Noah Harbinger

I try to toe 68MPH on the freeway. Not fast, but still hanging in the right two lanes. If you drive 75/80, the fuel economy drops fast - it has a ridiculously high drag coefficient and a large cross-section size, and with drag increasing with cube of speed, it becomes a factor fast. I probably average 42MPG at 68MPH, but my fuel economy dropped to 34MPG at 78MPH. At that point, you do better in a Camry. (Though I may have had a headwind that trip).

My gauge also reads optimistic, generally about 4%. I wonder how much of that is evaporative gasses being recirculated to the engine, burned without being injected / counted? I do report the optimistic mileage on Fuelly. 

Make sure to come back and tell everyone what the resolution was!

I love the MyFord Touch. I can recognize its foibles, but I still love it. I absolutely hate the screenshots I have seen of the new system, it's ugly as sin. 

when a cop car got in front of the four lanes and began swerving back and forth over all four lanes, like he was crazy. 

That is a standard tactic to create a break in traffic so that a road hazard (e.g. something that fell off a truck) can be safely removed.

This came as a complete surprise to me. I've been getting about 45MPG on my day-to-day driving lately (by the gauge, which is about 43MPH after adjusting for the fuel consumption inaccuracy problem), but I think I drive a tad more carefully than the average person and on roads that are pretty favorable to hybrid driving, so I can't say I'm TOO surprised that the rated fuel economy is dropping again. 

Just going to throw another image in here, taken from the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego, with some desert mountains in the background. 

Unfortunately drafting only works if the wind is coming at you or from the behind at speeds less than 20mph. Most of the time winds were cross winds so there is very little benefit in drafting.  To give an example when I was coming back I gassed up in El Paso and the winds were gusting to 30mph from the west. Within an hour I was up to 49.8mpg and it made very little difference if I was drafting or not going between 70 and 80mph. Within two hours the winds had shifted to strong winds from the south and drafting was useless and I was getting high 30's so that tank ended up getting 43.1mpg. The best results for drafting occur when winds are slight or coming from the front. :)

 

Paul

Well heck, I'm astounded. I haven't done a lot of long trips but the ones I have, have had bad mileage. 

My wife will not hear of putting more money into the car for a jumper battery.  She, and I agree, that having Ford pay for a wrecker/jumper service every time the car breaks they may become interested in fixing the problem.  The dealer put in a new battery based on my telling them it needed a new one.  They are well aware of problem and recorded error codes about starting system error.  In my experience the only thing going for the Ford Hybrids as they relate to me is the dealership.

That's all well and good but I'd hate to spend the night in the car some remote place because the battery happened to fail in an inconvenient time and place, or perhaps somewhere outside of cell range. 

But I suppose I rarely leave the car parked for very long periods in such wildernesses. 

I feel like right around 9000 miles or so is when I saw the biggest increase in fuel economy. 

It's probably true that you would get better fuel economy where it is flat than where it is hilly. But the thing is, other cars also get worse fuel economy where it is hilly, and I think the C-Max will perform closer to its rated milage than other cars driving the same route. For example, my friend's Camry gets 15MPG in San Francisco, and I got 32MPG. Our routes are not at all comparable but the type of driving - up-and-down steep hills, constant start and stop, etc - was probably pretty similar. Somewhere flat with long 40MPH stretches without any stopping, yeah I could probably get mid-40s easily, but your average car would probably be doing high 30s. So even though the C-Max would be more fuel efficient on the flats than in a hilly city, it would have a much lower benefit compared to a typical non-hybrid.

That's a good question. The manual says "Do not hang anything (bike rack, etc.) from the spoiler, glass or liftgate. This could damage the liftgate and its components". Maybe someone else has thrown caution in the wind and can report a good or bad result. 

I fold down my rear seat and put my bike in the back. Take off the front wheel and use the rear wheel to roll the bike as far as it'll go. You'd probably want to put a moving blanket (or something) between two bikes, but I bet you could get them in! The back folds flat so it's great. 

Someone posted recently about attaching a hitch rack - you might be well advised to read http://fordcmaxhybridforum.com/topic/1422-installing-the-torklift-central-hitch/ if you want to add a rack in a way that doesn't make you worry about damaging the liftgate. 

I'm trying to think, how would I objectively test something like the gas pods? MPGs over a test run can vary a lot.

The only thing I can think of would be to attach a data logger, put the car in cruise control (non-ECO mode) at a constant speed, and run the same route a couple of times, alternating between pods on and pods off. What I would measure is not MPGs, but one of the engine load, throttle, or accelerator pedal position PIDs, which would seem to be a good measurement of the power the car thinks it needs to maintain a given speed, and are read pretty precisely. That should be pretty identical between runs, and that number should drop measurably if you have made a modification that reduces drag. 

I'm tempted to try to do it just to see how consistent of a number I could get without making any modifications - if you can't reproduce a result when you aren't making any changes, you have no hope of meaningfully quantifying a small difference when you do make a change. 

