Instrument Cluster-BLACK

[Wardmoranfamily]

no, no laws like that here in Canada...

Sponsored

 

[Wardmoranfamily]

I picked my car up yesterday. The remote engineer as well as the dealership service dept could not find any back ground codes, nothing. They charged the car and had no issues. They have now suggested using the 12V charger that came with the car to see if anything happens. I drove it about 40kms yesterday, used 1% of battery. My concern is, I have photos of the cluster showing a service vehicle soon, as well the deep sleep issue and the engineer can see nothing when he scans my car from abroad.
The first time my car went into deep sleep, it had about 800kms on it, the 2nd time was at about 1700....so will see what happens when I drive it some more this weekend. We are at a trial and error stage right now!

 

[Wardmoranfamily]

New issue (I think)
Question: does your gear shifter spin all the way in a circle and counter clockwise as well? Mine spins round and round even after its in D or R
And I swear the 8 days I had it before that it didn’t spin round and round!

 

[macchiaz-o]

New issue (I think)
Question: does your gear shifter spin all the way in a circle and counter clockwise as well? Mine spins round and round even after its in D or R
And I swear the 8 days I had it before that it didn’t spin round and round!

Vehicle on/ready state, foot on brake: drive selector spins.

Foot off brake: selector locks once the vehicle is in Park.

 

[Wardmoranfamily]

Edit d or p not r lol

 

[Ciber 2022]

Good evening
we’re having problem as well with our instrument cluster, it goes black then come back in in a second or two. I have my GT performance for two weeks and it’s the only issue but scar, specially on bluecruse. The tec at the Ford dealer have check all updates, keep it on the computer for 12 hours and could find anything
I need to do more driving with the car, hopefully they will find the problem
PS
It did happen with the big scree, but again,n this one is easy to reboot

 

[Thunderbirdsoundsbetter]

I have a different problem. Twice this week, only half the main screen came alive (the left half). The problem does not prevent me from driving and corrected itself after about a minute. Just wondering if anybody else has seen this?

That you just need to do the sync reset on the steering wheel. No biggie.

 

[Thunderbirdsoundsbetter]

Happens a lot for me. Every time it happens I just wait it out. Leave the car off for like an hour or two it’ll come back half the time. On other occasions I have had it come back after a full day.

I went to the dealer and they even saw it but there’s nothing they can do as they told me there are no codes. Lol.

 

[Gilles]

That you just need to do the sync reset on the steering wheel. No biggie.

To do the sync reset, press the volume down and the top right button next to it for 10 seconds.

 

[Reign of Ravens]

Happens a lot for me. Every time it happens I just wait it out. Leave the car off for like an hour or two it’ll come back half the time. On other occasions I have had it come back after a full day.

I went to the dealer and they even saw it but there’s nothing they can do as they told me there are no codes. Lol.

Out of curiosity, still going on? I've had my Mach-E for about one month and just today the instrument cluster seemingly would go off at random. I first noticed it when the car started up, it seemed to be fine but then it would cut out for seconds to minutes at a time, seemed to get worse as we went. When I got home and looked it up I did try the reset that people mentioned here, but also as mentioned, that only reboots the main screen in the middle of the vehicle; it doesn't impact the instrument cluster.

Not reassuring to hear that even taking it in for service might have no effect. At this point I'm hoping that the car being off for 12 hours will fix it and that I'll never have the black screen again, that maybe it was just a software glitch, but...

 

[Reign of Ravens]

Taking the vehicle in for service.

The story for me is that the screen would occasionally flicker off, just a month and a few days into ownership with about 940 miles on the odometer. Seemed to be worse by changing default screens (for example, enabling the lane-keeping system to bring up the graphic of the car). I tried resetting the Ford Sync system, but that only seemed to affect the main screen at the center of the car, not the "instrument cluster" that sits right behind the wheel. Unfortunately, over the next two days - despite the car sitting off for over 12 hours, and despite being plugged in - the problem gradually got worse, flickering and blacking out more frequently . At present, the display will be off for about two seconds before flickering on for less than a second. The image is slightly warped when it does appear, almost like a connector is loose.

Without the ability to use the screen, not only can I not see what speed I'm going at, but I can't see any warnings from the vehicle. It's a big safety issue.

Ford's social media team had reached out to me about a wind noise issue I posted about in response to someone else's thread. We had a small conversation on here before they handed the communication off to someone at Ford over email, who scheduled my vehicle to be looked at. I mentioned that this was happening, and they added it into the things to be examined. They've arranged for a rental vehicle, and acknowledged that the rental car does not have electric vehicles available. They will reimburse expenses on gas, and also noted that in the event that the agency does not have vehicles available for rental, they will reimburse Uber/Lyft costs. Since I shuttle my children around and they need car seats, Uber/Lyft would be a huge pain for us... but I am impressed that they're taking fuel costs into account. Maybe they do it for everyone, I don't know, but if it's something unique for electric-only customers, I'm impressed. I pay nothing for the electricity to power my car thanks to my extensive solar setup, and was internally grumbling at the thought of having to pay for gas again, after not having touched a gas pump for over a year.

