Mazda Drivers in Seattle Can Only Listen to Public Radio, Dealerships Blame 5G

pcmag.com:

If you drive a Mazda in Seattle, there's a good chance your car radio can only listen to KUOW 94.9 right now, or worse, it stopped working completely.

As GeekWire reports, the affected vehicles all seem to be Mazda models released between 2014-2017 and are fitted with a HD Radio infotainment system provided by Xperi. The glitch occurred over the past few weeks, and drivers all seem to have similar stories: They were listening to KUOW 94.9 and the infotainment units would then start repeatedly rebooting and only play 94.9 after that. In other cases the unit just died.

Even the most devoted public radio listeners can only take so much, and with some units failing completely, Mazda dealerships are seeing an influx of owners asking for a fix. At least one of those dealerships has blamed KUOW "switching to 5G" as the reason why this has happened. It's true that KUOW did switch to using a 5G signal a few weeks ago, but as KUOW reporter Casey Martin points out, the "5G theory" leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

A more believable, yet still very strange, explanation has been issued by Mazda North American Operations. In a statement Mazda explained, "Between 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software."

Mazda goes on to state that dealerships have been sent a service alert explaining the problem, but also pointed out getting parts was proving difficult due to "shipping constraints." That suggests Mazda is blaming the radio station and that the fix means replacing at least some of the parts in the infotainment units.

KUOW Operations Director Dane Johnson confirmed the only image they use is the KUOW logo and told