Hi all,
I've been lurking in this thread for a while and thought I'd share my experience to hopefully benefit others.
The tl;dr of my story really is that if you're getting the "
Sshh Your Ford is in deep sleep mode ..." message constantly (or more often than not popping up), swapping out the battery is the only real fix.
I bought my Puma (Ford Puma ST-Line X - no
mHEV) last year. Everything was great, and I was happy with my purchase.
When the odometer hit ~4000 km my auto start/stop wouldn't active anymore. Didn't think too much of it to be honest; I'm not the biggest fan of it, but I'd still prefer it to work when it should out of principle.
Shortly after that I occasionally had the "Sshh deep sleep" message pop up on my phone and figured the battery was just not getting enough charge because of the short trips I was doing.
Then the messages would pretty much pop up as soon as I parked my car. Every single time. Regardless of trip length or duration.
I started searching around and came across this thread. And to be honest I was a disbeliever at first. I didn't want to believe that Ford would ship out cars, all with defective batteries.
My Puma got shipped out ROMBAT battery - see below:
I tried everything to disprove the initial hypothesis that the battery was not holding charge. I even drove for about 50km ensuring nothing in the cabin could be drawing and bleeding off any charge from the battery. And I falsely reassured myself that something was indeed happening substantiated by the fact that when entering into the diagnostic mode (also described in this thread), the "ETM Battery" readout was 14.5 volts?
Surely that was a good thing?
But alas, that was not the case. It did help for probably a day, and then that dreaded notification would pop up on my phone again.
I finally had enough and got in contact with my dealer.
They advised they would have to keep the car overnight to do a trickle charge and also perform some additional diagnostics.
In my initial encounter with the service adviser, I was quite straight to the point that my belief was that the battery was faulty.
He kind of dodged my statement and concluded that he would get to the bottom of what was going on by doing a whole bunch of in-depth testing (
sure buddy).
The next day, I picked up my car, and the battery was swapped out for the VARTA - see below:
And everything thereafter was fixed. Auto stop-start works again. No notifications.
The fishy thing for me was how little convincing I really
actually had to do. It seemed a little too easy.
This tells me that Ford is definitely aware that something is going on, which I think was quite well established in this thread anyway.
Quite disappointed with the fact that Ford would cut corners like this, and not do a recall.
However, the point of me sharing my experience is to not let your dealer try and coax you into believing something different any wasting your time. Swap out the defective ROMBAT.