Noah Harbinger

Not sure if I mentioned it but I was using on my iOS device EngineLink, which is good for real time display but nearly useless for logging. I think it is specifically designed for the crappy chinese knockoff ELM probes you see on EBay/Amazon for $20 or so, since it works seamlessly with those, whereas some of the other devices seem to only work with the legit ELMs.

I am so tempted to create an FTP account for you for my own hosting. I love your graphs and charts.

There have been far too many lemons of this model. Every day I drive MY C-Max I am THANKFUL it has shown NO signs of being a lemon. Because it is a BITCHIN car and I am glad I can drive it without problem every day. I can't wait to see the Satisfaction scores for this car, because I think despite how many problems it has for so many, I think for the vast majority it will prove to be a vehicle that people absolutely love. With typical products, the problems motivate perception more than the features / benefits. But I think with exceptional products, it is the benefits that outweigh the problems. And I think the C-Max is one of those products.

I bought my car from someone who, when I googled his name later, it turns out was a former reporter for the local rag. Made me respect him more. But when I was driving the car, I know I knew more than him about it.

Yeah, don't rely on it - but I have found that with the exception of newly re-signed streets it's better than guessing.

Honestly I think you're overstating how careful you have to be. In San Francisco you just seriously cannot expect EPA mileage. When I visited, I got mid-30s myself (and you can see my average). Of course, I just LOVE roaring up those hills! (My friend lives in Noe Valley). But the thing to notice is, in other vehicles you won't have the information in front of you to be aware that your vehicle is falling far behind EPA ratings, if you happen to be someone exposed to extraordinarily burdensome driving situations.

Totally! I normally don't drive fast but I love to occasionally blast up a hill.

I thought California Law said 70% Transparency on the front windows - is that the transparency of the glass itself? A roommate got dinged for tint, but it was just a fix-it ticket.

I'm also in San Diego and have been considering a tint - where did you go?

I know nobody cares but I do want to point out that they did re-send it, without any contact from me. So yay. One less payment on the clock :)

I missed my check! My address of record is a PO box that I don't check too often. Because it was sent certified, the post office only holds the letter for two weeks before sending it back. So I'm not sure who to contact about that, or how long it will take them to get around to tabulating that the check was indeed returned to them.

A little foolhearty - I would imagine the extra weight would ding the vehicles's fuel economy more than drawing power.

Just had my first long drive as well, over Veterans' Day weekend. With about 5k miles on the odometer, I did a San Diego to San Francisco run. The hybrid is fantastic in LA traffic... terrible in the Central Valley. First I should say that I still have not done the PCM update. What am I waiting for already? :-o But with cruise set at 74MPH (yeah, sorry, it's slow - I don't like to go more than 5 over...) I was getting about 33-34MPG on the northbound direction. That is pretty darn terrible, in my opinion. The aerodynamics of this vehicle are just atrocious for faster driving. After that I slowed to 70MPH, and was getting 38MPG. Southbound, again at 70MPH, I was getting about 42MPG. That difference is not unusual given the prevailing winds along the drive. Fuel economy in SF itself, I was running about 35MPH, despite staying with a friend living in a very hilly part of the city. The thing is a charming goat of a hill climber. Once I get the update, I'll have to do the trip again :) MFT crashed on me once - had to stop, turn off the car, and turn it on/off repeatedly to convince it to reboot. A short drive in the city is tolerable but I ain't driving 6 hours without music.

More specifically I'm in a shared housing situation where it would be difficult to separate out my costs without putting the car on a separate meter, and where I do not have an indoor location to park the vehicle while charging.

I could probably do my full commute in EV-only, if I had an Energi. Of course that would require a charging station.

Are you saying there is a physical compartmentalization between the EV battery and the hybrid battery? I never thought about that but it would make sense, since it would allow the full EV battery to be more energy-dense and cheaper, knowing that it doesn't need to go through as many full-discharge cycles and doesn't need to discharge at 25C, just maybe, what, 4C?

