A New Hope? The Story Continues.

[Mach1E]

Keep in mind in a tight lemon warranty situation I can't fix a damn thing. I am the type of guy who makes a forum account and would love to do any fixes you got. But when push comes to shove me touching that cable can VOID my warranty and Ford is not responsive so all signs indicate they would love to void my warranty.

This is false.

You can try to fix the pinched cable yourself and your warranty will still be intact. Plenty here have and half the time they don’t need to go to the dealer.

Warranties don’t get “voided.” That’s not a thing. If you modify your car in a way that CAUSES a part to fail, they won’t cover that part. That’s about it though.

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[stealthytolkien]

A wall of text and literally no clear mention of what happened.

 

[TheSteelRider]

A wall of text and literally no clear mention of what happened.

I mean it's all here in black and white in the first post ... note that I did not add the emphasis, it exists in the OP ... make of it what you will.

I'll keep it too real for you. My wife and I are around age 40, been married 13 years. I am the only man she has ever has been with consensually and this car was a gift to her.

 

[stealthytolkien]

I mean it's all here in black and white in the first post ... note that I did not add the emphasis, it exists in the OP ... make of it what you will.

Are you the same person as the OP but with a different ID?

 

[SlicerOnSteam]

(1) bring it to a different dealer; then
(2) Never interact with that dealer again; then
(3) Name and shame the dealer here, and to all your friends and family

This thread is really blowing my mind, like a slow motion train wreck I just cannot look away. Even now, I cannot understand why my hands are still typing this reply as my brain is telling me to let it go.

You're going to love this.

I called the service center in the huge dealership in Raleigh, NC. They put me on the line with their local EV expert. He said they will gladly check it out Monday morning if we can drop it off anytime this weekend and he is familiar with wacky Mach-E issues around the clock. He's the first person to bother to look up the real lemon history for me. Despite the fact that I've spent hours on the phone with Ford HQ being given the runaround.

It was originally sold in CT. The lemon issue was a powertrain fault related to the high voltage junction box. It was fixed, certified, and auctioned to NJ. Then came down to the lot in NC.

There's no history of the front camera fault back in the lemon days and those are getting worse and worse across all the models.

So apparently all of the issues we're seeing is just crap that can happen to any Mach-E. Is that really good news? Did I mention Tesla has won? Another good line I thought of last night was that Toyota can make a hybrid unicycle at this point and it will retain value better than a Mach-E.

Why do I care about the resale value so much? This was a 2021 certified Mach-E for $29000 sticker price whose lemon issue seems to be truly fixed. This was an impossible to lose deal unless the car is just bad or all resale values tanked. No one would've cared it was a lemon long ago if it wasn't glitchy as Hell. We would have proven it was OK by then and we could have been happy with it and kept it or sold it for absolutely no loss at all.

And then more and more and more problems kept popping up.

It gets way better. He said his records show a full warranty package active on this VIN. Wait a minute, what happened to the 1 yr/12000 mile lemon warranty that the dealer was very up front about and reminded us of when we came in with issues?

Did the shady dealership downplay the warranty to get the trade in deal?

But what about this? A Ford rep randomly called my cell a couple months ago. He said, we see that you have the 1 yr/12000 mile warranty. You know for the tiny amount of $150 extra dollars on your existing payment you can extend that warranty on out to keep it covered. That's right. Ford tried to stick us with an even higher payment just because we had their old lemon before we even complained about anything wrong with it.

You see why I'm not touching a damn thing for any voided warranty tricks. That's what I mean about following up on a lemon in the modern data driven customer support world. They've proven they know how to do that for completely undeserved extra cash grab just because their data is well aware that we are the new owners of this particular lemon and what its statuses are. And I can't get them to tell me anything about all these glitches and bugs. They are just showing us how they want to do business.

This would mean though that the shady dealership wasn't lying about the limited lemon warranty.

But there's a full warranty showing now. Did all of my complaints to Ford HQ make a difference and they've decided to honor the original warranty because my story is so shocking?

Is it just yet another glitch?

Stay tuned...

 

[TheSteelRider]

You're going to love this.

..... ok .... I am properly strapped in and seated, all hands and feet in the car.

