The Lightning’s Native Nav is Worthless

[VAF84]

This was a huge gripe of mine when I had the car. Honestly, all EV's just need a precondition button. At some point it will be easier for phone maps to guide the driver, and the driver should be able to activate preconditioning as needed. As the OP found, I gave up on the native OEM apps long ago.

Sponsored

 

[02Reaper]

I'm wondering when Ford will release an update to NAV?

It's been mentioned in the past that the charger list would be updated, I'm suspecting they're punting this allowing the charge assist app to fill the need, of course that has quirks as well.

This weekend I was in a situation that the only thing that would work was the Native Navigation. It was in a bigger city and apparently the mobile system was overwhelmed so Apple maps wouldn't work and charge assist wouldn't work. Too bad the native navigation is so out of date.

 

[Kev12345]

Is Ford not aware of their lacklustre nav system? Do they think its good?
Do they know how good Tesla nav is in comparison?
Do they think we DON'T compare Ford Nav to Tesla?
Is there one guy working on software updates at Ford?
Can Ford not afford a competent team of software engineers?
Why karaoke?
Why does Ford Nav still suck years later?

 

[21st Century Truck]

I actually prefer Ford NAV and use it all the time. It took us all over the USA, coast to coast and then some (in our now-gone Mach E).

Like any program, the NAV has its quirks and it takes time and a bit of effort to learn its strengths. Yes, it does have some strengths.

I like that it's built-in and gets me off my smartphone

This reminds me a bit of the old word processor preference wars.. "WordPerfect vs. Word". Our Earth is big enough to allow us each our own choice, to include (gasp) paper atlas maps.

 

[Albern]

The SYNC 4 Navigation does indeed have problems and the design decisions made are unusual, but to call it "worthless" is a statement of absolutes and is not helpful if we are to expect Ford to do a significant enough of an update to make the application usable.

Part of why I chose a Lightning over other trucks was because Ford made the decision to bring more software in-house and provide a native solution. As vehicles move to electrification which means greater compute and digitization, software capabilities will be necessary for an OEM to survive the 21st century. Any OEM that relies on 3rd party solutions like CarPlay and Android Auto are merely using a crutch of a solution and are choosing not to innovate.

SYNC 4 has a most of the information, telemetry, and data readily available but needs to do better on both the UI side and database updates whenever a new charger (even just adding Tesla Superchargers) becomes available.

On the UI side, I strongly believe that a style guideline change is necessary so that critical information like battery % SOC on arrival isn't burred 3-layers in. There is also opportunity to optimize for a lot of the white space and wasted space across the 2 screens. Essentially, an app should not have to take up the whole 2/3rds of the screen - e.g. energy consumption breakdown, when it could just be a significantly smaller information card.

Finally a consolidation of applications needs to occur. For example, the public charging search app should be integrated into the navigation. This as a standalone app should not have existed given that users would search by navigating across a map, rather than finding a charger via a look-up table.

Finally, if memory and compute capacity is required - delete the games and boot-up videos.

This isn't a comprehensive list but I believe this represents at a very high level how the software team should go about making SYNC work and what to prioritize accordingly.

@Ford Motor Company

 

[Maquis]

I actually prefer Ford NAV and use it all the time. It took us all over the USA, coast to coast and then some (in our now-gone Mach E).

Like any program, the NAV has its quirks and it takes time and a bit of effort to learn its strengths. Yes, it does have some strengths.

I like that it's built-in and gets me off my smartphone

This reminds me a bit of the old word processor preference wars.. "WordPerfect vs. Word". Our Earth is big enough to allow us each our own choice, to include (gasp) paper atlas maps.

Agreed. As long as you’re aware of its quirks and limitations, it’s at least “serviceable.”

Sponsored