mikekoz

I had a problem with another vehicle about a year ago, and when I took it to the dealer, they could not repeat it, and did not attempt to fix. The problem was with the computer controls with the audio system. It happened again a few times whan I first got in my car, so I took out my cell phone and took a video of the problem! I kept them on my phone to show to the technician the next time I brought the car in. As luck would have it, it never occured again, but you may want to try this if you see the displays malfunctioning whan you stop or start your car. Please do not try it when you are driving!!!! ;;p).

I just read that! I think I will hold off on that. It sounds really good but will wait to hear others experiences with it before I take our vehicle back in.

Ah!! I see. I did not read your last post correctly!! Thank you.

I have not noticed any change to the way ours drives. Do not like the idea that this buggy system affects the rest of the vehicle though! We got the extended maintenance agreement on the car, so that makes me feel a little better!

The update is only for the audio and navigation system. It should have nothing to do with the AC, motor, gas mileage, etc. I really hope I am correct on this because if the Sync system has anthying to do with the rest of the vehicle, I will regret buying it. I love the car itself. It is rides nice, looks nice, get the stated MPG, but the audio system stinks (styncs?? ;p) ). It is very buggy on our Cmax, even after the update. If they can ever get this right, it would have one of the better audio systems in the industry. Sound quality is great, in my opinion!

I had mine done last Monday and it was a bit of a rocky upgrade! My dealership had the same issues that a lot of you had with the wireless network connection, some module not updating, and the touch screen after the first attempt was not calibrated. I brought it in and they had it two full Saturdays. They gave me a rental after the second failed attempt, but had it upgraded late Monday morning. As far as how it is working, it resolved one problem, but made another worse. I cannot comment yet on its stability. It used to disconnect my USB devices every now and then, maybe once a month. This was annoying, but not too bad and I was able to live with it. The system would not recognize all of the music on my iPod. What it would not recognize would change. I tried every fix I could but nothing helped. It would play and recognize all music on an external hard drive or USB drive, but it would play the songs in the incorrect order (no...I did not have shuffle on!;;p) ). Now it will play songs on external drives fine as long as I have Gracenote turned off. The iPod is the same with Gracenote on, but will not index with it off and the files and folders that show up on the display are all scrambled. This makes no sense! I really do not understand the Gracenote feature. I know what it is, but I always though you needed an internet connection for this to work. I have not tested the navigation, but I was having no issues with that, so hopefully it is OK.

I just got back from the Ford Service center to have our Cmax upgraded. They failed after having it all day and now the Sync in the vehicle is all screwed up. The touch screen is all out of whack and I can barely use it. I have to bring it back next Saturday morn to have them try it again. If they still cannot do it I am going to ask for a complete replacement of the audio system. Seems to me it may be easier for them to just swap out the hardware with a system that already has 3.51 on it then trying to upgrade. They do not seem to know what they are doing!! :sad:

Once again, I thought I had this fixed. I used Mediamonkey as instructed on another forum to alter the ID tags so the track numbers had 3 digits (001,002,003, etc). This initially worked, but the next day it was back to its old tricks! I believe the only way this will be fixed is by Ford and / or Microsoft. It is a shame that on such a nice vehicle, the Sync system, well....Styncs!! Maybe the soon to be released update will help. It could not make it any worse I guess!!

Sorry, I should have made it more clear. I am having this problem on an external hard drive. I also have an iPod, however, and I never thought any of the settings on it affected the Sync operation in any way. A while back I turned the volume on the iPod up to boost the sound in my car, but it had no affect. Same thing with the equilizer controls. Does the shuffle setting on the iPod control the way the Sync system operates?

One more thing I forgot to mention. When you bring up the audio player in the car, and bring up the album you want to play, the songs show up on the display in the correct order. Sync will just not play them in that order. Just for the heck of it, I turned on shuffle play, and no change. It just plays them in a different random order. This morning I also noticed another odd thing about the player. It will show in the upper left corner the track number in relation to the amount of tracks on the album. For example, if your album has 10 tracks, you will see 2 / 10, or 4 / 10. I just noticed that it is not correct on my system. I may be playing track 1 but it will show 5 / 10.

They should play in the order that they were setup on the artists original album. This may not seem like a big deal to most, but I am just used to listening to them that way. On some albums, it is almost a necessity that they play in the correct order. A good example would be concept albums where one song blends into the other, like Pink Floyd's "The Wall." Another example where you may want to listen to the songs in the correct order would be live albums. One may want to listen to the entire concert in the order that it was originally performed. What I think is happening is that the Sync system is not reading the ID tag information in the mp3 files correctly (or at all!). I have created playlists, but unless there is some piece of software available that will scan my entire external drive and automatically create playlists, that would take way too long! This is a basic thing that MP3 players should do, I have owned various devices that play MP3's, and they all do this. None of them are perfect, and in some cases, the ID tag in the files are not correct and they play in the wrong order anyway. This even happens sometimes when using my iPod. I can correct this by just editing the ID tag on the files. If Sync is not reading this information, this is a major oversight in its design.

Well, my joy was short lived!! It is not having any problems indexing and all of my files are there, but it plays all of them in the wrong order. It plays all songs alphabetically! Even the most basic of MP3 players I have used have not had this problem. Taking this into account, along with the other problems, I do not have too much confidence that this will be fixed by an update. I could spend $30.00 on a generic portable player that would not have the problems my $33,000 one has! :cry: Looks like I have a choice....use my iPod and just play the files it finds, or use it with an external drive and have it play all of my songs out of order. ;(.

