fishpick
Well-Known Member
- Thread starter
- #1
No - not the traction control... Not Launch control. No - there's not a defect in the DCT that made a shift go crazy wrong... But the car DID try to kill me and my wife... and it's a legit bug Ford should really solve - all it takes is one line of code and it's universal - as a buddy in his 2020 Yellow Label Salleen had the SAME issue at the exact same time... so let me tell you a story...
(this is a bit of creative writing - if you don’t understand what that is, you should just skip to the Epilogue)
It all started on a warm summer morning. A group of fellow mustang enthusiasts gathered and drove together to a Pirate Festival Car show (you can't make this $#!t up). While at the show I enjoyed the kangraoos, the pirates, the cannon fire (again - $#!t not made up), the carnival (ever notice how carnies are all exactly the same - no matter where you go - odd genetic predisposition to being a carnie, I guess)... It was a nice summer day with good friends and lots of interesting cars to look at. I don't go for the trophies - I go to hang out because at a car show I can't work... and that alone makes them medicinal in practice for me. Anyhow I digress... distracted by the memory of the carnies...
This was a full spectrum show too - from model T's all the way up to my 2021 GT500 and a brand new fugly fat @$$end C8... Lots of amazing mods too - enthusiasts with some incredible paint jobs, beautiful restorations, monster trucks with power cables to their amps bigger than a 220 circuit in your house... all sorts of cool things. I'm a "car guy" - so even if it's not my thing - I appreciate the passion and energy others expend.
It was partly the jovial day that made what happened next so unexpected... at the conclusion of the awards, like so many other shows you have attended, everyone returned to their cars and departed for home... I twas here, as we were pulling out - the biggest monster truck with the most amps and hugest subwoofers pulled out between me and my buddy in the Saleen... as unsuspecting and innocent as that seemed - it was here that the horror began...
It started as a low droning sound... Like the harmonics between loud exhausts... but it kept building. Soon - my wife is looking at me and I can barely hear her talking... "what's going on" I make out... I yell back - someone has some really loud loud exhaust. The line of cars moves a little - we roll forward and the sound eases a bit.
"Holy shit that was loud" she says.
"Yeah - I dunno who's car that was" I reply... but I no more than finish what I was saying and the droning sound begins to raise up again... this time exceeding the level last time. The sound waves are punishing - looking in my rear view mirror - there's no image to be made out - everything is a blur from the vibrations. You can feel the sound waves in your chest. You head feels like it's being buffeted by a strong wind - but the air is perfectly still... My wife cried out... but all I could do was white knuckle the steering wheel and focus on the car ahead. To myself I thought - "this must be how they train fighter pilots - keep your focus no matter what". I feared the subsonic pulsations were weakening my bladder.
Frantically I started toggling the exhaust on the dash - what was going on - why was the car so loud... I'd look at the exhaust setting - "Quiet" - look at the mirror "blur" - look at my wife yelling things that sounds like she was speaking through a running fan and suing words I dare not write here for fear of moderation ban hammers... The cars rolled forward - and for a brief moment - the sound receded to a fraction of what it was and the mirror image returned... as I focused on the lines coalescing, and it was then that I saw the golliath of the monster truck behind us with its golden bowtie in the grill... every inch it came closer - the sound was returning to the cabin of the car... the image in the mirror becoming more violently distorted, shaking away reality and vibrating my senses numb...
My wife cried out in anguish "NOOOO! Why is it happening again?!"
I don't know my love... but we lived a good life together, was a thought passing through the turbulent mindspace. But it was then too - as the ripples of gray matter bumped into eachother I began to understand what was hamming my consciousness and liquefying my organs... it was that god damn Chevy truck... The cars moved - we were next... the oscillating sound waves had ebbed for a moment and now were crashing back for their finale as that rolling GM pile of amps and subwoffers descended upon us... Before the sound-waves reduced my awareness to only what was in front of me again, the young children along the exit were screaming "light them up", looking for the omnipresent Mustang crash video opportunity... and before I jammed on the throttle, not for their pleasure, but to escape the harbinger of sonic doom, I shouted through the waves compressing my lungs - not to the children along the street - but to my wife nearly in tears "It's that #uc&ing truck - it's freaking out the noise suppression in our car!"
I will always wonder about that that warm day in mid July, along the shores of Lake Ontario in the mids of modern pirates, is this where it will be remembered to have begun... where the technology overlords attempted to extinguish 2 fragile lives in the cabin of their car.
Epilogue
There are several articles on the interwebs about how much work and engineering Ford put into the software to make the active noise cancellation in the cabin allow for such a loud exhaust with no drone and TBH it works amazing. What I think the software engineers FORGOT to do (as a guy who writes code - I too have been guilty of this) - was add the notion of an upper limit in the feedback loop. The notion that the system keeps hearing "something" and trying harder and harder to cancel it, is absolutely what we encountered. There's no off button, there's no way to "stop" it - in this situation there was nowhere to pull over and shut off the car... and the massive subwoffer in our trunk just kept fighting harder and harder to cancel some sound only it could hear. Absolutely brutal. One line of code is all Ford needs to prevent this - a max limit in the feedback loop escalation... And - the next day - when talking with my buddy in the 2020 Saleen - he too had the same experience.
