viper001

That is interesting. Here in Cincinnati the information from Sirius seems to update really quickly. This morning we had some icy conditions from a storm that went through overnight and my screen was lit up like a Christmas tree with all the traffic icons and such. In fact I saw my first weather icon on the screen where I'm assuming the road had iced over.

Here is my understanding of how all this breaks out. The 3 year complementary SYNC covers just the services that are related to the syncmyride.com web site, and when you are in the car and say "Services" and it connects via your cell phone. These would include vehicle health reporting, downloading directions from Google, downloading saved favorite points, the news and verbal weather service, and the SYNC based business searching. Sirius Travellink covers the screen based weather services, the fuel prices, movie listings, and very importantly, all the traffic that is visible on your touchscreen (maps with traffic, navigation traffic avoidance, etc). I believe Sirius breaks this out into 2 services but I would suspect most people would want them both (Traffic and Info Services) as they are apparently pretty cheap (see post above). Additionally, Sirius has the music portion of the service. You either use this or you don't, apparently you can just have the Travellink without the music stuff (or vice-versa). I think a lot of folks, especially those with navigation like me, are going to be disappointed to discover the traffic built into the navigation system is coming from Sirius and will stop after 6 months versus continuing for 3 years. At least it is cheap to continue, but the free 3 year service is mainly the voice system where the car dials the SYNC 800 number. If I am wrong someone please correct me. To be honest even my dealer was not clear on how all this works out, I was told everything was included free for 3 years except the music service but from what I'm reading that is not correct. The Travellink stuff expires after 6 months as well and is fairly integrated into the navigation equipped models...

Are you talking about adjusting the big volume knob, or some other adjustment on the system? I am having a similar problem that was described by the first poster, except my navigation voice is too loud. When I went into the voice control settings and kept lowing it, it seemed to be lowering the volume of the regular voice command voice (and the "bong" tone sounds), but the navigation voice seemed unaffected and was still too loud.

My wife just picked up my Edge from the dealer today for getting the passenger door ambient lighting fixed. I considered it a trivial problem to even make them fix it until she saw the bill of what they would have charged to fix it after the warranty expired. I guess there is one wiring harness in the door that runs everything (power windows, locks, related switches, etc, along with the ambient lighting). Parts and labor for this was $450. Yikes! Car is new and obviously we were not asked to pick that up, but knowing what after warranty repairs are going to be I would recommend folks take a quick look at all their lighting at about the 30k mileage point...

I did not know that. Good tip!

At our car wash you have to get out of the vehicle as they vacuum the inside of it. I've only been once so far with the new Edge and I just dropped my keychain with the IA fob in the center cupholder and let the attendant know. It didn't seem like a big problem, they are in and out of cars all day and have probably seen a lot of the push button start cars. Worst case, if they were able to manage to lock the key inside I programmed a code for the keypad so I could still get in the car. I actually had that problem on my previous vehicle, I ended up having to have the wife bring a second set of keys to get in the truck that time. You will hardly ever use that outside keypad but every once in a great while it's a lifesaver!

With all the general problems and complaining I thought I would share an interesting discovery I made on my system the other day. It seemed to be slightly hidden and undocumented so I thought maybe someone with MFT would find it useful. Under the Sirius Travellink stuff there is a fairly nifty weather map feature (also accessible via the voice command "Weather Map"). By default it comes on at a 50 mile setting which is nice, but the neat thing is if you touch the screen you can zoom in to a 5 mile setting (those seem to be the only 2 zoom settings it has). On the 5 mile setting it will also display the major highways in your area, along with traffic of those major roads! 2 useful pieces of information on one screen, along with a moving arrow of where you are now. It would be even cooler if the map would pan to keep your vehicle in the center of the screen, as it is if you don't manually refresh it you will eventually see your arrow drive off the edge of the screen. But still a neat and useful feature, especially for those of use in the non-smartphone camp that are easily impressed. :-)

