Dear Forum members,

I drive a 2022 SMax Titanium. I have an issue that had occurred a few times already in the past, but last time this occurred three times in a row within 30 miles on the highway, so I needed to disable cruise control.

The issue is that the car would give emergency alarm and/or apply emergency braking in unjustified situations. This happens both with cruise control enabled or disabled, but happens more frequently when enabled. A few examples:

Within the city, single lane road, cruise control disabled, speed 25-30 mph. There is absolutely nothing in front of me. Not even a car in the opposite lane. Some shades are present on the road. Most of the time this would just result in an emergency alert 'break now' and no braking. The place when this happens is the same. I drive that road frequently, but it does not happen all the time, I would estimate the odds like 1:25. It only happens when driving in one direction, not the other. The road quality is not great there, no wet roads.

Another typical occurrence is when there are two lanes in the same direction, but those are not full highway-length lanes. I drive in the passing lane (which is the left one in Hungary) and the road is slightly turning to the right. The speed limit is 60mph there, and I would drive with that speed on this road. If there is a heavy track in the non-passing, right lane, I would occasionally get the collision assist activated with braking, even though I keep enough distance to the truck both before I start passing, and during execution of it. It would happen when cruise control is enabled, and I am about to get close (but absolutely not very close) to the left back of the truck in the other lane. This road is also one I drive regularly, and this would happen quite frequently if there is a truck in this turn in the outer lane, so with a higher chance to reproduce, but not 100%. I started to disengage cruise control in this turn. Again, it does not seem to happen in all similar turns, but it also happened in some such turns.

The last and most dangerous type also involves trucks and cruise control. On a straight highway (speed limit is 80 mph there), collision assists would activate and break when passing a truck. Similarly like the above, but also on straight roads when I get closer to the back left of the truck. It happened both on highways with both 2 and 3 lanes. I believe it happens more frequently with three lanes and a truck in the middle one, and it also happens in straights, though still with a highest frequency in slight right turns. I do not have a big sample and I obviously don't want to experiment.

I am not sure if linking is allowed here, but searching for 'ford collision warning malfunction' brings up a relevant topic with a law firm, however my symptoms are different than described there.

Have you heard about this issue? Is this something that could be fixed, do you have maybe any tips? This is a fleet car, and I heard about a similar issue with a Galaxy in the past in our fleet, but that could not be resolved as far as I heard. So if there is any specifics that I can refer to fleet management about this issue, it may help to get a resolution with the dealer as my experience is that without specifics, sporadic issues are not fixed. My only idea would be that somehow shades cause this in certain conditions, but that is also not a very strong theory, so any previous experience would help me a lot to avoid this issue.

Thanks for reading and would appreciate your feedback.

Firstly on a 2022 vehicle if you think it is defective take it back to a Ford dealer. You are not going to be able to repair anything yourself and even if you did it would void the warranty.

Have you used the settings in the instrument cluster to turn the 'collision avoidance' sensitivity down to low ?

The best thing you could do is to get a front seat passenger to video the problem happening when it should not and complain to the Dealer showing them the video.

It looks like either the front facing Camera/Lidor unit or Radar needs either realigned or calibrated.

Tizer's advice is very good, but as Unofix says, it's in warranty, take it back, probably just needs a software update

Thank you all for the feedback. This is not my own car but a fleet-managed one assigned to me by my employer. Not classic fleet-managed as the car is owned by my company while fleet management is outsourced to another, external company. I am not allowed to talk directly to the dealer or bring it to the dealer. I had a similar intermittent problem (see my other post about the thermostat trouble during winter). The dealer was willing to help, and they even tended to agree that the behavior was not normal, but after 3 attempts to fix, Ford CEE HQ finally declared that the behavior is not abnormal. Even though the issue went away with spring, so I am quite sure it is not normal, fleet management could not challenge the issue further. Consumer protection is not as strong here like in the UK, and as the car is not owned by an individual, but by a company, consumer protection does not even apply to it here and it would take expensive and complicated legal action to pursue intermittent problems.

So this time with another intermittent issue, I am looking for external references, posts, experiences, anything related. The car will be definitely returned to the dealer under warranty for this issue, but these are the circumstances I am in, so wanted to check if this may be a known issue or an individual problem. In our country we do not have a lot of such cars, and sales of new SMax and Galaxy were completely discontinued here beginning of this year.

As for the video, it would take some time and attempts to reproduce, as even under very similar conditions, it does only happen with a certain frequency. The only thing I could rule out so far is weather, as it happens both on a zero cloud and a rainy day.

I will definitely double-check the sensitivity for collision avoidance. But even with high sensitivity it should not brake at 25 mph without any obstacles.

Thanks again and will post updates.

