Noah Harbinger

It's there because there's no spare tire, which isn't so much of a "cool hidden feature"

Oooh I forgot about Unibroue!

Well that was probably for a snowstorm or hurricane or something. We don't really get those in Southern California.

If you REALLY want a performance boost, stick a NOS decal on the window.

It's funny you would say that, I can't think of a single good Canadian beer (though I'm sure that's more a function of distribution than anything). That old stereotype might have meant something when "Beer" in the US meant a choice of Coors or Bud, and Michelob if you're being fancy. But anyone who is dissatisfied with the taste of the behemoth brewers' beers has vastly more choices available today than a decade ago. I can get 90-100 different beers brewed at 9 breweries within 5 miles of my house.

They may very well have timed the lights to make people stop, but I don't think it because of kickbacks from or ownership of corporations that would benefit from increased gas usage. If it is the case that the lights are intentionally timed to turn red, it is more likely a "safety initiative" targeted at reducing speeding.

A simple enough change would have prohibited Ford from taking advantage of this loophole: To share an EPA rating, also require that two vehicles share a coefficient of drag of within 0.01.

Most people only have the EPA highway figure in their mind for their fuel economy. And the ones that have actually measured it probably did it on a long open-road trip, where most cars get their highest fuel economy.

Well, probably it means if the C-Max actually COULD get 47/47/47, you would have been getting 55 MPG.

Wait, are you telling me you're driving on STALE AIR?!?! :gaah: That stuff might disintegrate at any moment! And then what would keep your tires up?

Nevermind…. :arrive_alive:

We've only had one unplanned power outage in as far back as I can remember, but it was a doozy, 3pm-3am on a summer afternoon. My roommate used his marine battery to run the fridge and some lights, and occasionally topped it off by running his car. But it would have been awesome to to run something off the car's traction battery, where it would automatically turn on and off to re-charge the battery with fairly low losses.

The only problem as I see it in the EPA's testing guidelines is that they provided too many loopholes for manufacturers to avoid testing every configuration - a concession made in the name of "reducing regulatory burden". But in my opinion, there's nothing worse than regulation that goes half-way - it raises expenses with diminished usefulness. Every loophole creates a way for a manufacturer to game the system, avoiding running the full tests (as Ford did and as many other manufacturers continue to do for the vast majority of cars on the market). We're never going to eliminate standardized fuel economy ratings, as there are both consumer interests and national security interests in play in reducing oil consumption, so the EPA needs to aggressively monitor when loopholes are being used to give a manufacturer an unfair advantage and revise its rules to maintain the integrity of the data.

You make a good point, VABlueMax: I also went into my purchase knowing about the Consumer Reports claims, and that the majority of real-world users were not reaching the EPA mileage. It's fun to chase mileage, but I really just wanted a good car. I hate shifting, so the CVT is a huge plus. I love running in EV mode because of the quietness and smoothness as much as for fuel economy - especially at stops. Feeling like I am not wasting money/gas when traffic or lights slow down or stop helps me feel much calmer about driving in general, and helps me enjoy the experience. But the point being, I probably don't mind my fuel economy because I wasn't really expecting the EPA rating anyway.

As was pointed out elsewhere, the layout of the site got messed up because the Fandango ad doesn't close its <center> tag - so a lot of content on the site is currently being centered that should be. Can someone fix that? ¡Muchas gracias por su atención!

I agree, it's always boggled me that the option is available for fleet customers only. I can only imagine that there is some regulatory requirement to make it available for government vehicles, which make up a huge portion of Ford's fleet business.

It looks like "they" accidentally left the closing CENTER tag off the end of the Fandango ad up at the top, so the rest of the page is interpreted as being included in that tag. Once they fix that, the centering will go away.

I gave mine a little jiggle and it was absolutely firm. I wonder how much the replacement part is? Edit: Looks like part 63386A - $42.27 is the list part on the website, but having come through the dealer portal, $48.19. It's weird, most catalogs don't make a point of pointing out that you're paying more than list price for something…

They were thinking the rules allowed for it. And they do.

Yeah…. I seriously doubt there's a conspiracy to mis-time lights to drive up fuel use.

I would certainly never reject more data, but I think the fact that the current tests include a broad set of speed/acceleration situations is more important to assessing the overall capability of a vehicle. So few people drive cross-country or cross state, or do so for any significant percentage of their total mileage, that open inter-city highway is just not that significant to determining the relative operating cost of a vehicle. Heck I would love a heat-map with speed on the X-axis, acceleration on the Y-axis, and fuel economy represented by the color. And I would love to have a web tool to compare that heatmap between two vehicles to see where each vehicle does better than the other. And I would love to record a trace of my driving to superimpose over that comparison heatmap, to get an idea for my own driving patterns and habits whether one car would be better than the other.

DRLs run only the headlights - no marker lights, tail lights, or instrument lights, which I'd guess adds 50-100 watts of load. 100 watts continuous demand is an extra full battery discharge for every 14 hours of driving. Then I think DRLs run the headlights at a lower power - if they ran at half power, that's another 50 watts of load with headlamps over DRLs.

My bluetooth pairing is working well, so my phone always stays in my backpack. But yes, the general lack of nooks and crannies can be inconvenient at times.

Wait, are you saying Ford's offical shop manual which you must pay loads of money for is still requiring SVG Viewer? Hyundai's free online shop manuals (my favorite thing about my last car, an Elantra, was that unexpected perq - kinda sad when the best thing about a car is help fixing it) used to use SVG Viewer but they moved away from that 2006-ish. (Of course my car was a 2001, so that didn't help me any - but I did manage to get it installed at least).

I wish Fuelly would show a trendline over time for all vehicles - it would be interesting to see if the effects of the update are noticable.