High-pitched "Electrical Whine"

[Beege]

My FE (built December for Canadian market) also has the buzzing whining sound from the drivers screen area. Does sound like an electrical grounding issue, or a faulty component. Will let my dealer know after I put together a small list of concerns.

1. Is the buzzing sound.
2. My 15.5” screen is set to dark mode, but sometimes switches to light mode without warning. I do not have it set on auto.
3. drivers side wireless charging randomly disconnects. iphone position has not moved, yet charging disconnects. My phone case is extremely thin so it can not be interfering.

those are the only faults I have experienced so far.

Opinion to this point ( 1 week ownership )... love this car. So much fun to drive. It is worthy of the Mustang moniker. It is a four door mustang... that’s all. I also drive a 02 GT convertible in the summer... also fun, but in a different way.

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[RedStallion]

There are some advantages of an advanced age

 

[SteelMach]

OK, here's a theory:

Ford -
Engineering: EMI makes AM radio near impossible
Marketing: We gotta have it. Studies show BEV owners want AM radio
CEO: Find a way to make AM radio work
Enginering: %$&^#*

Tesla -
Engineering: EMI makes AM radio near impossible
Musk: Screw it then, tell people AM radio is old and we only make cutting edge vehicles
Engineering: Thanks

On this one, gotta hand it to the Tesla management for understanding. Polestar and Volvo did so as well. AM's days are numbered. I see Ford caving soon, idk anyone who listens to AM.

That said, it's the screen I care about. And mine is buzzing like mad.

 

[RonTCat]

Electric motors can and do emit electromagnetic interference (EMI)... however, they can be designed to minimize this and the intensity of the interference drops off exponentially with distance from the source. Passenger trains have huge electric motors, and there's no widespread news of it blocking a passenger from listening to AM radio. Ideally the AM antenna is as far as possible.

Trains allow for exponentially more distance from motor to radio, and likely the train motor controller is using old school SCRs which fire at turtle speed. AM radio should be easily possible on a train, prolly with no/minimal shielding. YMMV.

 

[CHeil402]

Trains allow for exponentially more distance from motor to radio, and likely the train motor controller is using old school SCRs which fire at turtle speed. AM radio should be easily possible on a train, prolly with no/minimal shielding. YMMV.

Most trains built in the last 15 years use IGBT based inverters at high speed and some passenger seats are directly over the motors (hence the bump out of the floor) which are orders of magnitude more powerful than the car motors.

 

[eltonlin]

My FE (built December for Canadian market) also has the buzzing whining sound from the drivers screen area. Does sound like an electrical grounding issue, or a faulty component. Will let my dealer know after I put together a small list of concerns.

1. Is the buzzing sound.
2. My 15.5” screen is set to dark mode, but sometimes switches to light mode without warning. I do not have it set on auto.
3. drivers side wireless charging randomly disconnects. iphone position has not moved, yet charging disconnects. My phone case is extremely thin so it can not be interfering.

those are the only faults I have experienced so far.

What iPhone model do you have? I have an iPhone 12 Pro and mine stops charging after a few minutes. Have the MagSafe case on it as well.

 

[methorian]

What iPhone model do you have? I have an iPhone 12 Pro and mine stops charging after a few minutes. Have the MagSafe case on it as well.

I have an iPhone 12 Pro and it also would randomly stop charging. In my case it was very slightly moving down the pad it seems I remedied it by putting a small piece of rubber on the bottom of the charging pad area, seen here:

Has been reliably charging since putting the rubber there. Note that I do not use a case on my phone.

 

[Mirak]

My FE (built December for Canadian market) also has the buzzing whining sound from the drivers screen area. Does sound like an electrical grounding issue, or a faulty component. Will let my dealer know after I put together a small list of concerns.

1. Is the buzzing sound.
2. My 15.5” screen is set to dark mode, but sometimes switches to light mode without warning. I do not have it set on auto.
3. drivers side wireless charging randomly disconnects. iphone position has not moved, yet charging disconnects. My phone case is extremely thin so it can not be interfering.

those are the only faults I have experienced so far.

Opinion to this point ( 1 week ownership )... love this car. So much fun to drive. It is worthy of the Mustang moniker. It is a four door mustang... that’s all. I also drive a 02 GT convertible in the summer... also fun, but in a different way.

