Glitch locks some Seattle Mazda radios on to station KUOW

It was on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 30, driving in Ballard, that Dave Welding entered the world of car computers gone amok.

He drives a 2016 Mazda hatchback. It turns out that about the same time, the same thing was happening to other local Mazda owners who had this in common:

They drove a 2014 to 2017 model Mazda, and they had tuned into KUOW, 94.9 on the FM dial, the NPR station.

That’s all it took.

Somehow the signal the station sent to the modern HD Radio that’s part of the Mazda infotainment center had, as Welding puts it, “fried” a major component.

That frying made the radios only play KUOW. No chance of catching a little classic rock or some Dori soliloquies. KUOW. Forever.

Also gone from the infotainment center were such features as Bluetooth, navigation, the clock and vehicle stats – “Many of the features I paid for when I bought it new,” Welding says.

It was as if the infotainment center had decided to team up with the ghost of HAL. You remember that malfunctioning, soft-spoken and ultimately sinister artificial intelligence computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey”?

That movie was released 54 years ago; now, there are just more HALs out there.

As the radio remained frozen, the rebooting visuals on the screen in the middle of the dashboard were just too distracting when he was driving. Welding ended up covering the spot with cardboard.

“The lower right field of my vision was seeing like a TV screen going on and off,” he said.