(this is a bit of creative writing - if you don’t understand what that is, you should just skip to the Epilogue)
It all started on a warm summer morning. A group of fellow mustang enthusiasts gathered and drove together to a Pirate Festival Car show (you can't make this $#!t up). While at the show I enjoyed the kangraoos, the pirates, the cannon fire (again - $#!t not made up), the carnival (ever notice how carnies are all exactly the same - no matter where you go - odd genetic predisposition to being a carnie, I guess)... It was a nice summer day with good friends and lots of interesting cars to look at. I don't go for the trophies - I go to hang out because at a car show I can't work... and that alone makes them medicinal in practice for me. Anyhow I digress... distracted by the memory of the carnies...
This was a full spectrum show too - from model T's all the way up to my 2021 GT500 and a brand new fugly fat @$$end C8... Lots of amazing mods too - enthusiasts with some incredible paint jobs, beautiful restorations, monster trucks with power cables to their amps bigger than a 220 circuit in your house... all sorts of cool things. I'm a "car guy" - so even if it's not my thing - I appreciate the passion and energy others expend.
It was partly the jovial day that made what happened next so unexpected... at the conclusion of the awards, like so many other shows you have attended, everyone returned to their cars and departed for home... I twas here, as we were pulling out - the biggest monster truck with the most amps and hugest subwoofers pulled out between me and my buddy in the Saleen... as unsuspecting and innocent as that seemed - it was here that the horror began...
It started as a low droning sound... Like the harmonics between loud exhausts... but it kept building. Soon - my wife is looking at me and I can barely hear her talking... "what's going on" I make out... I yell back - someone has some really loud loud exhaust. The line of cars moves a little - we roll forward and the sound eases a bit.
"Holy shit that was loud" she says.
"Yeah - I dunno who's car that was" I reply... but I no more than finish what I was saying and the droning sound begins to raise up again... this time exceeding the level last time. The sound waves are punishing - looking in my rear view mirror - there's no image to be made out - everything is a blur from the vibrations. You can feel the sound waves in your chest. You head feels like it's being buffeted by a strong wind - but the air is perfectly still... My wife cried out... but all I could do was white knuckle the steering wheel and focus on the car ahead. To myself I thought - "this must be how they train fighter pilots - keep your focus no matter what". I feared the subsonic pulsations were weakening my bladder.
Frantically I started toggling the exhaust on the dash - what was going on - why was the car so loud... I'd look at the exhaust setting - "Quiet" - look at the mirror "blur" - look at my wife yelling things that sounds like she was speaking through a running fan and suing words I dare not write here for fear of moderation ban hammers... The cars rolled forward - and for a brief moment - the sound receded to a fraction of what it was and the mirror image returned... as I focused on the lines coalescing, and it was then that I saw the golliath of the monster truck behind us with its golden bowtie in the grill... every inch it came closer - the sound was returning to the cabin of the car... the image in the mirror becoming more violently distorted, shaking away reality and vibrating my senses numb...
My wife cried out in anguish "NOOOO! Why is it happening again?!"
I don't know my love... but we lived a good life together, was a thought passing through the turbulent mindspace. But it was then too - as the ripples of gray matter bumped into eachother I began to understand what was hamming my consciousness and liquefying my organs... it was that god damn Chevy truck... The cars moved - we were next... the oscillating sound waves had ebbed for a moment and now were crashing back for their finale as that rolling GM pile of amps and subwoffers descended upon us... Before the sound-waves reduced my awareness to only what was in front of me again, the young children along the exit were screaming "light them up", looking for the omnipresent Mustang crash video opportunity... and before I jammed on the throttle, not for their pleasure, but to escape the harbinger of sonic doom, I shouted through the waves compressing my lungs - not to the children along the street - but to my wife nearly in tears "It's that #uc&ing truck - it's freaking out the noise suppression in our car!"
I will always wonder about that that warm day in mid July, along the shores of Lake Ontario in the mids of modern pirates, is this where it will be remembered to have begun... where the technology overlords attempted to extinguish 2 fragile lives in the cabin of their car.
Epilogue
There are several articles on the interwebs about how much work and engineering Ford put into the software to make the active noise cancellation in the cabin allow for such a loud exhaust with no drone and TBH it works amazing. What I think the software engineers FORGOT to do (as a guy who writes code - I too have been guilty of this) - was add the notion of an upper limit in the feedback loop. The notion that the system keeps hearing "something" and trying harder and harder to cancel it, is absolutely what we encountered. There's no off button, there's no way to "stop" it - in this situation there was nowhere to pull over and shut off the car... and the massive subwoffer in our trunk just kept fighting harder and harder to cancel some sound only it could hear. Absolutely brutal. One line of code is all Ford needs to prevent this - a max limit in the feedback loop escalation... And - the next day - when talking with my buddy in the 2020 Saleen - he too had the same experience.
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