So apparently all of the issues we're seeing is just crap that can happen to any Mach-E. Is that really good news?

What issues are you seeing?

 

[kodiakng]

What issues are you seeing?

 

[the golden eel]

Stay tuned...

Dear God... please no.

 

[SlicerOnSteam]

What issues are you seeing?

see screenshots of all of the line items in short form in this post: https://www.macheforum.com/site/threads/a-new-hope-the-story-continues.34409/post-768680

The one I did completely forget there was the auto-up on the driver door window not working. It just slipped my mind so it must be the least important issue. A service tech did tell me something on that one. He said they could recalibrate the stop points as an easy fix.

Problem is that it did it for a couple days last week and isn't doing it now. A lot of problems are like that.

Bluetooth as a Key worked fine last night. It hasn't worked in a couple weeks and just suddenly worked again. I went out to walk the dog with my phone in my pocket and no keyfob. The car lit up and put down the pony lights for me with just my phone the first time in a while.

Thank you for whoever said you can just add it back and it will work fine again. I appreciate you trying to help. I wouldn't do that for this specific reason. It came back on its own. Proof positive that no matter what I do it is an unreliable mess. It can come and go and come and go. I did no intervening procedures. Just let the car speak for itself. Unacceptable.

Same thing goes back to the window auto-up. It doesn't matter what procedure might clear it up temporarily. If the problem can fix itself and break itself with its own imagination and me doing nothing different. Unacceptable.

The emergency breaking broke itself and fixed itself too right? It only did it once and it's the same damn empty driveway every day. Unacceptable.

I can't wait for the EV pro in the big city to look for these missing updates you all talk about. It's a coin toss. Heads I win and Tails Ford loses.

If he can find them and run them, great! This thread has a screenshot of their support portal telling me this thing has no pending updates. It doesn't tell me to check with a dealer for secret updates. It's just a giant collection of bugs telling me everything is fine. Unacceptable.

If he can't find them and the car was lemony fresh the whole time, I'll shout it from the rooftops that Ford did an excellent job on the lemon fix. And did an excellent job getting everything up to date and good to go on that car before it was resold as well. But unfortunately then the reality of the situation will be this whole experience is the best we can hope for with all latest and greatest patches for a 2021 model car in 2024. Completely Unacceptable.

Note which issue I haven't marked as flatly unacceptable. It's the front camera cruise sensor thing. If the car has no record of that error until we got it and it's creeping up on a lot of them now, that's fine. It's a genuine, new fixable error that just got lost in a sea of poor warranty support. It's sort-of unacceptable that there were so many problems this one could get lost in the mix.

Here's a specific issue no one has touched with a 10 ft pole. Setting preferences with all the touchscreen toggles is an interesting conversation with the car. It's a futuristic AI experience where the car itself gets to decide if it feels like saving your preference or not. My profile is Unbridled with 1 pedal drive. When the car is in the right mood only though. Sometimes it loads my profile but in regular Engage. Sometimes it loads with Unbridled but the 1 pedal drive is off. It definitely did all that in the first week we had it. And do you know what I said? No rants, no big deal, it's so fun to drive it doesn't matter. My sysadmin instincts said that it had been sitting on a Ford lot from Hell and there's no chance they did any updates on it. We'll let all the auto-updates run and obviously they would have fixed that bug long ago. And it still happens to this day.

Obviously it goes without saying and obviously I'm the guy who is going to say it anyway. When you are expecting 1 pedal drive and it doesn't get it. You have been trained to let off that brake pedal with no worries because it's going to do the sane thing and not move all on its own. I conditioned myself to not complain and just look for the 1 pedal drive icon in the cluster every single time I get in the thing and correct if necessary. Unacceptable.

Haven't been able to experience that one lately though because when Bluetooth as a Key stopped working it started loading my wife's profile every time anyway. Ironically it seems far more likely to remember that I chose 1 pedal drive in the very first week of ownership and re-select it every single time it fails to load if it loads my wife's profile first and I manually switch to mine. Oh and I think I've finally discovered the pattern of when it loads that blank guest profile instead of either of us even though every key is attached to a profile. Fob and wife's phone to hers and my phone to mine, but not during a full moon! Enter the Guest, roflmao.

 

[tbrumleve]

TLR - also every response is TLR.