I absolutely think this is the most important, yet hardest thing to keep in mind. A lot of people think "well I got a hybrid so I want to save as much gas as possible on top of that". But I would say that that's really backwards: We're already saving lots of gas just by driving a hybrid. Why not relax and enjoy it? It's the people without hybrids, who get 27MPG on a typical tank (I'm looking at you, Camry) who really should be agonizing over every drop they might save.

You must tell us how you escaped! Surely you were able to leverage the unique capabilities of your C-Max to evade your dastardly pursuers?

It's necessary to maximize battery lifespan - the further one charges / discharges a battery, the faster it wears. With rechargeable batteries, auto manufacturers have found that by staying within a range of 30%-70%, the battery's useful lifespan is practically indefinite. By contrast, a battery under typical usage would expect to be for all practical purposes useless after a thousand charge cycles. Being on an energi, you probably don't experience it to the same degree, but on the regular hybrid, the battery might go through many charge cycles a day. If you were doing full charge/discharge cycles, well of course there would be fewer cycles, but even a few a day would kill the battery in a year. I'm actually surprised it lets your battery charge and discharge as far as it does. Maybe it allows that because the larger battery allows it to experience far fewer deep discharges. Of course, as I understand it, the batteries used in a hybrid do have some other fairly significant construction differences that might also contribute to longevity. For example, you could never charge a standard lithium ion battery at 25C (from empty to a full charge in 1/25th of an hour), yet my logging shows my battery pack experiences that fairly frequently, though usually for fairly short periods.

Read my post #8 for where this info came from - reading between the lines, I googled for some of the PIDs from Sparky's posts and found where they were originally posted, and the guide for how to convert Scangauge pids to our various ELM readers. I wrote a script to automate the conversion from scangauge to AB formulas and applied it to the full list. ModeAndPID Name Min Max Unit Formula Header224801 Hv Battery State-of-Charge 0 300 % (((A*256)+B)*(1/5))/100 022480D Hv Battery Voltage 0 300 Volts (((A*256)+B))/100 0224800 Hv Battery Temp 0 300 F (A*18-580)/10 0224815 Maximum Discharge Power Limit 0 300 kW (A*25)/10 0224816 Maximum Charge Power Limit 0 300 kW (A*25)/10 0224841 Average Battery Module Voltage 0 300 Volts (((A*256)+B)*(1/10))/10 022DD04 Inside Car Temp 0 300 F (A*18-400)/10 0224810 Battery Age 0 300 months (((A*256)+B)*(1/20))/10 0221E1C Transmission Temp 0 300 F (((A*256)+B)*(9/8)+320)/10 022480B Hv Current 0 300 amps (((A*256)+B)*(1/5))/10 0224832 Motor Electronics Coolant Temp 0 300 F (A*18+320)/10 022F41F Engine run time 0 300 minutes (((A*256)+B)*(25/16))/10 022481E Generator Inverter Temp 0 300 F (((A*256)+B)*18+320)/10 0 224824 Motor Inverter Temp 0 300 F (((A*256)+B)*18+320)/10 0 I made a few adjustments, but not extensively, so accuracy is questionable. The min/max are placeholders, not really used (I just do digital readouts - I suppose if I was doing dial readouts they would matter. Put in values you like!) Over a 12 minute drive over fairly flat land, about 3 hours after a fairly rigorous drive home, I collected data, from which I make the following per-PID observations: Hv Battery State Of Charge: Seems OK; had to adjust by a factor of 10 from the automated conversion formula Showed a range of 36% to 53%, which seems about right given how conservative the vehicle is about extensively discharging / chargingHv Battery Voltage: Seems OK; also had to adjust by a factor of 10.Hv Battery Temp: Didn't show much movement for me - from 78.8F to 82.4F, which is a little bit higher than the interior temperatures (which is to be expected). Based on the log my app collected of data sent over the CAN bus, the values expressed only varied by 2 (4C through 4E), so not a very precise thermostat. I'd bet it goes up more over some long charge/discharge cyclesMaximum Charge Power Limit: Did not return a value until after I turned the car off, at which time it showed a value of 0kW - perhaps this is relevant only to the EnergiMaximum Discharge Power Limit: Only ever showed one value, 350kW; I wonder if on an Energi, this will vary based on the "EV Now/EV Later" settings?Average Battery Module Voltage: Seems OK, range of 35V to 38V, which seems accurate if a battery module contains 10 Lithium Ion batteries in series. Or it might need another factor of 10 divisor, like the battery voltage and state of charge?Inside Car Temp: Gradually rose, which makes sense since I had the temperature a little higher but with the AC off. Seems close enough but I would be interested in comparing to an actual thermometer for accuracyBattery age: Accurate to about when the car was manufactured.Transmission Temp: This was odd - Each time data was returned, two temperatures were returned: One a realistic sounding number that ranged between 102F-115F, and one pegged at 59.9F (which was about the outside temperature at this time). Hv Current: Sent over the CAN bus as a signed integer where negative values are given in 2's complement representation (flip all the bits and add 1), and is apparently the only value sent this way. This means that it will display correctly when the battery is discharging (positive current), but incorrectly when negative. Unfortunately my app EngineLink uses GCMathParser to parse the PIDs, which does not support any bitwise operators, so I'm out of luck. Your math will vary. Consult your vendor for information about how to convert a 2s-complement signed integer. If you are exporting the raw hexadecimal values and using Perl to convert it as I am, I convert it by packing the value as an unsigned integer and unpacking it as a signed integer, roughly along the lines of: unpack('s', pack('S', A*256+B))/50 Motor Electronics Coolant Temp: Not working. The app never received any responses for this PID Engine Run Time: I'm not sure if it just took me longer than I realized to get connected, but it started off with an oddly high run time - but it seems to increase monotonically with the time I'd spent driving, so it seems somewhat reasonable. Maybe it's "time since you opened the door and activated the car's electronics"? Generator Inverter Temp, Motor Inverter Temp: Both started out at 95F, which seems a bit high to me. But the Generator Inverter reached as high as 140F, and the Motor Inverter Temp 120F - and being nestled in over the engine, perhaps they stay warm from a few hours ago? So these numbers could be reasonable as well. I hope that is of interest! Also, there are a *ton* of PIDs from the standard banks of PIDs that work and may be interesting. Notably, almost every measure of throttle position goes a flat line when the ICE is off - but Accelerator pedal positions D and E both picked up data in electric mode as well (D somewhat intermittently). 0149,Accelerator pedal position D,0,100,%,A*100/255,0014A,Accelerator pedal position E,0,100,%,A*100/255,0

