Quick question on vehicle sounds - interior

[20Expy]

Uh, the airbag light is definitely a safety concern. Ours only occasionally loses surround sound beeps, but now the tailgate beep is completely gone from the back, you can only hear it from the IPC speaker, no matter if we remote started it or not.

I do get the random chime in the IPC and then switches back to the surround speakers.

I'm curious if it changes after you turn it off and back on again, or does it just change while driving?

We have owned several mid-2000s German moneypit before and are really tired of electrical gremlins. I thought Ford should have figured it out in 2 years (we have a 2020), but apparently not! Seriously considering ESP, but I don't know if they will cover for non-persistent electrical gremlins like this. Please keep us updated!

 

[ColoradoJon]

Based on my experience with my electric stuff and the rear hatch. A hard reset, both battery cables off for 10 mins does a reset that should fix the sound coming from the dash vs the stereo unless the modules are corrupt. If they are corrupt, a dealer needs to repair it.

 

[5280tunage]

I did a full 20 minute battery disconnect and still no luck getting the sounds back, but also no additional communication errors and codes thrown.

 

[20Expy]

I think our battery is fine, because auto start/stop would still work the one time I reminded myself not to hit the button when in the car.

Today though, our 360 degree sensors completely failed, and the instrument cluster said "Park aid failed" with the parking sensor symbol, though you still can clear the message and it would reappear every time you toggle the sensor on/off button. It was wet and raining, don't know if it had something to do with it, because our 2016 RAV4 front-right sensor would freak-out every time it's wet. On some rare occasions, the Expedition sensors would also freak-out for a sec, even though it's completely dry, but we never had it completely fail before.

We turned off the car for 2 hours+ as the rain stopped and it went back to normal now. Hopefully just a bug, nothing to do with the APIM.

 

[20Expy]

Oh yeah, I was also planning to do the Sync 3 update and the hard reset by disconnecting the battery as well. Should I do the Sync update first, or it doesn't matter and I'm overthinking this?

 

[5280tunage]

Honestly shouldn't matter what order you do it in. I typically do the double soft reset procedure after I do the Sync3 updates. Mine still hasn't gone back to normal and I'm just not sure about the battery at this point. I haven't had the CEL's re-appear for the lost connectivity but I keep pointing to the battery. Trouble is two fold, for one, i'm well within my batteries free replacement period but apparently there is a national backorder on several brands of medium quality 94R (H7) batteries. Even my local Napa's are having a hard time getting the most expensive brands out there in this group, for goodness sake it's always something. Sure, I can order something off of amazon for better part of $400, but this is ridiculous. My battery charger and multiple mulit-meter trials show the battery is at optimal voltage resting and running, but my medium quality scanner says the battery fails voltage tests when I use it. Could this be voltage drop due to the aluminum chassis? don't know, but I sure would love it if this thing would go back to normal.

it's like driving around with a gremlin playing hide and seek, is it going to pop out on the coldest - snowiest night of the winter and strand me?

 

[5280tunage]

Update here. I was able to finally get a replacement battery under the batteries warranty. It's been in the car for 3 days and so far so good, the first night I set up an AGM trickle charge even thought it really didn't need it, the battery mfr date was 11/23 so it's pretty new.

For one, its really frustrating that you can't even change a battery in these without things freaking out. Yes, I get you lose some personal settings like the running boards and some other settings, but I can't stand that after changing a battery the proper way, you get 3-4 DTC's. Its even worse that those don't show up when using a pretty standard scanner, you have to break out Forscan to find them. These codes, after a battery swap, prevent remote start from working. So even though I waited till after the system would have relearned/reset the battery monitoring system (sat for 2 nights undisturbed and locked in the garage), I couldn't remote start the vehicle. So hooking up Forscan I cleared those codes and now I can remote start the vehicle.

Now on to my original issues, missing sounds for various vehicle interactions. I still haven't had the parking aid sounds come through the stereo. Until I replaced the battery, I didn't have anymore APIM/IPC errors appear so I would have hoped I'd be good. After I cleared all the DTC's, I ran a few more tests via forscan. For example, I did the ACM (audio control module) tests, those passed with flying colors. I ran APIM tests, no issues. I ran the DAC tests, no issues. Funny enough, I ran the DSP tests and each time, it would come back with a different list of speakers that have an open circuit, but the fact that it changed to some degree each time made me think that's just a faulty test (anyone else try this using forscan, curious what your outcome was?). an example code was DSP B1A06:13 speaker 9 open circuit. Actually, to that extent, anyone have a diagram showing what each speaker number is in relation to the system?

Anyway, I have no other issues really, its just really frustrating that I can't get this to return to normal. Has anyone on here tried the sub-only wiring harness I'm using (I used the Kit 10 - harness only from https://plugnplaykits.com/products/2018-2020-ford-f150-with-b-o-plug-play-harness-kits). Curious if anyone else has tried this. The sub and amp work perfectly fine, and all these harness do is essentially let you tap into the 4 sub-leads going into the factory enclosure, but in a clean way using a factory style harness adapter, that shouldn't affect anything.

Honestly it's a real pain in the rear to take apart the back of this thing, so troubleshooting isn't uber easy, looking for anyone's thoughts here. Appreciate in advance.

Quick additional question here - Anyone play with the settings for 727-01-01 related to the open detection? I'm wondering if the fact that I'm using the amplifier output connections for the stock sub, would the modules see that as an open connection and be causing issues? I see two possible options but I have no idea how they actually work, "Front/Rear Speakers Detection enabled (if Int amp)/disabled & Antenna Type & Number of Presets" and "Center Channel Open Detection & AAM & Convertible & Turn Signal Chimes". Any idea if using my asbuilt to determine original settings but change both to check for open disabled? Curious if anyone else had to do this.

 

[20Expy]

Our parking aid now mostly sounds like it's 360 degrees and rarely comes from IPC speaker. Recently, the tailgate beep also came back, but only when closing which is when it's supposed to come on if I remembered correctly, pls tell me if I'm wrong for those who have a faultless Expy. Our battery is 4 years old, but still running well, because the last time I tested the auto start/stop, it stops and starts flawlessly. Don't think I'm gonna change anything, until there is a catastrophic electrical meltdown, hopefully not any time soon!

 

[Mr Big]

Just had my vehicle in for service and my airbag light came on while on my way to drop it off. So I asked them to take a look in addition to the other work they were doing. Turns out for the past few months my vehicle has been telling the ford database/server that my BCM is losing communication multiple times per week for numerous modules. They think the airbag was just one message it couldn’t self correct and illuminated the airbag light. They reset all of the modules, cleared the errors and they are going to monitor it for a while remotely. I do get the random chime in the IPC and then switches back to the surround speakers.
I’m wondering if this is all related to the bcm?

I took a quick screenshot of the frequency of how often this is happening which is concerning. Service rep seemed genuinely concerned and not just brushing it off.
Is it possible the bus that all these messages are sent to just gets overloaded? That was the dealers thinking.

Depending on the year, there is an airbag circuit issue with the Expedition. You may want to do some research.