SYNC 3 Lagging, Wrong Location, Responsivity Issues

[idriveacar]

So, I thought this issue had gone away, but it just returned. There is an unexplainable condition experienced by my SYNC 3 system where crossing state lines and entering different parts of the country trigger unpredictable freezing, lagginess, and similar issues. Sometimes it is an issue that lasted for over 1 year when I bought the vehicle, but it went away eventually in mid-2022, but as of my most recent road trip it has returned. I am not too frustrated since I have had this issue happen before so I live with it ok, but it sort of stinks to know for either the next week or year it might be acting up like this. It can take up to 3 minutes to change the radio station or bring up the battery % menu, and if I press the voice button the steering wheel the person takes usually 5 minutes to say "please say a command *beep*". Sometimes, it does not register the vehicle's movement at all (as if I'm still at a charging station) but most of the time it can have me driving in the middle of fields and lakes...

The press+hold power and right button typically fix the location situation for that moment but the lagginess and behavior problems seems to be its own beast, and only happening in certain states (also happens when I cross timezones, most of my trips are over 1,000 miles).

Does anyone have a similar account of this? I have found sometimes letting the car sit for a full 3 days in the parking garage after a road trip will help it regroup itself.

 

[idriveacar]

This is a follow-up to the initial post. the system again works flawlessly since I am back out of Illinois (home base, where the lag was happening) again. If it’s happening in Illinois, it’ll happen in Missouri too. What seems to be the catalyst to it is issues with updating live data on the map. Some cities get this coverage and others don’t, an example of this being the map showing traffic near Nashville on 24 from almost the I-69 junction all the way to Georgia. Headed on I-24 the other direction, when I get to Illinois even as I’m on the Ohio River, it begins to go crazy (or other select groups of states, I haven’t been to them all). I believe the state I’m now in and the other one I’m going to next week will have no lag issues.

I have filmed this phenomena before and am certain it correlates with crossing state boundaries, regional boundaries, and time zone lines sometimes. I’ve driven all over east of the Mississippi in this car.

Only additional guess is perhaps having the ford app and signed into the account might be causing the system to have errors? Issue persisted before 3G modem shutdown FWIW.

 

[Heima]

Just gonna throw this out there.....
Maybe what you are seeing is the mapping system switch from one database to another. That you are at a virtual border in the software, and it has to reload one submap, and then another, depending on your location and velocity (if it is pre-emptive).
A way to tell might be to drive, note when it goes crazy, drive until it normalizes, make a U-turn and see if it goes crazy again at the same location upon your return. There might be a little bit of database loading "hysteresis" from overlapping sections of the submaps.

As an aside, I wonder how they define those submaps? You want them to be centered around a location you are most likely to be. Such as a large city. But what if by following that thinking, it puts a slightly smaller city, right at the edge of the submap? Most likely there would be submap overlap, but by how much, and would that be dependent upon the memory available for the submap and the processing power of the system reading the database?

A short, unrelated GPS story. I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area when consumer routing GPS was first available. For those not familiar, there are long bridges stretching across San Francisco Bay. In the east bay city of Hayward, I entered an address in San Mateo, on the west bay peninsula. No matter how I tried to enter the address, even by changing the house number, the GPS directed me to drive only halfway across the San Mateo Bridge, and then take a right, into the bay.

 

[idriveacar]

Just gonna throw this out there.....
Maybe what you are seeing is the mapping system switch from one database to another. That you are at a virtual border in the software, and it has to reload one submap, and then another, depending on your location and velocity (if it is pre-emptive).
A way to tell might be to drive, note when it goes crazy, drive until it normalizes, make a U-turn and see if it goes crazy again at the same location upon your return. There might be a little bit of database loading "hysteresis" from overlapping sections of the submaps.

As an aside, I wonder how they define those submaps? You want them to be centered around a location you are most likely to be. Such as a large city. But what if by following that thinking, it puts a slightly smaller city, right at the edge of the submap? Most likely there would be submap overlap, but by how much, and would that be dependent upon the memory available for the submap and the processing power of the system reading the database?

A short, unrelated GPS story. I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area when consumer routing GPS was first available. For those not familiar, there are long bridges stretching across San Francisco Bay. In the east bay city of Hayward, I entered an address in San Mateo, on the west bay peninsula. No matter how I tried to enter the address, even by changing the house number, the GPS directed me to drive only halfway across the San Mateo Bridge, and then take a right, into the bay.

"Virtual border in the software"
seems to be a very plausible theory. The car was initially delivered in New York City and stayed there before me. right after buying the car I drove it west and worked fine until Chicago where the radio got all like that with me. Chicago is on the time zone line, so I suspected it had to do with the central time zone or state boundary (of course you get a look when you mention this to the dealership employees...) The radio never got good from that point all the way until about 15 months later.

It worked again fine until around my initial post. At that time, I just got back from a road trip out of state. Since that time, l again left to travel in it to 5 more states and no issues. I am not going to be back in that state until MLK day.
Additionally, the issue could very likely be reproduced how you are suggesting taking a u-turn after crossing into the zone and exiting it again. Sometimes the touch sensor will refuse to acknowledge any pressing on the map such as the zoom in or out or tuning of the radio even if via physical button, and bluetooth goes insane, but other things like checking the battery will work flawlessly before slowly all apps within the unit "switch over to laggy mode".

 

[idriveacar]

Update:
While I still encounter this issue from time-to-time, only one time since my previous post, it appears the self-resolves a lot more than it used to. Doing the SYNC system reset helps most of the time, and if it doesn't, letting the car sit for a little while seems to let it fix itself, too. However, on road trips it does seem to happen once every 500 miles or so.