valkraider

[*]Do not drive a Toyota [6]

I feel the need to clarify. *I* get 46mpg. My wife who drives like an aggressive maniac, gets less. Although we have not done enough logging to figure out what her average is. I always cringe when she is driving the car for a day because she kills all my cool statistics.

You will get the A4 with the MyFord Touch 3.5.1 update. They are free.

Wow, these things fit really really exactly. Its actually quite impressive. I wish they were a tad thicker, they seem a little thin. OR - at least for the driver side, make the area where the heels rest all the time thicker - and keep all the rest of the areas as-is. I always seem to wear a hole in my mats right where our right heel rests on the mat. Making just that section extra thick would extend the life of these things greatly... Also - and this is maybe just because I have a lot of graphic designers and artists in my family - and I am an analyst, so I tend to be critical about form AND function - but if I pay $100 for floor mats they could come with a little classier logo. I mean come on, Weather-Tech should be proud of their producst. Emboss the logo in the square area, and keep it nice and simple and clean. But instead we get a vintage 1987 puffy reflective sticker that looks tacky and cheesy as hell. But hey, if you want the cheesy tacky crappy reflective bubble sticker, AT LEAST put it on straight - and not cock-eyed in the rectangle where it is designed to go. So I promptly removed the tacky ugly stickers from the floor mats. Too bad, Weather-Tech deserves to have their name on them.

Except, it is a 47mpg car. Why do people ignore the "your mileage may vary" statement printed right under the 47mpg on the sticker? The test is specified by the EPA. Ford runs the test as specified by the EPA. The C-Max attained 47mpg on that test, as specified by the EPA. So if your driving style and conditions are similar to the EPA test, you will get 47mpg. YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY That disclaimer is on every window sticker and used in every ad. My Energi model is rated at 43mpg, and I have attained 46mpg consistently.

The cost of adding this to the car would far exceed any economy gains. There has been discussion of it though, I am not sure if its here or on the Energi site.

Lets not go down a political rabbit hole please.

In the Energi it's not a shelf. It's the top of the battery compartment. :) I had a cool collapsible shelf in my Jeep Liberty that was brilliant. Sturdy, versatile, and really useful. I haven't seen that sort of thing anywhere else.

You mean a shelf? Because what you're looking at there is the cargo bay of an Energi model.

My daily route is in city with traffic. So it's a long slow descent, speed limit is 35. It's hard to tell how much is regained because the "miles" estimate takes into consideration the fact that I am moving without consuming therefore the estimate will be optimistically high, and all I have is a graph display for battery charge. A percent state of charge display would be more useful here. I am going to experiment with spring skiing, I have a very steep downgrade for 12 miles then a reasonably steep downgrade for about 20 miles. The first section has a 20 to 30 mph speed limit and the second section varies from 45 to 55 mph speed limit. In my truck I usually can coast the whole second part. Not the first part - it's too steep and curvy. I am going to start with an empty "Energi" battery (and take a snapshot of the status of the "hybrid" battery when I start) and see how much is regen. I should be able to try L, brakes, and Grade Assist on different days and compare. :)

I disagree. I see consistently higher than 42 and I am in an Energi which is rated lower than the hybrid. And I have significant hills - thousands of feet elevation change daily. I beat 45mpg running at 65mph highway, even with large grades. This weekend will be my first true mpg stress test though, two 5 hour drives at 70mph over mountains in the cold with 5 passengers and luggage, plus the 300lb Energi battery...

Nothing personal. Just a friendly debate. ;) I could quote an incredibly politically incorrect joke about arguing on the Internet... I respect everyone's opinions, even if they're wrong. ;)

You want to make my car payments for me? Because until then I am glad that you don't decide what makes a good option or not... No one does. But I wager you have far bigger things to worry about than me glancing at my gauges. There is all kinds of stuff in cars that people look at. It's not going to change any time soon. By your logic, there should be no readouts at all. So you never look at your gauges then? And why would it "require" it? I am perfectly capable of glancing at a gauge to see what is happening in my vehicle while paying attention to traffic in front of me. A gauge is a gauge. Glancing at a spinning wheel is no different than glancing at a speedometer or a nav screen or a heater setting. MFT has a radio interface seemingly designed by by MC Escher to control 6 inputs, 54 presets, and hundreds of stations. You should worry more about that than the color changing icon.

