Opinion
During an extreme cold spell earlier this year, the 12V battery in my car died, and so I replaced it. Imagine my surprise when the car’s clock no longer displayed anything; it was blank. On the car’s interactive screen, the menu item for setting the time was grayed-out. I could no longer set it. See the image above. Same for the calendar display.
For me, this is a problem. When I drive, I frequently glance at the clock to gauge time remaining. I did find online a bunch of "solutions," but none worked. The local Ford dealer offered to make an appointment for me to have the car looked at -- at $210. No thanks!
I found that other owners of my car, the 2009 Ford Escape Limited Hybrid, had the same problem: the clock goes blank. It’s a software problem with no way of fixing it -- short of buying a new vehicle.
Replacing the Clock
So I began hunting for a clock replacement. The fastest solution was a standalone digital clock meant for cars. It has a rechargeable battery built-in, which can be charged like a phone, but also has a solar panel on the top to recharge continuously when there is light available.
It has a motion sensor, so turns off its display after five minutes of no vibration; it is sensitive enough to turn on the display when I open the car door. Displays 12- or 24-hour time.
It is $20 from truck-kits via eBay. The only drawback is that it hosts a ton of functions (including reporting the temperature) that are controlled by just two -- two! -- buttons. I am not looking forward to changing the time come next daylight savings switchover.
Replacing the Built-in Screen
The Limited edition of my car has a touchscreen for handling many functions, including setting the time and showing the GPS. Due to the 19-year bug in GPS satellites, the GPS a couple of months ago stopped tracking my car’s location, and now most days my car is apparently floating in the midst of Juan de Fuca Strait.
I found that the screen in my car can be replaced for about $200 from eBay, giving me an up-to-date GPS and a working clock.
But the number of connectors on the back of the screen intimidated me. I didn’t want to be tearing apart my dashboard and then fail with the installation. Also, I would lose the CD player and AM radio. A dead end.
So I checked with a few local installers, who told me that the problem might be that information about my car’s 300V hybrid battery would no longer be available. This screen not only reports on the status of the battery, but also handles fuel mileage settings. Another dead end.
Second Screening It
As I was casting about for further solutions, I came across the second-screen solution. This looks like a big GPS sitting on the car’s dashboard, but interacts with Android phones (also iOS ones) via Bluetooth. I got one from Amazon for $85.
There are two types of interaction.
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In Android Auto mode, it displays apps from my phone, full screen, with touchscreen interactions. Cool! But I quickly found a major limitation. Google only allows some apps to work. Supported apps are mainly ones for mapping and playing music. So any other app on my phone is blocked from being displayed on the screen, like the McDonald’s app I use in the drive-thru. Fail.
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In mirroring mode, the second screen displays anything that is displayed on my phone, so all apps “work.” But not. In mirroring mode, the touch interactions are blocked, so I cannot, say, tap the Code tab in the McDonalds app to get my ordering code number. Fail.
A third fail is that the second screen is not high resolution (1024x600), so when an app displays only in portrait mode on my phone (with its 2340x1080 resolution), it also displays in portrait mode on the second screen, and then small text become illegible. The second screen cannot be rotated 90 degrees to display in portrait mode.
The next day, I returned the second screen.
So, at this point, I am staying with the $20 dashboard clock. I put my phone in a dashboard holder when I need to use a GPS.
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