In-Vehicle Karaoke Rolling Out to F-150 Lightning! (Stingray Karaoke App)

[rugedraw]

I'm actually kinda jelly. I want karaoke in my truck. Can we pair a mic to the bluetooth? Picking up/dropping off my daughter in the drive-thru of her high school in front of all her friends while blasting and signing Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" with my aftermarket sound system sounds like a gloriously good time.

Sponsored

 

[invertedspear]

I also think it’s a little silly how some people are so sure their ideas are more important than others. Like I would much rather have karaoke than dog mode. My daughters would love to sing karaoke, and we don’t take the dog on road trips. So DogMode is useless to me.

It's not that the specific feature of Dog Mode is the most important thing. I rarely take my dogs in the truck unless we're taking a trip to the vet, and they're about a mile away so I'm not leaving them parked in the truck anywhere.

It's the fact that so many people have mentioned wanting dog mode. Or wanting this feature or that feature. There's likely a top 10 list you can easily cultivate from this forum. Sentry mode, or getting rid of "full view not available" would be high on that list. And instead what has Ford provided? SOC on the gauge cluster (Ok, that was a good one, but isn't a "sync" feature), Charge assist (we all use plugshare anyway and it still doesn't precondition the battery for charging), and now Karaoke. I'm glad you have a use for it, but so far you're one out of dozens.

I do 100% agree with you, don't take it out on the intern running the social media account that was given a press release and told to distribute it. They are not the issue, the management behind these decisions is the issue.

 

[62F1004x4]

Need the ability to add a weather app with radar to the vehicle. This is very important when dodging severe weather on trips!
Entertainment is pretty low on the list but I still want more. Why not open up the Ford App Store and let us add what we want?

 

[maineiah]

Oh Ford, you do make it hard to be a fan.

 

[StaggerLee]

Need the ability to add a weather app with radar to the vehicle. This is very important when dodging severe weather on trips!

The app MyRadar Weather Radar works on Android Auto. I don't know if they have an iOS version.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.acmeaom.android.myradar

 

[62F1004x4]

The app MyRadar Weather Radar works on Android Auto. I don't know if they have an iOS version.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.acmeaom.android.myradar

Thanks for the good idea, I will check it out and see if this works with iOS.
edit, MyRadar now available on CarPlay …$4.99 per month for radar

 

[The Weatherman]

Need the ability to add a weather app with radar to the vehicle. This is very important when dodging severe weather on trips!
Entertainment is pretty low on the list but I still want more. Why not open up the Ford App Store and let us add what we want?

Radar just showed up with the 6.14 update.

It’s a little out of place but it’s there.

 

[carys98]

@Ford Motor Company here is a list of all the entertainment options I would like to see added.
1.

and here is a list of actual, useful things I would like to see.
1. Generator mode
2. Trip planning in the app
3. All available chargers in nav including Tesla
4. Frunk open without turning off climate
5. ProPower control from app
6. Zone lighting from app
7. Manual DC charging precondition
8. Single button charge to 100% in app

Basically, give me back the app functions we used to have and add generator mode and frunk open.

 

[Newton]

I don’t have dogs either, but would like the ability to leave the truck with climate control on. Even if my wife has a key, if I leave the truck it turns off when I leave and she has to go into the driver’s seat, push the brake, and start the truck. I’d like the ability for both of us to walk away on a hot day and be able to come back to a non-roasting truck. If I leave my musical instrument in the truck, I’d like the truck to keep the temperature low enough that the varnish doesn’t melt.

Climate control does not take much energy (I ride the ferry with climate on and it hardly affects the range over two hours).

While I’m adding a wishlist, I’d like the ability to set a minimum and maximum temperature. I’d really like it if the truck would keep the cabin from freezing, especially if it is plugged in. Preconditioning the cabin is great, but it does nothing about the frozen blocks of ice in the water bottles or other damaged items. On the other end of the scale, I see no reason to let the cabin ever hit 100 degrees or whatever dangerous level of heat is killing children. So you lose range, no big deal usually.