It is a small portable drive and just requires a USB cable. I got it on a closeout deal at Office Depot last year for $19.99!!! I thought at first it was just a case at that price. Best deal I ever got at OD!! :drool:

Just a quick update. After backing up my iPod onto an external Toshiba 320GB drive, I plugged that into my car this morn. It worked flawlessly on my way to work and was actually a lot more responsive than using the iPod! It saw all my files, and apparently there were over 300 of them not being seen when using the iPod. If this works consistently, I will retire my iPod!! But that is the key word, consistently! ..;).

They are broken down into folders, but if you look at the file structure just using Windows file explorer, you do not see any artist or song names, just a jumbled mess for song titles. Using a 3rd party utility like Floola, I can see the artist name and song. I just backed up all of the music on my iPod to a 320 GB hard drive and am going to try that again this morning. I hope the update that is coming out has been tested. The Sync system in my Cmax has been flakey since the 2nd week I had the car. For a week or so, it would not recognize any USB device plugged into it. The day after I called Ford and setup an appointment for them to look at it, it started working again! Since then, it has just done this one time. One morning I was going to work and listening to the iPod, and all of a sudden the song I was listening to just started distorting, then quit. I could not get it to work again until I shut the car off and turned it back on. I have had no display a few times, twice had the system restart stating it was doing maintenance, voice commands do not seem to work, but that may be me!

I own a 2013 Cmax Hybrid with the Sony audio system and want to know if there is a maximum amount of files or songs that the system will see on a music device, USB Drive, external hard drive, etc. Most of the time I use an iPod Classic 160 GB, and the system will not see all of the albums I have on it. My iPod has 14,418 songs on it with just under 27GB free. I can navigate to an artists folder, and on some, not all albums will be seen by the Ford's audio system. My car is using Sync VersionGen2 - V3.1.3. The system has been very buggy since I have had it and this is the latest thing to go wrong. When I plug the iPod into the car after I add files to it, the cars audio system seems to index the iPod and does not get stuck, as it apparently has done on some other peoples systems. Manually indexing it does not help. I have Googled this problem, but cannot find a direct answer. Any help would be appreciated!

LOL...you are correct! My old Civic was not very big and had NO get up and go whatsoever!

Consumer Reports is wrong. Ever since I have been doing this so called "pulse and glide", I have been averaging a bit above 47MPG. When we first purchased the Cmax, the AVG MPG on it was about 38.x. It is now 42.8 and I have been driving it like this for a few weeks now. My average goes up a little bit daily. Like you, however, we did get about 36-38 MPG on a recent trip where the speed limit was 70mph, but I knew the car was not going to work in EV mode above 63 MPH anyway. That is still higher than most cars on the road and all cars get lower gas mileage at high speeds. I still think it is odd how gas mileage in cars, up until hybrids became popular, has gone down over the years. I drive a Honda Civic back in 1984 that got 46 mpg around town and 55 on the highway. The next year, they made a car that beat that! Ford now seems to be ahead of the pack as far as gas mileage goes.

Thanks for the info. I actually did some reading last night and got a lot of mixed information about this subject. One thing that I read that seemed to make sense was to set your tire pressure to 10% below the max stated on the tire. This was so when you are driving and the tire warms up, it does not go over the max PSI. Other vehicles that I have owned had tires that had a max PSI of about 36 and I never had a problem. However, I think I am just going to put it a few PSI over the recommended rating on the door to play it safe. I did read some online article a few days ago dealing with MPG tweaks and it had mentioned setting the pressure according to the max on the tire. Seems to me now that this is not a good idea and not worth the extra 1 MPG it may give you!

I have done this all day today, and on my trips to work and back I averaged about 50 mpg! My trip to work is about 25 miles, half of which is on a beltline with a 65PH speed limit. I stayed in right lane and kepy my speed any between 60-63 the entire time there, and just drove 35-55 mph on the smaller roads. I did not drive any different than what I normally do other than just having quicker starts! Thank you fo the great information! It is informative and so easy to do. One more thing all of you may want to check is your tire pressure. I have found that on every car we have purchased, the tires on it are very underinflated to make the test drives smoother. The tires on my Cmax are rated for 51 psi and Ford had them at 32! The recommended rating on the door is 38 psi, but I have always followed the rated pressure on the tires themselves. You get better gas mileage and wear this way.

I tried a reset on my iPod, but did not reload the music onto it. My wifes Nano and my iPhone 3GS also did not work. I spoke to a support person at Ford today and she recommended I let the techs look at it. Oddly enough, today it worked!! Both my iPod Classic 160 and my external 320GB USB hard drive both worked fine. Go figure! I have also put music on my iPod that for some reason would not play in the order it should have on the album. I am not sure what Ford will do with it unless they have some way of hard resetting the system beyond what you can do manually. Maybe they will try a complete reinstall of the software.

Looks like my C-max has to go to the doctor!! ..;(. Maybe the techs at Ford can sort it out!!

I have been trying this since yesterday. I normally accelerate very slowly, but with this info, I have now been getting to the speed limit quicker (I have not been squealing tires or slamming down hard on the gas pedal!;;p) ). I have also been trying to keep my speed limit at 62 MPH and below. Is this what you have been doing? It seems like this is very similar to the way I usually drive, except to start and get to the speed limit quicker. Also, and this may be in the manual, how do you know the C-max is in EV mode?

Laurel, thank you very much! I will try to call them tomorrow. Us men are like kids, and we love our toys!..;p).

Mine did that last weekend, but I am having other problems with the computerized systems in my C-max anyway.