(Some) steering wheel controls not working

d31b0y

Hey,

MK IV Mondeo. The controls on the left hand side of the wheel are working fine (vol + / -, skip forward / back).

The controls on the right, the ones used to control the on board computer, up and down only work the odd time. Left, right and ok seem to work all (or possibly most) of the time.
The up and down work maybe 1 in 20 journeys. When they work, they will sometimes only work for one or two presses. Other times they work the entire journey.

I only just got my clock changed the other day.

Any ideas where to start? Lose cable maybe? How hard is it to get into the back of these to check wiring etc?


EDIT: I have an Android head unit. The controls worked intermittently before and after install it's just gotten worse now.

martinr5232

Those controls gave a bit of trouble more than likely its them.

Gwynston

How old is the car?
I have an 8-y-o Ford S-Max and the wheel buttons sometimes do odd things. What I find is that one button can have the affect of another one. e.g. I press Volume Up, but it takes it as a Seek Next press.

I found out on another forum that's because Ford have done these controls on the cheap and there aren't actually 5 separately wired buttons on each side. In fact it's more like one wired connection and each microswitch just imparts a slightly difference impedance on it and the car has to determine from the slight variation in voltage which button was pressed.

So a slightly dirty contact, or cold weather (I find) which could affect the voltage slightly can make the car think a different button was pressed.

In your case, you might just have dirty contacts. Somehow I doubt it will be easy to access them to check/clean.

d31b0y

09.

Had a look online to see if it's easy to get at them but seems to involve removing the airbag which I am not comfortable with.
You could be right about the weather. Must keep an eye on that.

Special Circumstances

Gwynston wrote: »

I found out on another forum that's because Ford have done these controls on the cheap and there aren't actually 5 separately wired buttons on each side. In fact it's more like one wired connection and each microswitch just imparts a slightly difference impedance on it and the car has to determine from the slight variation in voltage which button was pressed.

Wow, sounds pretty basic, I thought anything with more than a few buttons would have a local module sending info out of the wheel on a serial bus these days!

kirving

Basic alright, I'm surprised it's not CAN or LIN. Then again, if the clock spring breaks, any communication method will be affected. Varying impedance requires just a single wire, with a feed and return, so in theory even less to go wrong at a lower cost.

Special Circumstances

True that, the less "tracks" going out on the clock spring the better I suppose.