In the interest of helping out future buyers of Edges I will share the 3 defects that were found with my vehicle when I bought it. Because we have been discovering them in a successive fashion I am still waiting on the dealer to correct the 3rd one but I expect to get a call on that any day. So that said, here are my recommendations: 1) If your vehicle has the power fold down rear seats I would highly suggest you cycle both of those down and up a couple of times. My right rear seat would not latch in the upright position at all, that was discovered by the dealership guys when they were preping the car for delivery. Took 2 visits to correct. 2) After getting said rear seat fixed, the first time someone went to sit in that position for a ride it was discovered the seatbelt in that position would not latch. Another 2 visits to correct. So I would recommend clicking all seatbelts to make sure they work before leaving. 3) Also on the right hand side of the car, we noticed that the one door's ambient lighting was off on several colors that we selected. The rest of the car would be doing green, that door was lit red. Etc. 2 visits and still not fixed so I'm assuming it will take a total of 3 to correct. So you might want to crank up the lighting to full and cycle through all the colors while taking a look around. It sound silly, but if they are going to put the option in there and charge you cash for it, I figured it should work correctly. All that said, I love my Edge and am very pleased. And I suspect if I had noticed all 3 of my issues on delivery day they would already be taken care of. It's just a little frustrating to have to schedule for so many trips back.

Find destination in Google maps. Click "Send" in upper right, select Car, select make of car (Ford/Lincoln), input your cell phone number, then send. Go to car. Click voice button, say "Services". Phone call will connect. The first option it will offer you is to download directions from Google maps. Respond "Yes" to the prompt of "Do you want to download these directions?". Make sure you press "Set as destination" or my experience says it will loose what was downloaded if you go to another screen. I have also been unable to do "Save as Favorite" at this point. It acts like it is saving it, but when I go to "My Favorites" folder what I downloaded is not there. Not sure what I'm doing wrong on this point, but it will download it for use as a destination on the spot. Good luck!

Yea, I will admit this one had me stumped for several days. And the manual is really vague and at no place in it does it actually show a picture of this slot. I was also looking for a place for the metal key to insert. How it works is this. The metal key that pops out will go in the door key slot to get you in the car (remote keypad would do that as well if you didn't want to pop out the metal key). Once you are in the car take your giant fob thing, open the center console, and below the 12 volt outlet door thing there are 2 slide bracket plastic rail things. Those are designed so that you can insert the entire fob into that slot. When you do it right the rest of the keys on your fob will basically be dangling from underneath the little ledge, you don't have to take the fob off of a keychain to get this to work. Hopefully version 4 of the owner's manual will point this out better. I consider myself smarter than the average bear and I couldn't figure this out for a while. Other keyless systems I've seen tend to use the metal key as an alternate start mechanism. The bad thing is folks won't figure this out until they need it, and then they will be stuck. :angry:

It's under the Options for the USB device. If I remember there is a slide bar when you go there and the Gracenote settings were further down from the first page.

I'm 3 weeks into ownership on my 2011 Edge and I'm accumulating a small (but growing) list of gripes/bugs/improvements I'd like to see in the MyFord Touch system. Do Ford engineering come here at all? Is there a different forum or venue that would be good to submit bugs and such? And for the record I am running the latest/greatest software already so what I'm seeing would be in the current production environment. Again, I am not highly dissatisfied or anything, just noticing some bugs that could probably be addressed in a future release of software. Thanks!

I'm glad someone else already asked this question. My Edge is going in to the dealer for another problem and I was going to ask them to check the front cupholder LED while they were at it as it appeared to have a light not working. I think I'm already in the running for "customer pain in the butt" for making them fix the passenger door that won't do the correct color (seems to be missing yellow from what I can tell). If I had them disassembling the center console to fix a light that wasn't there I might have had to find myself a new dealer. :-) At least it has one non-trivial problem as an excuse for them to work on it. The right rear seatbelt will not latch. The makes the second noticable defect we have found in our car, both related to the right rear seat. The first problem was found when they were prepping my car for delivery in that the right rear seat would not latch in the upright position. I have to say I was fairly disappointed in that one, I'm not sure how that could have been missed at the factory. Whomever was working that side of the car that day must have been having a bad day.

So what do we think, report this as a bug, or consider it an undocumented "feature"? I would hate to report this as a bug, and potentially get it changed in a future software upgrade only to discover that 98% of the folks would rather it work the way it is now. For me, my vote would be to change it to match the manual. My previous F-150 had the seats that timed out at 15 minutes and I liked it that way. Plus, frankly, those were easier to turn off manually as there were buttons anyway. Maybe I'll try this Topic Poll button I see...

I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this or not. According the owner's manual the heated seats should automatically time out and turn off after 15 minutes. I turned mine on this morning in the driveway and as a test I didn't manually turn them back off, they were still on when I pulled into work 51 minutes later. I know some like heaters that don't turn off (my wife's Honda is a toggle switch that doesn't time out and she likes that), I actually kind of like them shutting down automatically. Especially since we didn't get a physical button for them and potentially have to cycle through the menus to get to the button to shut it off.

