If you visit your friendly neighborhood Ford dealer right now, you can get your hands on any number of fun cars, like the 2015 Ford Mustang or the 2015 Ford Fiesta ST. (They have SUVs and stuff too if you lost that argument with your spouse.) What you won’t get is Sync 3, the long-awaited replacement for the hated MyFordTouch infotainment system, until later this summer.
Sync3 won’t arrive until the 2016 model year vehicles start hitting dealer lots, which is expected to happen with the Edge and other nameplates in the coming months. The entire Ford lineup won’t fully switch to Sync3 until the end of next year. And no, you can’t upgrade to it if you bought a car with MyFordTouch.
So should you hold off a while if you’re in the market for a new Ford? That’s the gist of this Automotive News story. If you wait, you’ll be paying the same price for what is said to be a much better infotainment system:
“It’s going to be a big change that makes the car considerably less frustrating,” said Tom Mutchler, a senior automotive engineer with Consumer Reports, which has long criticized MyFord Touch. “If more consumers knew the improvement that Sync 3 was going to provide, they would wait a few months.”
It’s an awkward situation sure to become more common as automakers rush to pack their instrument panels full of the latest technology. Waiting to make updates at the next natural break in a product’s life cycle risks losing sales to competitors, but adding features as soon as possible means existing vehicles become dated faster.
It’s true that MyFordTouch got better over its run. Newer versions of the system were quicker, more responsive and better at pairing with users’ smartphones. But it was still clunky in terms of layout, and prone to problems.
Just recently in a 2015 Expedition (reminder: Ford still makes the Expedition) I tried to bring up a list of satellite radio stations only to have the system hang until I switched off the engine. It’s a piece of engineering nobody will miss, least of all Ford, which took a huge hit to their reliability rankings over the system.
If you’re looking to buy a new Ford, odds are you’ll be stuck with it for at least a few years, maybe much longer. Why not wait and get what has to be a better infotainment system? I haven’t used Sync3 yet, but anything’s an improvement over MyFordTouch. Hold off on your purchase until the new system is installed, and better yet, proven.
And if you’re stuck with MyFordTouch, sorry. Them’s the breaks.
Contact the author at patrick@jalopnik.com.