen to the podcast 99% Invisible—it turns
out that the car was using the string “%I”

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somewhere else in its operating system, so
it couldn’t read the title as plain text

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and ended up crashing.

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To fix this problem, 99% Invisible had to
start putting out a new “Mazda-friendly”

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version of their podcast where they actually
spelled out the percent in the title.

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“Well jeez,” you might be saying, “that
sure does sound annoying, but at least these

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software bugs were harmless and didn’t cause
the cars to lock up in the middle of a highway

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and almost get everyone in the car killed.”

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Except… that did happen, just not with Mazdas;
good job Mazda!

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Now, look, I love EVs, and it’s not like
I would make a whole video dunking on EVs,

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but these sorts of software bugs are going
to have higher and higher stakes as cars become

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more computerized.

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And that is, of course, your cue to start
arguing about that in the comments below.

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But for those of you who would rather stick
around and enrich your minds instead, then

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listen up.

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I don’t have a computer science background,
and I’m not the best at explaining these

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