Find a new service location.
Don’t buy a lemon.
Be concise if you want actual help.
Don’t go off on pages of rants if you want to be taken seriously.

 

[Snakebitten]

I don't think you are going to be happy with any current technology laden vehicle in production.

Unacceptable, is going to be your conclusion. Over and over and over.
It's the direction the entire automotive industry is going.

 

[SlicerOnSteam]

I mean it's all here in black and white in the first post ... note that I did not add the emphasis, it exists in the OP ... make of it what you will.

Yes. I included a little personal detail there as well for everyone to understand that this shady Ford dealership has made this personal. I'm a nice guy. I tell a lot of folks I've had to talk with along this journey that I know they just work for Ford and have nothing to do with this mess. I'm sorry I have to bother them with it. But if you want to see a real NC redneck temper all you got to do is disrespect my wife or daughter.

Now for another personal detail that is relevant. SURPRISE! I was personally trained by a man who was the best of the best of old school used car salesman scammers 20 years ago. He found that his skills could work even better in the PC business with no paper trail of titles and that's how we met. The core of his business had been nonsense rent-to-own contracts on junk PC's that could never be paid off. Complaints turned into instant profits as, for a fee and renewed contract, he could talk every unhappy customer into a trade-in on a much better (wink, wink) PC and keep their payments the same. Sound familiar?

They were almost all Win98 PC's so they were going to run much faster and smoother after every fresh install and always get slower and slower after the customers got them home.

This man could sell ice to Eskimos and have them kissing his feet and thanking him for showing up to save them with his special ice. I saw him do it over and over and over again on every mark that walked through his door. Take a man like that and give him the power to forgive missed payments for down on their luck customers. He was pulling these rules out of his ass and he was beloved by all of his victims. They never could figure out it was just a cash flow scam and no one could tell them. They would never believe it. The time came when he had to get out of town, probably to another state, and I took over his PC repair shop and tried to run it legit. We lasted 10 months or so without resorting to any of his tricks. A sheriff deputy came looking for him one day but he was long gone.

So I don't have much to say in a dealership. But I see everything going on there. This Ford dealership has been notorious for decades. Mostly for having a never ending parade of new sales people who are obviously being taught the trade in the worst way possible but aren't at all smooth about it, lol. My father-in-law has bought 3 or 4 cars from them over the years so I've gotten several chances to observe them in action. He finally got fed up with them over busted warranty service on a used Mustang. So I made sure going in this was Ford's warranty and not the dealer's.

I'm aware there's no Mach-E question in there. Just fun context to kill time until we drop it off at the big dealer service center I suppose.

 

[SpartanZack]

So you were personally trained by "the best of the best of old school used car salesman scammers"...

Yet the sales people, at the dealership that's "been notorious for decades", who "aren't smooth at all about it".... still managed to pull the same kind of scam on you, selling a lemon instead of a Win98 PC?

I think the rent-to-own PC customers were not the only ones that got scammed...

 

[devmach-e]

Dealerships are independent businesses that are not owned or operated by Ford Corporate. They are franchises of Ford and represent the brand. Some dealerships represent Ford very well. Some, not so much. Sounds like you bought the car from a sucky dealership. Because of how franchise laws work, Ford is limited in how they can control a bad dealership short of yanking the franchise for repeated bad behavio, which is always a last resort. But it sounds like the new dealership that you are bringing the car to are much better.

Keep in mind that Ford corporate likely had very little to do with how your car went from a lemon buyback to ending up in your possession. More than likely it got bought back by Ford, who then finally fixed it via the dealer it was turned into, and then went to auction In NJ. Clearly some Ford dealership then bought it used for cheap where it eventually made it to your hands. That’s the nature of the used car business.

 

[SlicerOnSteam]

I don't think you are going to be happy with any current technology laden vehicle in production.

Unacceptable, is going to be your conclusion. Over and over and over.
It's the direction the entire automotive industry is going.

Interesting. Note that concept of all these issues are easily fixed just started to fade away. Did you all pay full price for these things and just accept the bugs or not? I can't wait to find out after this EV wizard gets it.

So we all just accept very expensive buggy cars and move on then? They can brand their next EV the Ford Stockholm.

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