 

17 minutes ago, gerilege said:

As for the video, it would take some time and attempts to reproduce, as even under very similar conditions, it does only happen with a certain frequency. The only thing I could rule out so far is weather, as it happens both on a zero cloud and a rainy day.

Just fit a dashcam and when it happens press the save button.

Set the settings to low

May need adas recalibration? Either way if its a concern needs to be reported to looked at under warranty. 

I am waiting for fleet management to arrange an inspection.

In the meantime, I got a hint to connect with a Galaxy owner in Germany, which I did. He currently drives his second Galaxy, and his first one had the same symptoms in slight right turns on highways, in his case with higher speed due to to lack of speed limit in Germany. It was attempted to be repaired three times without success in his case in Germany, which is not very promising. On the other hand, he never experienced this issue with his second, current Galaxy, which confirms that the behaviour is abnormal. As he put it, his first one was a bit 'cursed' with a lot of issues, while the current one runs fine.

I currently have the sensitivity on medium (never changed the factory default). For now I will keep it on medium, and wait for the inspection. If the issue occurs afterwards, I will try to change sensitivity to low. If that also doesn't work, then comes the dashcam.

Thanks again, and I will report back.

After the summer holiday and a delay in appointment scheduling, I received the car back from inspection yesterday, so I can start to retest. Due to the nature of the issue it will take some time to find out whether the situation improved or not.

In the meanwhile, I can share the following lessons learned from the behaviour (before the inspection) with the community for future reference.

I was able to narrow down one type of occurrence a bit, illustrated by the attached image, so that became a bit more reliably reproducible. Especially if the first green rectangle is a truck, the car has a tendency to alarm/break at the point of time and view represented by the illustration. The blue line represents that most likely the car predicts that the rear left corner of the truck (which is turning together with the truck) will turn into my lane. There needs to be quite lot of cars/trucks in that exit lane for the issue to occur (which makes it difficult to reproduce).

In addition, I was connected with another Ford owner (Ford Explorer, not under warranty any more) who has similar symptoms under similar conditions. The only difference is that his car just gives the (unjustified) alarm without braking, though it also has emergency braking feature activated.

I will test now on medium sensitivity again. If I can still reproduce, I will test with low sensitivity.

I have recently received a copy of the work order and a software update for the emergency alarm/braking part was applied during inspection.

The highway section on the image above went through a reconstruction in the past weeks, so I had limited options to test there due to frequent congestion.

What I can say so far is that for high-speed occurrences there, the situation improved a bit. The car would now just decelerate by reducing power to idle instantly instead of braking (until I override by further acceleration). That means that speed would reduce from 60 mph to something like 55 mph instead of the previous 45-50 mph, which was really dangerous. It is clear that the car still thinks there is an issue at that location, so I need to check this further, but I would say the reaction is a bit better now. I would also say that whether the issue occurs or not seems to rather correlate to how close the other vehicles are to the marker line and less to the number of vehicles. Of course if there are more vehicles, it is also more likely that one of those would be closer to the marker line. I also had one occasion where the exit lane on the right was almost empty, but one vehicle in the passing lane on the left was close to the marker line, but still well within its line.

No improvements observed for the low-speed speed occurrences though which are more difficult to reproduce. I had two unjustified emergency alerts under empty road conditions at 30 mph at two new places in the last three weeks.

I could also reach out to an ex-colleague who works in the ADAS domain and in his opinion this is a software issue and I may be experiencing side effects due to improvements. It could be that one problem had not been there a few years ago, but was introduced as a side effect for fixing a different problem, and I have now the new problem.

I will still keep sensitivity on medium and test further and report back. If you meet or talk to any Ford owner with an emergency alert/braking equipped vehicle, please keep my issue in mind and ask about their experience, as any piece of information would help me. I really like my car in every other aspect, so I hope eventually this issue will also go away.

 

3 more months with medium sensitivity. Less low-speed occurrences with cruise control disabled on empty roads, which makes me think those have to do something with sun and/or shades - which is lesser of an issue during cloudier late autumn and winter. The 2-3 times it occurred was always in sunshine, and I never had this in darkness in the past. I still don't have a clue how to predict and reproduce.

I also had 2-3 high-speed occurrences with cruise control enabled, again with active braking unfortunately. Same place, right-turn, and another vehicle is close to the marker lane. I think I can say that I can reproduce this, assuming the conditions are there, which also means that I can prepare and avoid.

I will still stay on medium sensitivity. I really want to understand now the low-speed one before I change anything.

I would switch to low sensitivity

33 minutes ago, DaveT70 said:

I would switch to low sensitivity

Thanks, that makes sense. Then I could see if the high-speed problem remains or not (and I tend to over-complicate things).