Honda Infotainment Systems Have Been Crashing And Not Even A Complex Hack Will Fix Them

Owners of Honda vehicles from 2016 to 2020 have been experiencing a frustrating problem that doesn’t seem to have a real solution. The infotainment systems of Honda Accords, Honda Civics, and Honda CR-Vs from the era are known for freezing, crashing, and failing to respond to inputs. The issue is bad enough that a class action lawsuit has been filed which alleges that the units are “defective.” One person thought he found the solution, but upgrading the memory of his Honda’s infotainment system made it faster but doesn’t make it stop crashing.

If you squint enough, you might notice that some popular infotainment systems aren’t much different than your Android phone. Many infotainment systems run on Android, and depending on the skin being used you might even find that the infotainment system uses some of the same icons you’d find on a phone from the same era. You might even find that navigating one of these systems is not much different than playing around with a phone.

There are three major ways most people will find Android in a car. Perhaps the most common way is called Android Auto. This is an application that runs on your phone and is projected onto your car’s display. Another method is called, perhaps confusingly, Android Automotive. This is an entire operating system stored and running on your car’s hardware and operates what you see on your dashboard displays. Finally, there’s a third way Android shows up and it’s contained only in the operating system of your car stereo system. That’s what these Hondas have.

When all of this works as it should, you the driver get what should be a seamless experience that should be about as easy to use as a phone or tablet. Android says the system is great for automakers because the operating system offers tons of customization for whatever you want to achieve.

Unfortunately, as many Honda owners have found out, the reality is far harsher, as their infotainment systems freeze, flicker, and crash, becoming annoying paperweights. This news comes to us from tech site Hackaday and tech Youtuber Collin “dosdude1,” who takes us through the process of an upgrade of a broken Honda infotainment system:

Your biggest question might be why this is happening in the first place. Good question.

Reports of these issues begin with 2016 tenth-generation Civics, ninth-generation Accords, and fifth-generation CR-Vs. These cars were available with an Android-based infotainment system. If you run a system checker, you might find that a Honda infotainment system of this era used dual-core Cortex-A15 SoC chips, 2 GB of storage, and ran Android 4.2.2 Jellybean. Collin believed the big deal here was the fact that the unit has just 1 GB of random-access memory (RAM).

It made sense in theory.

I you know your phones or computers, you know this is some totally unimpressive hardware. A phone with just 1 GB of RAM would have been quite slow in 2016 and would be nearly unusable today. Heck, the last Netflix movie you downloaded would have filled up the storage, too. Keep in mind that a flagship phone from 2016 like the Samsung Galaxy S7 had an octa-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, Android 6.0, and around a minimum of 32 GB of storage.

However, a 2016 Honda Civic doesn’t need to run Netflix, take high-quality photos, or surf the internet, so its specs should have worked ok. Yet, as I have personally witnessed, many of these systems had big problems.

Back in 2018, I was dating a woman who purchased a 2016 Honda Civic Touring from Carvana. Honestly, this was the car that made me fall in love with the tenth-generation Civic. The car wasn’t particularly thrilling, but it was just oh-so-good at being a daily driver in Chicago. It fits into most parking spaces, it was comfortable on the highway and, important for us, it had a good stereo.

I remember my girlfriend and me being quite amused that the infotainment was an Android system like our phones, and at first, it was fine. Then, one day a chain reaction happened. I was playing around with the system’s equalizer when my girlfriend put the car into reverse. The system attempted to bring up the backup camera but instead, it failed halfway through.

Like an overloaded phone, the infotainment system froze up and then crashed. I was eventually able to get the infotainment back to its home screen, but like an overloaded phone, you couldn’t get most of the operations to work. The backup camera wasn’t activating and neither was the nifty LaneWatch camera attached to the right mirror. I was able to get FM radio, but that was about it. Just like a dying Android phone, pop-ups told me of apps that no longer operated and asked me if I wanted to force-stop them.

At this point in my life, I was a technician repairing computer and server hardware with some programming on the side. My girlfriend was a programmer. We tried to reset the system like you would a phone, but the infotainment system’s power button was unresponsive. Turning off the car just made the screen turn off, but nothing else. Ultimately, I found that pulling the infotainment system’s fuse to be effective enough.

My girlfriend then performed a factory reset. Unfortunately, freezing and crashes became commonplace with that vehicle’s infotainment system. Even a new infotainment system replaced under warranty eventually began hanging up and crashing. If we caught the crashing problem before a full freeze, using the power button for a restart usually worked. If not, it was back to yanking the fuse. My girlfriend ended up wiring a switch to the fuse to make the forced restarts easier. Later, the vehicle’s system got stuck in a boot loop.

If you do a search of Honda forums you’ll find a wasteland of performance-related complaints from crashing when using Apple CarPlay to lagging, boot loops, apps closing when you’re trying to make calls, and all of the annoyances I complained about, too. Check out one user of CivicX.com, Bob_L, talking about what happened with his Civic Type R:

The head unit in my CTR got so bad that I couldn’t drive anywhere without it nearly always crashing at some point during the drive. It would even crash on FM radio, and the only recourse was to pull the fuse from under the hood, give it 30 seconds or so, then plug it back in.

I tried every trick posted: plug the phone in and turn on in a certain sequence, use an AAWireless adapter, sand off the paint on the chassis where the ground connects, etc. Nothing helped consistently. Sometimes it would get better for a while…..only to later just get bad again.

I put a Bluetooth speaker in my car and just listened to that instead, since I couldn’t keep stopping the car to pull fuses every drive.

