Opening Doors with PAAK (or not)

[Mirak]

I'm 15mos into ownership and I continue to be frustrated with PAAK allowing me into my car. To be clear, my PAAK failure rate in starting my car is down to less than 5% - I can live with this. But I much more frequently have trouble getting the door locks to recognize PAAK. I'm talking a failure rate of maybe 20-25%.

I'm running PAAK on an iPhone 12, and I always keep FordPass running in the background. The phone is typically in my pocket. When I walk up to the car and press the driver door button, the car recognizes that I'm doing something, because some clicking sounds emit from the front of the vehicle, but the door doesn't open. Sometimes if I wait a second or two and then press again, the door will open. Sometimes it will open on my third or fourth or fifth press. Sometimes it just flat out won't open, and I have to use the door sill keypad (that always works).

A few more observations:

• The door failure seems to occur more frequently when the car has been sitting for a long period of time (like overnight, or parked at work).
• The door failure seems to occur more frequently when my hands are full of crap and I need the damned door to just open (so many possibilities here: could be Murphey's Law, could be that I just tend to notice the problem when it is a bigger pain in my ass, or maybe the car somehow senses when to be the biggest possible pain in the ass).
• I almost always have to open the drivers door before any of the other door buttons will respond.
• My fob is stored in a different room but still only about 10 feet away from the car, so maybe the constant proximity of the fob to the car is confusing it? I will try moving the fob to another location much further away in the house. But that wouldn't explain why the problem also happens away from my garage.
• This appears to be PAAK-related, but I haven't used the fob enough to totally verify that. I don't remember the problem ever occurring when I'm carrying the fob.

Thoughts? Are other people experiencing the same? I think this is the single biggest running annoyance with this car that I've never really gotten solved over a year later.

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[Nklem]

I try to do it the Ford recommended way, Iphone XR in my hand when I approach, in the console charger to start but I get the same issues as you. I tried to reboot the phone and restart FP every morning before leaving for work, and it worked well February through April. Then in April, it has been hit or miss just like you are seeing. Most of the time now I press the Unlock button on Fordpass to make sure the doors unlock on my way to the car.

Since the terrible updates last week, I use the fob and it works every time. That's my take away for now. It worked great for several months but now I am back to the Fob.

 

[2021-MMEx-RT1]

I try to do it the Ford recommended way, Iphone XR in my hand when I approach, in the console charger to start but I get the same issues as you. I tried to reboot the phone and restart FP every morning before leaving for work, and it worked well February through April. Then in April, it has been hit or miss just like you are seeing. Most of the time now I press the Unlock button on Fordpass to make sure the doors unlock on my way to the car.

Since the terrible updates last week, I use the fob and it works every time. That's my take away for now. It worked great for several months but now I am back to the Fob.

FOB always works for us, but of course being Job 1, we only have the one.

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