I’m curious as I wasn’t able to find too many details on this and I’m really curious what the most common symptoms of the Park Assist function not working are on older vehicles that have had Sync 2/MFT > Sync 3 upgrades.
Just upgraded my 2013 US C-Max Energi to Sync 3 and was pre-programmed on purchase. Tested everything as throughly as I could even on a 4 hour round trip drive this morning but the one feature that I don’t have the ease to confirm is the Park Assist function which I know is a very common thing to just not work on these upgrades. The basic parking sensors work just as they did prior as well as the backup cam. I did attempt to half-test the Park Assist and got as far as getting a parking spot to register (but was not able to proceed past that due to reasons) with the appropriate alerts and screens as I’d normally expect. Just not sure exactly where the point is that one should expect it to not work normally.
To the best of my knowledge the PAM has not been updated at least not by my hands. I’ve had the car for 4 years this month and the only major update was having the Sync 2 APIM replaced in May 2017 with the 3.10 update done by the dealer then.
So far though testing what I could including I can say everything seems to be 100% perfect. The only glitches I’ve run into are a) The Voice assistant function when not on BT already, will only go as far as listening to my query and when the response should come back, it reverts to the audio source and nothing comes in through the phone. And b) Some of the voice commands like trying to go through a POI search on the built in nav it’ll occasionally just stop listening altogether once it completes its prompt. I also noted the flickery brightness change, but that isn’t a big issue for me personally. So far everything else has been solid.
As per f150chiefs link above, I resolved this on my focus with a PAM calibration upgrade and some asbuilt modification to make it match a focus with sync 3 from factory.
I’m fully aware of this and the instructions and all that is involved.
To condense down my question a bit further: I was hoping for a little better clarification on when and what level of ‘lack of functionality’ is expected pre-update for the PAM?
So far with my limited testing the Park Assist button works, I get the initial ‘looking for a space’ screen just fine and on a single occurrence I also got the alert of a found space, proper screen and notification sounds. However that is as far as I have been able to test as I have extremely limited opportunities where I live to use the system, especially now with so many working from home.
That said, it’s not a HUGE issue for me for that reason alone. I think I’ve used it once in my 4 years of ownership of this car and that occasion was simply a ‘Does it work?’ test. The passive parking sensors still work just fine which is a much more pressing issue for me so I’m thankful that didn’t force me to do the update ASAP.
Sorry for the late reply but thank you for this little bit of info. That may be good news. I will have to see if I can get the actual calibration/firmware string on my PAM and try to see where it stacks up, otherwise proper testing is going to be near impossible. But as noted, this feature is absolutely nonessential for me so this is very much a curiosity more than anything.