My lifetime score is 96%. Regen numbers and your calculations don't work for me at all. I drive in mountains. A frequent trip of ours has over three miles of regen down as much as a 6% grade - without ever stopping and calculating a braking score. That's one trip we make 10 times a week usually, if not more. Another one I can leave our home and drive for about three miles almost exclusively downhill - a lot with brake regen and a lot with coasting teeny regen, maybe at most 4 stops in there. So my brake score won't mesh accurately with my regen miles counted. But it's not about anything other than I paid $30k+ for the car and I think it would be a neat animation and data point to know when it is pure regen and when it is eating brake pads. Because I am a nerd and I would like to see it. EV+ at gives owners maybe another 1/2 mile of EV miles a day - in an average car driven 12000 miles a year that's like a fraction of a percent. But Ford still developed it and markets it because its cool. This feature is no different. There are tons if features in a car that are if limited value but are still there. Should I start listing out all the features I don't care about? Or should we recognize that my preferences are not your preferences and I think turning the wheel red would be cool. I would rather look at info about what the car is doing than a bunch of leaves. Also - since I do drive on so many long steep hills, I can save a lot of brake pads if I can know when I am in pure regen vs. grinding down disposable parts... My vehicles usually need brakes annually but the C-Max may go years without going through the pads. It saves me hundreds of dollars a year, maybe more.

I just use my eyes and read road signs. Getting lost is half the fun. ;) Wink wink, nudge nudge. Generally my process is to look up the address before I start, get a general idea in my head, and then I go find it by hand. Sometimes I will pop up nav to check distance but mostly if I get turned around or something I'll pull off the road and pull out the phone and re-orient myself. I geek out on maps though. So sometimes I play with nav just cause. I do like GPS data though, a cool GPS screen would be a bonus. Speed, altitude, trajectory, number of satellites, junk like that...

The score only shows up if you come to a complete stop. The score will not show up when you are just applying the brake on a descent. We are specifically talking about the blue spinning wheel that shows when regenerative braking is happening as a result of pressing the brake pedal. It should turn red or yellow or something when you exceed the regenerative slowing capacity and begin using brake pads. I am sure in a perfect world I could tell when the pads grab as well. But between rough roads and other vehicle feedbacks - I generally can't tell the difference with any certainty. I don't even know why this sort of thing would be debated. Make it an option and let those of us who want it - use it. If you have super spidey-sense and don't want to use it, that's cool too. I never understand the need to debate customization. If it seems to complex, hide the settings in an "advanced" menu, make it easy to reset to defaults, and make the use acknowledge that they understand these are advanced settings by pressing "OK" before entering the menu. There, due diligence done. It's the same reason I support jail breaking iPhones. I think Apple does a great job with UI. But sometimes I wish they would at least give us an advanced option to let those of us who know how have a little more control. I like a well built product - but I also believe in letting users have a little control if they want it. Ford could give us more data as an option, they have it and they log it. Let us see it if we want.

We are talking about the spinning wheel on the battery showing when regen is active, not the brake coach. I look at them all the time. I can not feel a difference between brakes and pure regen, there is no extra grab for me. My lifetime average score is 96% and the only time I don't get 99% or better is during rush hour when traffic stops unexpectedly or of course panic stops. But I have had occasions where I made a nice easy gradual stop but only got 92 or 88 and I don't get why it was that low. It would be nice to have the spinning circle turn red when brake pads are engaged. Why I mentioned hills is because on hills you don't get a display of braking score. So Inlike to watch my regen when descending - just because I do. It's fun. It would be nice to have an indicator of when I drop from pure regen to regen and brake pads...

I look at it all the time. We have big hills and I like to try and stay in regen as long as possible... :)

Where's mine?

Not that I know of. Just the four quadrant home screen and that's it.

Call Ford customer service: (800) 392-3673

Our hills are too steep. :)

The problem isn't the leaves. Maybe some people like them... The problem is that WE as the owners and users of our cars - should have better ability to choose for ourselves. If I want leaves, cool. If I want a screen full of gauges, cool. There is no reason that the right screen should be less functional than the left. :)

Not nearly as much as running heat. But really - in Florida, you're going to be running AC no matter which car or packages you're going to get. When I lived in the south I developed the habit of obsessively looking for shade go park in. Now I still do it, even in Oregon - hot sun is hot sun...

I think the theory *may* be that since the engine has to run anyway initially when the car and battery are cold that it could charge more in conjunction with that... I do agree it seems like really only a true benefit for the Energi plug-in version. :)