Some people have installed aftermarket units to get around these issues, but doing so means giving up features. The factory infotainment is tied into the vehicle’s hardware. An aftermarket unit usually means giving up things like the nifty side camera when you change lanes. The factory Honda system also uses CAN signals to tell the infotainment system about vehicle speed and transmission gear selection.

Others have decided to take legal action and in October 2022, a class action was filed against American Honda Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. The suit alleges that even more Honda owners are experiencing the faults I mentioned above and call them defects. The suit alleges:

Specifically, Plaintiff is informed and believes, and based thereon alleges, that the Infotainment System is defective in that it malfunctions, freezes, or crashes, which in turn causes the inoperability of one or more features (including, inter alia, the navigation; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (“HVAC”); music/radio; display screen; Bluetooth/phone; and backup camera functionalities) (the “Infotainment System Defect” or “Defect”). As further described below, discovery will show that improperly designed and/or programmed/calibrated software results in these failures.

Among the most concerning is the failure of the back-up camera images to accurately depict the conditions behind the vehicle. Drivers, including Plaintiff Chiulli, become accustomed to the driver assist features in the infotainment system, including in particular the back-up camera and the right-side blind spot camera. A camera image that freezes is a clear-cut safety hazard—if a child were to wander in the path of the reversing vehicle after the back-up camera image had frozen, the driver would be shown a false image of the rear of the vehicle clear of any obstructions. Likewise, when the display simply goes blank, drivers continue to, out of habit, look at the blank screen for cues about blind spots and obstructions, only to realize the screen is blank and to adjust their driving behaviors in real time, disregarding the blank screen and turning around to look out of the windows. Those few seconds are of critical importance, and the need to adjust one’s habits and correct for the Defect contributes to the risk of collisions and injuries.

Because the Infotainment System controls myriad vehicle functions, the Defect causes a wide array of failures. Discovery will show that the Defect causes the back-up camera image and the display image generally to flicker, freeze, and/or fail, error messages (including a “no device connected” message despite device being connected), the display screen and all associated functionalities to crash, Bluetooth connections to fail, USB connections to fail, the inability to receive incoming calls or make outgoing calls, the failure of in-vehicle microphone function, the navigation to fail, and GPS signal failure; it prevents the driver from being able to adjust the HVAC system; it causes the display screen to fail and suddenly go blank, black, or blue, which can cause the driver to become distracted, and it causes safety-related systems (including backup camera functions) to fail, necessitating repair or replacement of the entire system.

Two YouTubers both thought they had the solution.

As Collin explains in the video, the infotainment system on the workbench came from tech YouTuber Ryan Gehret, and Ryan believed that the crashing issues basically everyone’s been experiencing were due to the fact that the system just doesn’t have enough RAM for all of its basic functions. The awesome thing about car infotainment being glorified Android tablets is the fact that you can root them to run Android apps like the CPU-Z system monitor. Sure enough, when the system is doing nothing at all but running CPU-Z, only 384 MB of RAM is available.

However, both YouTubers didn’t know if they were right. So, Collin cracked a Honda infotainment system open not just to see if the RAM could be upgraded, but also to see if upgrading the RAM would even make a difference.

Disassembly is relatively easy and involves taking out a bunch of screws. Then, you’ll find that the head unit consists of a bunch of boards stacked on top of each other with a cute fan helping with cooling.

Our host now takes us to the main board, where he reveals that the SoC chip running this thing dates back to 2012. So Honda wasn’t using any cutting-edge hardware for these systems. But the more important parts of this experiment are right next door with the pair of 512 MB D9PZV chips.

Removing and replacing the chips with ones of double the capacity would seem easy enough to anyone with experience soldering. It’s a delicate process involving solder flux agent and a lot of heat, but still definitely within the abilities of an avid DIY person.

The old chips were tossed out for D9SWB chips. Sadly, due to the design of the board, the memory can only be doubled, which Collin thinks should still work.

Sadly, a boot demonstrated that just changing out the chips wasn’t enough. The system worked, but is using only 1 GB of its new 2 GB of memory. From here, Collin went through a convoluted process of essentially reverse-engineering the unit’s hardware and software components until he could convince its internal software to recognize the new chips. Ultimately, after a lot of trial, error, and apparently some “luck,” the unit eventually booted with double the RAM.

The unit was then returned to Ryan and Ryan was then kind enough to demonstrate the process for removing a factory Honda unit:

Thankfully, Ryan had good news to report. The system was much faster right from the jump with twice the RAM. Ryan then took the car out onto the road where the infotainment continued to be far quicker than it was from the factory. He noted that everything is much snappier, even the embedded Honda functions within the infotainment system.

Unfortunately, Ryan reported that while all of the work Collin did made the system much faster, the crashing issues were still present. Worse, the crashing happened enough that it doesn’t seem like doubling the RAM even made a difference.

Sadly, this likely means that something else is causing these systems to fail. That also means that there really isn’t a reason to do what Collin did. Sure, doubling the RAM doubled the speed of the infotainment system, but the core problems with crashing remain present. But then, even if Collin’s hack did work, the process was so convoluted that no regular car enthusiast is going to be able to do that themselves.

I have reached out to American Honda for comment on this situation.

So, there’s no real solution for Honda infotainment crashing just yet. Infotainment problems also aren’t limited to Hondas, either. I’ve purchased aftermarket stereos with similar crashing issues and you can find people reporting issues with infotainment from practically any brand. However, this Honda issue appears to be more widespread. At this time, it appears that aftermarket infotainment systems are imperfect and even hacking the factory one doesn’t seem to fix it. But at the very least, if you do have one of these cars and experience these issues, you’re not alone!