No Preconditioning for over a week

[Maxx]

You can't precondition without departure times set.

I understand truck needs to be plugged in for preconditioning. So if it is still charging at the time, the act of charging itself will precondition the battery, right? I am thinking, if I don't have to hit a certain SOC in AM, lets say I am at 60% previous night and have only 10 miles drive the next day. Would setting the charger at 6 Kw, level 1 keep the battery warm enough (say at around 25 degrees outside) throughout the night and the next morning? or that is not enough juice to keep the cells warm? I got the sense that the pack is well insulated.

Sponsored

 

[TaxmanHog]

I understand truck needs to be plugged in for preconditioning. So if it is still charging at the time, the act of charging itself will precondition the battery, right? I am thinking, if I don't have to hit a certain SOC in AM, lets say I am at 60% previous night and have only 10 miles drive the next day. Would setting the charger at 6 Kw, level 1 keep the battery warm enough (say at around 25 degrees outside) throughout the night and the next morning? or that is not enough juice to keep the cells warm? I got the sense that the pack is well insulated.

I'm working with the theory in mind as well, early am charging, followed by preconditioning the battery that concludes an hour prior to my true departure time, of which 15 minutes prior I use remote start to warm the cabin, seats and steering.

Interestingly, the outside temp was actually 59 degrees this morning, the truck kicked off at 07:39 am and only needed modest energy [1.8 kwh] to bring the battery temperature and cabin heating up to snuff for an 8:05 departure.

As everyone pointed out this mornings departure time resulted in cold steering wheel, which was timed to exactly my real leave time at 8:05, so as mentioned above I'm pushing that back an hour and I will have HVAC off, so there is enough time for the truck to sleep and the remote start will engage the steering wheel heater. Somewhat in line with the advice Jim Farley gave in a recent interview with one of the youTubers.

Too much planning and strategy to work around this flaw, it could be resolved by simply turning on the steering heater the final 10-15 minutes of the departure window.

 

[sotek2345]

Well I can confirm that 4.1.2 doesn't fix the issue. No preconditioning this morning even with the app refresh trick.

I made sure that the schedule didn't get reset in the truck too just to be sure.

 

[nanohead]

This whole "preconditioning" thing is just absurdly sub optimal. It almost never works right, the dopey Fordpass is not reliable, the schedules seem to have a mind of their own sometimes, and you cannot do it on an Ad Hoc basis, which is overall a terrible design decision.

I've had it work correctly twice in the past 5 weeks. But that's only if the truck will communicate and I don't have to run outside and power cycle the network connection by disconnecting the LVB...
I love this truck, but wow, they are making it hard to live with it day to day in the winter by not having attention to the details we need for battery management in the cold.

 

[TaxmanHog]

I've adjusted my pre-conditioning schedule slightly from what I said in earlier posts, setting departure time 20 minutes prior to my actual leave time, with exception to the the cold steering wheel it's working. The reason I set it 20 minute sooner, is so the truck can go back to lite sleep, then I can do a quick 5 minute remote start, which triggers the steering wheel heater, then the truck ready to rock!

This is too much black magic, everything should be ready at intended departure time.

Still waiting for 4.1.2, then 4.1.3 to test for any improvements.

 

[sotek2345]

I've adjusted my pre-conditioning schedule slightly from what I said in earlier posts, setting departure time 20 minutes prior to my actual leave time, with exception to the the cold steering wheel it's working. The reason I set it 20 minute sooner, is so the truck can go back to lite sleep, then I can do a quick 5 minute remote start, which triggers the steering wheel heater, then the truck ready to rock!

This is too much black magic, everything should be ready at intended departure time.

Still waiting for 4.1.2, then 4.1.3 to test for any improvements.

4.1.2 didn't fix anything for me. Failed again this morning.

At this point I have deleted my morning precondition and just do a remote start. I left in the afternoon one and treat it as a nice surprise if I leave work to a warm truck.

It is just so frustrating that our Mach-e has had this working perfectly from day 1. What is so different between the Lightning and Mach-e software stacks for this?!?!?

 

[HaroldCal]

I don't normally have a set departure time, so the whole debacle over the unreliability on that wasn't affecting me as much as some others. BUt this week, I had a couple days where I *was* leaving at a predictable time, so I had set a departure time. Completely ignored. No preconditioning, nothing. SMH.

 

[MBM]

The last couple of occasions where my departure times failed to work, I adjusted one of the scheduled times by 5 minutes and it got it working again. Several weeks later needed to do it again.

 

[TaxmanHog]

Today's episode of perfectly timed 80 to 100% charging bumping right into my pre-conditioning window, the battery is at 99% now, but the EVSE is sending more current to allow the PTC to warm up the cabin now, of course the heated steering won't work, but the remote start will fix that now

 

[sotek2345]

Ok - haven't posted here for awhile since I deleted my morning precondition and my work schedule has been too irregular to determine if the afternoon one is working.

However, I had the weirdest thing happen this morning. Before I had a chance to remote start, I got a Fordpass message that my cabin had reached desired temp. When I got in the truck I found that this was true. Apparently Ford somehow reinstated my deleted preconditioning schedule, without any input from me, and it actually worked. I check in the truck and all of the morning (6am) time slot had been put back in. I have no idea why. I deleted them again in the truck.

For reference, since it did precondition, of course the heated steering wheel didn't work...

 

[TaxmanHog]

Sunday evening, I set a departure schedule for Mon-Fri, to be ready 7:45a which is 20 minutes prior to actual leave time at 8:05a

This morning the temps was a mild 51° for late February in Southern New England.

No battery warming occurred early this morning, might be because the temps were already in the 'comfortable' zone.

The cabin warming cycle did not start until I triggered the door unlock command at 7:42, ran for 18 minutes and shut down promptly at 8:00a using about 1.5 kWh of shore power.

We left the around 8:08, cabin was comfortable and the steering wheel was at ambient temp on entry but as soon as I started the truck and turned it on it warmed up in a couple of minutes.

 

[CdnCGM23]

I gave up on preconditioning. I just remote start with it plugged in.

Until Ford sets up some procedure to inform them of software bugs, I don't see how some of these problems gets resolved. Taking it to the dealer for things like this is a waste of time.

We need to be able to tweet directly to Jim Farley or something! Bug him enough and the business end of getting things done will should start to happen. I know tweeting Elon works with legit issues and he gets the IT teams to work on it.

 

[Pioneer74]

We need to be able to tweet directly to Jim Farley or something! Bug him enough and the business end of getting things done will should start to happen. I know tweeting Elon works with legit issues and he gets the IT teams to work on it.

Ford needs to implement a system to report bugs and take suggestions on how to make things better. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they care about doing either of those things.

 

[data003]

How has this not been fixed yet @Ford Motor Company ? It’s been months now…

 

[Beans]

At this point I think the trucks just messing with me. It hasn't preconditioned for over a week (other than one day when I refreshed the app to trigger it). Then yesterday I worked from home because of the snow storm, and as I sat at my desk the app told me the cabin preconditioning was done. The one day I didn't need it.

Sponsored