There is a lot of legacy thinking in cars still. The truck has enough energy to power my house for days, surely we can keep the cabin at a reasonable non-damaging temperature.

 

[MyJoule]

My list of desires didn't include fun and games, I'd like some of the useful things my Tesla has had and these should be possible I hope

1. Camp Mode ( Similar to Dog Mode, and Dog mode can be used the same way)
2. Routing to Tesla Superchargers including pre conditioning
3. Charging rate displayed in the vehicle, even though it does show in the App.
4. Sentry Mode so we can use the cameras as security
5. Dashcam .


This one is something I love in my Tesla, but I suspect it's not possible with the Ford- Geolocation automatic HomeLink.

 

[RaspPiDude]

I know many people are upset that they worked on this instead of any number of other features, but based on my experience that's not how things like this play out.. It's usually one of these events that results in a new feature like this:

• They had an innovation day or hackathon to motivate employees and a prototype of this came out as a top project, and the winner got to work on it through to release
• Stingray reached out with a commercial music agreement and it meant more $$ for FMC, so they took a few devs (maybe even student devs) to release this side project
• FMC wants access to Stingray's licensed music library for some other idea (SXM subscription displacement??? Upsell Ford Connected with music streaming feature??), and this is a trial run of a co-dev partnership
• An executive's neighbor has a karaoke app in their non-Ford car and routinely brings it up over back patio beers

I'd bet 99% of the engineering team wasn't involved in this and are still focused on their (and hopefully our!) other priorities..

P.S. I love the suggestions for other functional features, such great ideas here!

 

[Maineiac12]

Yay! More features that us poors with XLTs and Pros don’t get.

 

[Stang68]

So we have to pay for the Ford Connected thing or use our phone as a hotspot for this to even work? This is going to be used by dozens of people! Dozens!

 

[invertedspear]

I know many people are upset that they worked on this instead of any number of other features, but based on my experience that's not how things like this play out.. It's usually one of these events that results in a new feature like this:

• They had an innovation day or hackathon to motivate employees and a prototype of this came out as a top project, and the winner got to work on it through to release
• Stingray reached out with a commercial music agreement and it meant more $$ for FMC, so they took a few devs (maybe even student devs) to release this side project
• FMC wants access to Stingray's licensed music library for some other idea (SXM subscription displacement??? Upsell Ford Connected with music streaming feature??), and this is a trial run of a co-dev partnership
• An executive's neighbor has a karaoke app in their non-Ford car and routinely brings it up over back patio beers

I'd bet 99% of the engineering team wasn't involved in this and are still focused on their (and hopefully our!) other priorities..

P.S. I love the suggestions for other functional features, such great ideas here!

Only the first bullet point would make me feel any less annoyed at Ford.

If one of the devs just fucking loves Karaoke and integrated this as a passion project... then great, these hackathons are a lot of fun and motivating for developers.

The second bullet is mid, but ultimately it won't make anything cheaper for us, so I'd be annoyed at a cash grab taking devs away from better things unless it is used to fund those better things. We'll never know since Ford will never tell.

Bullets 3 and 4 are would still be on my high annoyance at Ford putting any effort towards this. I don't care about any in-car music service, none of it will be better than using my own phone with my preferred music platform, and number 4 would just reaffirm the tone-deafness of management decision making at Ford.

Do you include QA testing as part of an engineering team? I do, and an integration like this means LOTS of testing. There was a hell of a lot more than 1% of the teams bandwidth soaked into this integration during it's lifecycle.

 

[RaspPiDude]

Great points!

Do you include QA testing as part of an engineering team? I do, and an integration like this means LOTS of testing. There was a hell of a lot more than 1% of the teams bandwidth soaked into this integration during it's lifecycle.

I can only estimate their team size, but my guess is that 1% is something like 7-10 people. I haven't seen the app yet so I don't know how great it is, but since karaoke games are simple enough to be university class projects these days (timings files make it a breeze), it seemed a reasonable estimate. Especially since (a) it's Android, and (b) it's a co-dev with another company.

Sponsored