PAAK Issues and resolution

[jhalkias]

I did not post about my PAAK issues in the past because I wanted to wait to see if they would get resolved and what the resolution would be. The issues I was having were also perhaps somewhat unique when compared to the normal "it doesn't work 100% of the time".

Back to the week before my car got here, and the dealer gave me his FCTP as a loaner. PAAK was easy to set up on that car, and worked fine.

Forward to when I got my car. I got it on a Saturday, and quite frankly was so busy with all the other stuff and work that I was not bothered when I initially could not set it up. A week later, I had time.

The issue was that it would go through the initial setup, and download a key. However, when it would get to that very LAST step it would always fail. I would get a message like this:

So I sat in a parking lot, and called the Ford "guide" on a Saturday morning. She was completely at a loss. She tried elevating the concern to a supervisor, that had her try a couple more things, but still the same result. She said she would escalate the issue, and that I would get a call back.

Being just a technical enough to be dangerous, I also tried everything I could think of - including resetting the car to factory standards in Sync, and rebooting Sync. Nothing that I would think might work on another computer seemed to solve the problem or help.

When I didn't get a call back by Tuesday, I reached out to the Ford folks who are on Twitter, and got a response back that my issue was going to go to the Ford team that handles PAAK and I would get a call back from an engineer. He called me later that day, and we tried several things also to no avail - he said he would consult with the team and get back to me the next day.

Further background - I have an iPhone 11ProMax, with the latest iOS, and the latest version of FordPass. I also have a spare iPhone8 that I loaded with FordPass and tried it too to see if it was the phone. No difference.

The next day, he called me back and tried several more things with settings in the car. None of that made a difference. His team was puzzled. He asked if I could give them more time to work on it, which was fine since I had "one" fob that worked fine - this was just frustrating.

I also want to stress that communication from the Ford team was EXCELLENT. He kept me up to date daily with the fact that they were still working on it, and the progress. It became clearer by the end of the week that I would probably have to take the car to the dealer's service department and let them figure it out with the Ford Engineers. They wanted to try completely reloading the car's entire software modules.

I dropped the car off on a Thursday, and hopefully doing this would solve the problem and I could pick it up on Friday. Well, after several tries OTA, they finally had to download the car's modules to USB and load it that way as just downloading it kept failing. But, they finally got the software loaded. AND . . . still the problem. Now the problem was with how the Ford Cloud was "seeing" my car, and they needed the weekend to get it sorted. I didn't mind as once again, my loaner was the dealer's Mach E FCTP.

Informed me on Monday that the problem was fixed and that they wanted me to pick up the car and try it. Also should mention I left them the spare iPhone 8 (which I cleared all data and apps except for FordPass) that they needed to use to test if PAAK was working. Since I had a spare phone, this was no issue.

Now the interesting part . . . apparently my car was provisioned with software as a European car. Both on the car and in the cloud. That is why I could not use PAAK. The software could not enable PAAK for a European car when the car was in North America. There is one other owner I am aware of (on Facebook) that had this same issue. His maps in Nav were also showing Spain and Portugal (I never used the native Nav - mine might have too - I use WAZE for back and forth to work, etc.). His car was also escalated to this team, and he messaged me recently that his was fixed finally too.

The team at Ford is now trying to figure out how this happened. All through this process the team I worked with at Ford was GREAT. Good communication, and sincerely trying to help and solve the problem. Since I have had the car back, PAAK has actually worked flawlessly, and I am leaving my fob at home now.

I know we all want our cars to be perfect and for everything to work without flaws from the very beginning. The truth of the matter is however that we are still early adopters, and there are issues to be expected when you make that leap. I understand that, and have had patience, and Ford has been more than accommodating to solve my problem. I had to jump a few more hurdles to get there though that an everyday person buying a car may not be willing to jump. I don't think simply working with the dealer and their service department without immediate help from this Ford team would have been as quick or effective.

If anyone else here has similar behavior and problem I would be happy to reach out to the Ford Engineer who worked with me for you. For obvious reasons and out of respect for them I won't publish their phone number or name that they gave to me here on a public forum. Message me and I will do my best to get them in touch with you. This was hopefully a pretty unique situation, and once again not the normal "my PAAK only works 99% of the time". This was a total fail (If I can use that word) of it to even set up.

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[mixduptransistor]

This is so frustrating. I am having *worse* problems and can't get any communication from Ford at all

 

[Jimrpa]

Here’s a fun fact I learned during the azure outage yesterday:

If you’ve successfully generated a key on your phone, let’s call it Key1.
Then, Ford cloud services crap out for whatever reason, FordPass goes into the infinite Circle of Ouroboros and PaaK stops working.
You naively think you’re doing something wrong and go through the “normal” Apple steps (force quit, restart, reinstall app) and nothing works. You still have the Circle of Ouroboros.
At some random time in the future, Ford cloud services become available again and FordPass wants to set up as a fresh install. It takes you all the way through to creating a key. It sort of knows that there’s already a key for your phone, but there’s no way to get that key that already exists back. All you can do is to delete the old key, create a new key on the phone, then you have to create a new password in the car again.
Being able to restore an already created key would be a good thing. What would be a better thing would be to store a key the same way a credit card is stored so that you don’t have to recreate it when you have to reinstall the app for the credit card. Oh, wait - that’s called CarKey ?
Sarcasm aside, I’m sure there’s a good reason for the implementation that Ford has chosen in terms of feature sets, etc. however, the ability to restore keys would be nice.

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