I wondered if I was the only one that set it to Aqua for the same reason. My family told me it was my OCD, but I really like all the lighting to match the button colors. In fact, it's a little bit of a bummer that the buttons don't change color to match the ambient lighting, but again I'm apparently OCD. :-) On a somewhat related note, I also noticed this morning that the lights in my front passenger door are not working correctly. I noticed they were doing a different color than what I had the vehicle set for. I cycled through all the colors and my guess is that the connection for yellow is not working (green was wrong, aqua was purple, another one was off but I can't remember it now). All the other lights in the vehicle were correct as per the screen so I'm hoping it's just a connection issue. I would actually feel weird taking it back to the dealer for such a minor issue, but it's going back anyway for a rear seatbeat that won't latch so I'll have them look at it while it's in anyway for that.

I did a little further investigation and figured out something interesting. When I put the IA on my keychain it ended up right next to my electronic security token that I use to access our computer network. The shape of that device is round on the end that attaches to the keychain, then it becomes straight after that, overall it's maybe 2 or 3 inches in length. What I noticed is when it's pressed up against the fob in 2 of it's 4 positions the rounded part of the access key lined up perfectly with the panic button on my new fob. I took it off the keychain and moved it to another position where it would press against the back of another fob I have and it hasn't happened again. This probably won't help out 1 in 10,000 other people, but I figured I'd share anyway.

I think that's a fair assessment. And honestly, the fact that is kept all of my inputs during the event (radio station and volume, Navigation route picked up where it left off, etc) says it was more of a controlled event than some other Microsoft products would have given us in the past. It certainly could have cleared all my setting preferences, killed my route guidance, and set the radio to AM 550 static but it didn't. So count me as impressed even when there is a crash. Assuming I don't keep seeing them of course.

I'm not completely sure what you are saying. Does the scheduled maintenance actually apply patches or do updates to the system? I thought since I had already done the computer/USB/computer update trick the week before that I was up-to-date on patches applied. By definition, if it happens as the result of a system crash it really can't count as "scheduled", and if the software is essentially unchanged before and after the event I think calling it "maintenance" is also a stretch. Although I suppose in fairness rebooting an operating system can be considered regular maintenance. By the way, one guess what line of work I am in. :-)

This is good to know. I assumed it was a well disguised crash, and admittedly I was working the system pretty hard at the time that it happened. As long as they keep issuing periodic patches and improvements with software updates I can live with an occasional crash. I was demonstrating the MyFord Touch features to some friends for the first time last night and they were really impressed, and it was a tough room as they are IT savvy type of folks. :-)

With 2 USB ports and an SD card slot I would have thought there would be a way to mass upload and download favorites in the navigation system of my 2011 Edge. Does anyone know if this is possible? I could do it with my dash mounted Garmin and it was pretty handy if you ever had to reset the system or when you bought a new one for transferring that information to the next one. Thanks in advance!

I was messing with my touchscreen this morning when it suddenly went dark. The two smaller screens continued to run although my radio cut out and my route guidance stopped. Then I saw the Microsoft Sync screen which said "Performing scheduled system maintenance, please wait" with a status bar. Once the status bar completed everything came back on, the radio came on, and the route guidance started again. My question is, did I just have a crash, or was this honestly something that was scheduled? I believe by doing the updates on my SYNC account with the USB trick that my software is up-to-date, I believe it shows Gen 2 software which was loaded just last month when it was built. So can I expect to see this again, or was this (hopefully) a one time fluke? Thanks!

Looks like it was accidental panic button pressing. Thanks for the tip, that hadn't occurred to me.

I'm a little surprised when I searched and didn't see anyone else mention this issue. But has anyone else noticed that the "Fuel Prices" tool within the Sirius Travellink Services is not necessarily up-to-date on the prices that it displays? I have noticed that it doesn't display for every gas station, and I can understand that, but even for the ones that it does the prices seem to be more often than not inaccurate. I know the information comes through the satellite signal, but how does Sirius obtain it? Is it collected randomly by end users (like Gasbuddy, etc), or is is being collected directed from the stations themselves?

That is a possibility. Where my keys were in my jacket they admittedly where kind of jammed down between me and console/seatbelt latch. I will do a test tonight and see if that corrects this. I was thinking the alarm was arming itself automatically so I was thinking that was the issue. Certainly, you should be able to get out of your car without it setting an alarm, correct? Like parking it in a locked garage, etc?