Edit 2: I can't find anything that shows the actual combined load while cruise control is active. Poo

My check got sent back to Ford because I use a PO box and the post office sends back anything that requires a signature after a week or something like that. I sent a message to a customer support form and never received any response back, but Ford did automatically re-send the check - and that time I picked it up without incident.

I think my customer support expectations are calibrated lowly enough that I just don't expect any larger organization to respond quickly to individual issues. You need an infinite number of omniscient people, and if any corporation figures out how to do that, they will rule the world. Maybe if call-centers treated those jobs like career tracks instead of like disposable grist, the employees would care enough to engage themselves in building expertise on the subject matter.

Fortunately in my case the functioning business process produced the right result. That, in my opinion, is the more important goal anyway. 

Sorry for the bad pun, but you hear a creak when you drive over a creek? 

I used to have a little creak coming continuously from my B-pillar, but it went away when I had the headliner recall done. 

Hmmm. I use my 7" Kindle Fire HDX to usually read this forum sometimes my wife's laptop. Didn't know it omits stuff.I guess for the space/size of screen.

It's also a setting users can customize. I know on the mothership, BOF, I disabled signatures because some peoples' were getting ridiculously long. 

PS: I drove to San Diego and back, about 5K miles With A/C on most of the time and strong winds and averaged on the Interstates 45mpg. Without the wind and A/C it looks like I can average 47MPG and They said it couldn't be done. LOL :happy feet: :shift:

Is this while drafting behind a semi? I can totally see getting 45MPG if you stick to semi-speeds. 

Getting the highest mpg is easier than you think if you follow these simple rules.

 

1. Always look ahead. If a light turns red down the road start braking GENTLEY now.

This is how you get the best regen which charges the battery, and helps a lot with mpg.

 

2. Accelerate slowly, this way you will be able to stay in EV mode as long as possible.

Also always keep to the speed limit.

 

3. I find that the engage screen on the C-max is the most informative. Watch the screen to see when you are engaging the engine. Once you learn what you do that turns the engine on, you can help stop it, or at least prevent it from happening as much.

 

4. I know all of these steps are pretty basic, but once you learn to master all of these steps, you will get great mpg. Please message me with any other questions.

If you know how long the light is, and nobody is pulling in front of you, by braking a little harder earlier, you can often maintain speed so that you don't have to accelerate as much - which is much more efficient than regen and electrical acceleration. 

I like to stay in Empower most of the time, and switch to Engage if I'm doing any heavy acceleration. I dearly wish you could show the engine power threshold on the Engage display. 

(Looks like others have commented on #2 already)

Me too, actually! Much harder than any of the other doors (so it can't be air-tightness, or they would be difficult as well). But I almost never have anyone in the back seat. 

I think my kick-to-open didn't catch once, since the update.

I can't believe that I forgot to tell everybody the most important part! 

 

When I had some previous updates at the dealer, I would always cringe to find how badly they killed my numbers for fuel economy, during the service. This time, I got smart!

 

I made sure to do a last long .5 Bar burn and then to feather the pedal to keep ICE working to Max SOC. I finished off by gliding with a light application of the brakes, just enough to basically fill the battery indicator to nearly the last bit at the top.

 

Even after the service, I still had enough juice to get out to the roadway for the first burn on the way home. Of course, this could be after the engine ran a little during the service, but it looked like I maybe lost .1 MPG, and even this pretty much immediately came back on the first leg of the trip back home.

 

Pretty smart, huh! :hat_tip:

Now that's thinking ahead! I have the same reaction, and I'll be sure to do the same thing next time!

Keep in mind that, although the color is called Blue Candy, it is more like a teal or aqua. At least, that's what it seems like to me. I really haven't seen a photograph yet that shows the car's color accurately.

I know what you mean - there's just something about it that's hard to capture. 

How does the dirt show up on this car? I know we have a black escape and it shows dirt like crazy.

It does very well. Next time mine is dirty, I'll try to take a pic. 

...but the battery in the Hybrid can only supply about 33kW (If I recall correctly)

That jives with my OBD data - looking at one of my logs, the highest current draw I see reported is 34.8kW. 

Of course, if I had it my way, I would eliminate the concept of a steering wheel, which makes no sense for tired arms and neck on long drives. 

What would you replace it with?

A CMax desert.

I live in San Diego and in the 2 months I've had and loved my CMax {SPARKY} I have only seen two others.

 

.... 

The other was a random sighting, in Mission Valley, same color as my own. But Sparky looks cooler 'cause I added chrome window pillars, a color match door guards with chrome stripe and shark fin antenna.

We must be in different parts of town. I too am in San Diego. There's one down the street from where I live, I pass the same two every day from where I park to walk to work (a Ruby Red and a whatever-gray), and there have been two others (a white and a candy blue, both energies) on that walk on random days. I feel like I see random ones every day or two. One day last summer, I saw three other Candy Blues! 

Ah, the cable, not the pedal. That makes more sense. :)