Automobile Clocks and Daylight Time

@irlandes:

Greenwich Mean Time (aka Zulu) already exists. It is used mainly in aviation (at 500 MPH, pilots would spend half their time re-setting watches).

You’re certainly free to use it, if you so desire…the fact that so few do indicates it does a pretty poor job for everyday uses.

(FYI, prior to the railroads, every town was on “astronomical time”: 12 noon was whatever time the sun was at its highest. That meant at 12:00 (Pittsburgh PA), Cleveland might be at 11:54, Philadelphia at 12:11, and NYC at 12:20.)

My versa has a AM/FM/CD stereo that is very simple to operate. If I press the menu button repeatedly it scrolls through all the audio setting and then hour and minute for the clock. I had a Civic with a Pioneer stereo installed by the previous owner. In two years I had that car I could not figure out how to set the clock. I e-mailed Pioneer and their solution was to sell me a $40.00 owners manual, which I declined. My reply was something like “Why are your stereos so counter-intuitive that I have to buy an expensive owners manual to set the #$%&ing clock”?!

Menu-driven pushbutton controls have long been a complaint of mine on modern cars. Give me back my knobs and my single-function buttons so I can keep my eyes on the road.

My Toyota, like @Docnick, has two little buttons next to the clock display.
One labeled “M” and one labeled “H”.
Press one to bump up the minutes and the other to bump up the hours.

Let me guess, the British again are coming up with this idea? Haven’t they done enough damage for one century?

My Toyota clock has the two buttons also. But that isn’t menu driven, and if I understood the OP correctly he/she will have to search through menu selections to reset his/her clock.

@the same mountainbike
Our 2011 Toyota Sienna does set the clock by bringing up a screen, running through a menu until the clock set menu appears. Our 2003 Toyota 4Runner has the two buttons to set the time. Why it had to be made more complicated for our Sienna makes no sense to me. This time I was able to set the clock in less than 5 minutes without getting out the manual. Maybe younger people adapt more easily to running through menus.

IMHO the reason they’re doing these menus is simply because the marketing types think the young crowd likes things menu driven. They may be right, I don’t know. I know that they reduce safety by making the driver take his/her eyes off the road just to do things that we used to do by feel in the old days.

@the same mountainbike–I think you are right. I preferred the simple controls on my 1950 Chevrolet pickup truck to the complicated systems used on today’s cars. The headlight switch was a simple pull switch to the left of the steering wheel, not some twist switch on a the steering column stalk. The wiper switch was right in front of the driver on top the dashboard. These wipers were interval wipers–the interval they wiped the windshield was controlled by letting up on the accelerator pedal. The wipers on the Toyota 4Runner and the Toyota Sienna we have operate by a stalk on the steering column and the one on the Sienna works the oppostite way of the wiper control on the 4Runner. I didn’t have to worry about resetting the clock on the Chevrolet pickup–I just looked at the clock on the courthouse as I drove downtown. The only thing complicated about the 1950 pickup truck was that there was a knob marked “C” that had to be pulled out for cold starts and pushed in gradually as the truck warmed up. If my Toyotas have such a knob, they hid it pretty well. I keep the Toyotas in the garage at night so I don’t have to worry about cold starts.

Like one of the posters above, I’m sort of reverting to old-schools ways myself. My clock of choice at home is a pendulum powered by weights, which is plenty accurate.

But I haven’t even considered purchasing a Toyota Camry ( Ray refers to it as a “Geezer-car”! … lol ) , so I’m not entirely over the hill I guess.

My complaint w/my Toyota’s clock setting method is that the “SET” button isn’t used to set the clock. I mean the button is right there. Clear as day, labeled “SET”. And there are two other buttons right next to it with pointers pointing “UP” and “DOWN”.

Now Wouldn’t you think the logical way to set the clock would be to hold the SET button while pressing either the UP or the DOWN button to set the clock? But No! The engineers at Toyota, they decided that was too easy. They didn’t use any of these three buttons it to set the clock.

I like the airplane way. It used to be on our aircraft (B-52s and KC-135s) that every knob and switch was shaped totally differently. Some were shaped like pointers, some like convaluted-edge circles, some like arrows, etc. This was done such that an A/C (pilot) could feel what he was grabbing without having to see it, even at night. That design logic would go a long way toward safety in a car.

“every knob and switch was shaped totally differently”

This is done on the better TV remote controls.

The factory clock in my 1999 CRV is a dim digital that’s impossible to see in daytime, so I took an old wristwatch, without strap, and stuck it on the dash with foam mounting tape. Works great, and reminds me of my dad, because the watch is one I gave him before he passed.

@Barkydog,I love your suggestion,if you go to the abolish DST site they some good ideas on there that make sense too-Kevin

Here is something someone sent me years ago… Sorry but I only have a screen shot of the article. It’s a little scary… I took the liberty of blotting out the name of the person who submitted it to protect the dimwitted. (Click on the image to enlarge for reading)

@oblivion–I liked the article. I moved my sundial out of sight of our beloved oak tree when daylight time was pushed up earlier in March so that the tree wouldn’t leaf out as soon.

A old neighbor commented to my the other day about Daylight Savings Time and the government and I thought he hit the nail on the head. He basically said that only the government could take a blanket, cut a foot off the top of it, sew it to the bottom of it, and tell you that you now have a longer blanket.

I’m told the original rationale for DST was to give farmers longer time to harvest their crops. Farmers have always gone by the position of the sun and would just change their eating times to give them maximum harvest time. Today’s farmers work around the clock if the crop is suitable for harvesting (such as no dew) and spring plowing and seeding goes on all day and night when necessary.

Today’s DST benefits hobby gardeners who have more time after work to do things in the yard. I can’t think of many other reasons for it.

Personally, I wish that they would just leave DST all year, as I enjoy having more evening light and less morning light. It’s just the changes which nobody likes.

As for the blanket analogy, nobody who understands DST has said it makes the daylight longer, it just “saves” it for later in the day. For the blanket analogy, that means you have just moved the blanket because you wanted it in a different place.

What can I say? We have a duty to educate everyone but some folks are just beyond hope. Kind of like the deer crossing sign complaint.