I have the same bug with the display not remembering the light / dark / auto setting. I want it to stay in dark because light is just way too bright. The dark looks great even in daytime. But every time I restart the car it reverts to “auto.” And even the auto doesn’t work - it stays in light mode even at night!

So it is actually two bugs. This seems like an obvious bug with an obvious software fix and I’m kinda annoyed Ford hasn’t fixed it yet.

I am going to try creating a profile, and maybe that will remember my settings, but you shouldn’t need a profile to remember these sorts of changes, should you?

As for the driver screen buzz, I can confirm that it changes frequency when you toggle the brightness. I have found one particular setting (fairly dim) where the buzz is a lot less noticeable, but again this has to be reset every time I restart the car.

I’m pretty sure Ford is never going to fix this because it is hardware related, more expensive, and the problem is more variable than an obvious software bug. Some people either got good screens or they don’t hear the buzz. I only hear it while sitting in park messing around with the infotainment screen (which, again, I have to do every time I turn the car on to change the display back to dark mode - grrrrr Ford!!)

 

[Thevanin]

Settings not sticking have come up in other threads. It seems like disabling personal profiles acts as a workaround.

 

[eltonlin]

I have an iPhone 12 Pro and it also would randomly stop charging. In my case it was very slightly moving down the pad it seems I remedied it by putting a small piece of rubber on the bottom of the charging pad area, seen here:

Has been reliably charging since putting the rubber there. Note that I do not use a case on my phone.

Yeah I think there may be something interfering with the use of a case, at least for the newer iPhones. Going to try a little hack with the MagSafe charger on the other side and see how things look.

 

[ARK]

So - On my drive into work this morning the whine was really getting to me. So I started fiddling with brightness again - this was the first time I'd did so while it was dark out. Turns out a bit less than "medium" brightness, while it's dark out, makes the whine almost completely go away for me!!!! It was like night and day. It is a pretty dim brightness setting, but I was happy to not hear it for once.

Unfortunately as I got to work and the sun was coming up the car was increasing the brightness to accommodate, and the whine came back. In daylight there is no brightness setting that makes it go away like that, so far as I've been able to test.

You know I noticed the exact same thing the other night. I had just had a long day and the noise was really grating so I tried to fiddle with it again. At the 40% setting, i.e. one bar below the middle setting, and at night, the whine was at its lowest.

During the day time, even in dark mode, the screen does not have the same number of bars when adjusting the brightness, I think it might only be 8. Anyway, none of the daytime settings make a material difference for me - some slight variance in pitch but basically the same volume and same sound. It’s at nighttime on 40% brightness where I can appreciably notice that its volume lowers a bit.

I don’t know if this might shed light for anyone who understands this stuff if some intermediate brightness is the least noisy in terms of what the problem here might be.

 

[VegStang]

The buzzing screen on my vehicle (took delivery last night) is pretty loud when you just have accessory or vehicle on. When driving or with stereo on it isn’t too bad, at least not for the first 50 miles I have driven it. I turned down the brightness, believe it is just as noticeable.

I did notice something interesting when I walked out to the car tonight, without key fob or phone the buzzing display was on, only the “gear” selection was displayed. After about 15 minutes I went out to the car with fob opened passenger door, then closed, display stayed on even after the car locked. Then turned the car on and off and display turned off as expected.

I guess I will go back out and check the car for gremlins (or late night car shenanigans) later.

 

[GoGoGadgetMachE]

I guess I will go back out and check the car for gremlins (or late night car shenanigans) later.

pony parties. it's pony parties.

 

[VegStang]

Yea, they have a mind of their own. I guess I need to make occasional checks in the middle of the night, the next two times I checked the screen was off so possibly a bug. Maybe after the screen burns in the buzz will go away, yea not really.

pony parties. it's pony parties.

 

[Mirak]

I took one for the team and brought my week-old MME in for service this morning mainly just to document a couple software bugs (this was before I found out the first OTA updates are already starting to roll out, otherwise I would have waited). Went ahead and included the screen buzz while I was there. Buzz was confirmed and passed along to “the Ford engineers.” Actually pretty painless - I was in an out in under an hour. The guys I worked with were very professional.

Hope it helps. I’ll let you know what I hear from the service dept.

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