I absolutely hate that you cannot activate defrost without turning on the AC - I just want to blow warm air on the windows. It takes longer to defrost, but it seems to then stay defrosted longer after you turn off defrost. Really, I'm disliking automatic climate control altogether. I would much rather control the temperature of the air coming out the vents directly.

There's no reason to cheerlead. Find alternative measurements and perspectives (satisfaction surveys, for example). But turning a blind eye to problems only justifies not fixing them.

Reliability surveys are a better measurement of a vehicle. Unfortunately the C-Max doesn't do well in that regard. (Of course the actual survey places so much weight on qualitative disapprovals that it's hard to get a sense of how much of it is due to "mechanical defects vs. personal preferences".) I certainly hope the second-year numbers recover significantly.

The $550 is based on the gap between the previous window sticker and the EPA rating after the powertrain update. It's not a coincidence or uncoordinated move that the rebate was announced at the same time as the powertrain update and new EPA certification.

It saves a log of the raw transcript from communicating with the device, which you can access from iTunes > Device > Apps > File Sharing > EngineLink Documents >obddata.log. So I suppose if I want to do anything useful, I would have to parse that out. It does not include GPS data or time data, but one of the PIDs it follows is "time since startup" which at least would let you create a timeline of the values. I've seen some open-source tools that parse ELM communications, perhaps I can feed this to one of those. It has a rather long list of working built-in PIDs. I'll have to play with it more to see how many of them are useful. That is also where you can place a CSV of custom PIDs - it includes a couple, which can be used for examples. I'll try yours out tomorrow.