The drop-off time for my car is next week. I'm really hoping it'll be a quick fix. I'll keep you all posted on how it goes... but for now, to give credit where it's due, Ford is doing a very good job with their customer service. I had mixed feelings about my dealership's sales department; here's hoping their service department can live up to what Ford corporate has been doing so far.

 

[Reign of Ravens]

Another update... Ford had my MME for a few days. They did a bunch of software updates and then said that the issue was something they couldn't reproduce. Funny way to word it, considering the initial intake person needed me tell him the mileage on the vehicle through the Fordpass app, because they couldn't see anything on the screen. All was fine when I drove home and did a few more drives that day, but the next day it blacked out again. But then it was fine for about a week... and then today it's blacking out again.

It's a weird issue, to be sure. It almost seems like a cable of some sort is loose or faulty, but the inconsistency of it is what bothers me the most. For now I've asked Ford to please schedule another service appointment with the dealership, but I'm worried that the day of the appointment, it'll be working perfectly. If it is, I'm pretty sure that the dealership won't even investigate further and will just give it back to me. Even though Ford makes the scheduling and the rental effortless, in total I was still out about three hours in total for vehicle pickup and drop-off, including the rental process. It's a significant chunk of time. That's not including the headache of removing and then replacing my child car seats in the vehicle, which is another pain.

My dealership was perhaps brutally honest and mentioned that they only have a single technician who is certified to work on the Mach-E. It's surprising, considering that this is the largest Ford dealership in my area, and they do tout that they are EV-certified. I'm sure the lack of certified technicians is a problem that won't exist in a few years, but it's not like the Mach-E just went on sale... service through dealerships are a supposed benefit over Tesla, but I'm not feeling it at present. Given what's been written above, I'm also not confident that the dealership will be able to figure this out. I'm hoping that they or Ford will at least take the initiative to replace something - I'd love it if they replaced the entire display, cables, and what ever processing unit goes with it, just to fully make sure this doesn't happen again. Maybe that's unrealistic, but at least do something to give me a chance of not having to keep bringing the car back. Our state does have lemon laws but I don't want to have to sell the car back, I just want this fixed.

 

[Reign of Ravens]

Another update. Screen was literally black with an occasional half-second flicker of black and some minor garbling coinciding with where text would be, for about a week. Two days before the service appointment, it flickered midway through my drive and came on. Stayed on. Worked perfectly for two days. I called the service department and asked if I should still bring it in, and they said not to. If it was functioning perfectly then I might be on the hook for the rental. I guess it doesn't matter that I have a few videos and photos of the screen being off. And fair enough - the tech would probably poke around and try a few things, and if it's already working when they have it, then they won't know what worked or didn't work. Their advice was to just bring it to the dealership even without an appointment if it happened again.

Well, guess what? Wife drove it this afternoon and the screen was totally out again. She brought it to the dealership. The service adviser noted it. They couldn't find their technician to look it over. (We apparently have one Mach-E-certified technician at this dealership... the largest Ford dealership in my area. Sorry if that's a repeat from my prior posts, but it still gets me every time.) Said we should come back with it next week if it was still an issue. And of course, the screen worked perfectly as she drove away, and it has been flawless for the rest of the day.

This is a critical piece of equipment on the vehicle, and the lack of reliability is pretty troubling. It's also troubling that it seems like it's going to be tricky to get it fixed. The dealership wants to search for error codes when it's happening, but given @Thunderbirdsoundsbetter 's post above, there won't be any codes for the dealership to find. I'm still in touch with Ford, so if it comes to that, I trust they'll have some other solution. This is just taking a lot of time, and having to drive without that screen is a safety risk.

I'm not much of a car guy, but I do have an interest in electronics. This problem perplexes me as to what it could be. A faulty connector or screen would have fit, but those issues shouldn't spontaneously get better and function flawlessly for days on end. A faulty GPU should just cause distortion, and is less likely to spontaneously resolve and behave perfectly. A software issue should recover any time the vehicle performs a power down, power up cycle, but the sporadic improvements occurring mid-drive make this seem less likely, too. It's a mystery. I've read some other people having an issue with blank screens, but for the center console screen, and those were fixed by replacing the processing unit associated with the screen. So even though it seems non-standard, I'm going to guess it's the GPU (or what ever processing unit Ford uses to drive the screen). Hopefully at some point I get an exact solution, not only so that I can be free of this issue, but so that I can post it back here so that anyone else suffering from this can direct their own dealership to the problem and solution.

Sponsored