I submitted this to Honda support, but never got a reply.

One feature of the 2019 (and other) Honda Accord’s is connecting over Wi-Fi. However, the sites I need to connect to need a password. Should be simple enough, right? Wrong. All of the sites have at least one space in the middle of the password phrase. And I cannot get the car to accept a space. Everything seems to work okay from a hardware point, but typing in the password doesn’t appear to accept spaces. The space key is there, and it blinks blue, but no space appears in the password!

Short of explaining to security that they need to redo all their network passwords to make my car happy ... [Want to guess how well THAT would go over?]

Ideas?

Jmk

 

Someone goofed the programming. WPA2 supports passwords off all printable ASCII characters. Space is a printable character.

Odd character to use for sure but it is valid.

Maybe try a local open WiFi connection to get your update completed. Might have fixed the space character thing.

Also most Honda dealerships will have a hidden SSID just for cars to auto connect to for updates. The SSID is AHMOTA and "should" only be allowed access to the update servers. Mileage my vary.

 

For some reason around here, most of the WiFi passwords (WPA2) are phrases - usually with a few deliberately changed characters. Like "Be$t of both whirleds". Not saying it's great security, but it's full of spaces.

I thought I was on to something when I found the setting in the car for WEP vs. WPA2, but settting it to WPA2 didn't help. I did run across that AHMOTA, although I admit I had no idea what it was. Interesting. When I tell the system to check my software version, it tells me that there is nothing new. However, without a connection, I have no idea how it get's that information, and is likely therefor unreliable.

Thanks for the tips. Honda support never did reply to my query.
jmk

 

I have a 2022 model Accord Hybrid, and they still haven't fixed this.

One option suggested in this driveraccord.net thread: If you have control over the network and don't want to change the wifi password, you can create a "guest network" on some routers, and give that a password with no spaces.

Another workaround is to enable hotspotting on a phone and give that a password that doesn't have spaces. May incur data charges of course.
Still annoying because I assume the car would normally check for updates automatically maybe? But now I have to remember to manually enable hotspotting every few months or something to manually check for software updates.

 

Understand, I really like my car. But it is little things like this that downgrade the experience from "wow, really great - you should check it out" to "okay except for a lot of little stuff." I was really appalled at the Honda US customer service. Took months to get them to call me back (and never did return emails). The woman I talked to was at least honest. She said the ONLY thing they were allowed to do was read to the customer the page that their screen said was relevant. I am not surprised that they have still not fixed it - she said they were not allowed to take a problem report or pass any comments up to the engineers. So I suspect the software guys don't even realize there is a problem yet. Really dumb policy. Even Microsoft has tiered support. A short note and a few lines of code (possibly as little as one) and this problem would be fixed for years, including on new models.

jmk