valkraider

Well, you can run in full electric mode up to 20 miles, and cruising on level ground at 55 with no climate control you should easily be able to hit 20. Hills or using the heater reduce that down. Outside of the electric mode, the Energi is rated at 41 highway. My experience has been just over that in conditions you describe, however my engine is not broken in (I only have 400 miles of gasoline powered travel). My seat of the pants estimate combined with a back of the napkin calculation, I would bet that without too much difficulty maintaining 40mpg at 55mph will not be a problem at all, and I think probably a couple mpg low. The key is that the C-Max and the Energi model especially are really at their best in stop&go city environments. If your primary driving situation is long highway cruises at 55mph I would highly suggest looking into a Volkswagen or Audi TDI. I could routinely break 50mpg in my 2003 when cruising at 55 or less. In my 2009 I could cruise at 55 with an economy of 45mpg (the 2009 is a different engine which loses some efficiency due to much cleaner emissions). Those VW and Audi TDI are simply the best highway vehicles on the market. However, in the city I would only get about 25mpg. Diesels take a long time to warm up, and don't do well idling in traffic. Since almost 100% of our daily use is in stop&go urban areas the C-Max makes much more sense for us.

Edmunds: Testing Electric Vehicles in the Real World

You Only Live Once

The batteries made for the dreamliner are low volume custom builds, in which the process is subject to much more variability than in a large volume standardized process. The two batteries in question are fairly close in serial number so it could have been some anomaly in a certain batch of manufacturing. However, I feel no worse about carrying around a Lithiom ion based battery than I do a tank full of gasoline... Either are no fun when they burn. Unless you are Eddie's uncle Gus...

The exhaust fan might be a good idea. I have no idea about the high voltage battery.

"Separate but Equal" really went out of style a couple years back...

I am guessing, if that works, is that thr Bluetooth controller is attached to the USB bus. (I know that is redundant, the "B" stands for "bus"). It seems more like an actual poorly written error message (no way! Get out of town!) than a real problem...

If you turn on the charge/discharge arrows on the display you can see that the car does in fact blend EV and Gasoline power. If the arrow shows battery discharging and the ICE is running, then power is being blended.

Also, that "100 miles on a charge" is taking in to consideration the "80% to preserve battery life". The battery controllers in these cars already don't charge or discharge the batteries completely. The range numbers are accounting for that and are considered the usable electrons. That's how EV+ works actually. It allows the battery to drain slightly more than usual when near home. It eats into that reliability buffer just a tiny bit.

The Leaf is not intended to be an only car. It is really intended to be used by multiple car households. Sure, many people do use them as only cars - heck, I know many families who don't even own cars (it is possible believe it or not). But realistically the Leaf is well suited as the "around town" car for people who also have a "on the road" car. The plural of anecdote is not fact. I am quoting from my own memory here - I may look up the actual numbers later so forgive me if I am not exact. I think these are ballpark though: Around 90% of all Americans drivers do not drive more than 75 miles per day. More than 70% of them drive less than 40 miles per day, and around 40% drive less than 25 miles per day. That means that without an ounce of recharging while away from home: An Energi could keep 40% of Americans almost completely in electric Miles. A Volt could keep almost 70% of Americans in electron powered transport. A Leaf or Focus EV would work for 90% of the drivers in America. A huge huge percentage of households in this country are multiple car households. As EV prices drop there is a huge potential to get rid of most of our around town transportation petroleum consumption. Depending on where my next job ends up, we may need another car (we already have several vehicles but I am not commuting in a truck with a camper and motorcycles only work part of the year for me). If we get another one it will be a full electric and the shortest commute will take the Energi and the longer commute the full EV. We should be able to only use gasoline for recreational out-of-town purposes...

When we came back to Oregon and got our DL switched, I was next to a lady in line who had failed the written test 4 times, and was on her 5th taking (which is tough because in Oregon after three they make you wait like 6 months to test again - or something like that) and I was just amazed. I mean - I am not sure I want her driving on the same roads as me and my family...

There are also possibly thousands of them. Google is not the only one, there are universities and other companies too. VW Audi has been active in the self-driving car space for years... Three states have made them legal: Nevada, California, and Florida. Other states are working on new laws to legalize them as well. There are millions of human beings I trust less than autonomous cars.

I am afraid it will just laugh...

"Your" is possessive. So the people you are referring to posses a "doing it wrong"? What is a "doing it wrong"? How does someone have a "doing it wrong"? Anyway, I agree with the OP - the car is great (except for MFT).

Ahh, but looks aren't everything... ;)

But for two pair of glasses, a visor clip is needed.

Speaking of doing it wrong...

I have offline maps on my iPhone so I don't even need a data signal... As for your charger not working well maybe it's not enough amps? I found that if I am using something that takes power - like navigation or my Radar Detector app - then my normal chargers don't provide enough juice, usually only half an amp. I found a 2amp 12v charger which will both power the phone during heavy use AND charge the battery.

This afternoon my MFT locked up, black screened, then rebooted after a while. I was backing up, switched to drive and it just seized...

Drivers Think Navigation Systems Suck, Want Their Smartphones Instead

EV+ simply allows the battery to be drained slightly more than normal. That's all it does. So if you have a full-ish battery already then EV+ isn't going to really make much difference. If you turn on a display mode which has the EV threshold you can see how EV+ changes behavior. When the battery is lower than a certain point, the EV threshold is very small, and almost any time the accelerator is pressed you exceed the threshold and the ICE kicks in. When driving with a low battery and that threshold is tiny - when EV+ kicks in the threshold will increase back to almost normal levels, which if you're on neighborhood or slow speed streets means you will be able to drop into EV mode much easier. If the battery is already full enough that the EV threshold is high - then EV+ won't really have any impact.

I ran my entire iTunes library through the SYNC tool (took 4 hours) and it supposedly fixed all the names it needed to. I'm gonna try changing the organizational structure of my files and see if that does anything different.

I had a Kawasaki Concours motorcycle that was perpetually off like this. The original Concours was sold for 20 years virtually unchanged except colors. So many people had them for so long that tinkerers figured out the exact resistor to solder in line that would do just the right amount to tweak the fuel gauge into accuracy. :)

http://outofmytouch.com/reboot.html

Add insult to injury: the track info is displayed on the home screen when playing from USB. Why would you display track info on the home screen from USB but not from Sirius or FM? It's so inconsistent it's crazy. I just keep having random problems. Good thing the reboot stick works OK.