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 girlfriends vehicle there was no option to set manually on the clock screen. Seems like a pretty shortsighted move to not allow that.

> the cellular contract GM had for vehicle connectivity expired

2022, I got a letter saying that my car's crash response SOS system will stop working because FCC is retiring the 3G spectrum it is using.

The car clock however is synced to the GPS instead.

If GM used NTP instead of GPS, then it makes sense that it stopped working arbitrarily around 2022.

Older versions of the GM OnStar hardware used 2G cellular radios and carriers have decommissioned those networks. Adapters are available for some vehicles to use newer networks.

https://www.onstar.com/support/faq/2g-network-sunset

In 2019 there was a GPS week number rollover, another possible cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover

It seems absurd to me that cars needs a cellular connection to automatically set time, meanwhile 10$ clocks can get the time correctly from the radio signal that are broadcasted. More insulting the fact that the car itself has an FM and also an AM tuner that are capable of receiving time signal and decoding them while the radio is not in use. And that modern cars that use digital radio (DAB) have a standard to get the time. Come on, car infotainment is so outdated...