PWBarrett

In our C-Max, this is now FIXED :happy feet: You may have seen a thread here where JulieB posted about a power steering failure (200 miles from home of course)... Since they fixed that, this problem is GONE. At highway speeds, the steering is now smooth as butter - it's like driving a different car. Here's a link to a photo of the repair ticket: http://fordcmaxhybridforum.com/gallery/image/473-steeringrepair/ They replaced the power steering gear due to high friction, and adjusted the toe-in (although that may have just been due to working on the steering.) So now I know this wasn't just a characteristic of the car, and was really a problem. Maybe something over-tightened led to the premature demise of the power steering (although it was always just fine in town). Anyway - Happy now :) (Except for the touch-screen getting reversed when they did the 3.5.1 update, but that's a different story.)

I dug out an old DAT-tape camera and tried it shortly after I got the car. It works, only in Park, needs a lot of cables, is low-res, and almost nothing uses composite video out these days. It would have been so much better if it would play from an SD card, or take an HDMI input directly from a phone. I would have also preferred them to do what everybody else does, and put up a disclaimer that asks if you are not the driver, and allows it when not in park.

What about the height of the C-Max didn't you like compared to the Escape? I thought they were about the same height. I find nothing undesirable about the braking (but I definitely did in a Prius). +1 on the test-drive suggestion.

All I can think of that would honk the horn is the perimeter alarm system going off, i.e. a door or hatch is ajar or not adjusted correctly, and/or somebody's messing with your car. There's no other alarm-like noise that the C-Max would make. If it really sounds like an alarm and not a horn (and you haven't got an add-on alarm system), it must be somebody else's car.

Seems like I'm having 1 or 2 sightings a week here north of Dallas (finally). I suppose a few of them could be duplicates, although I've seen almost all the colors by now (just no black).

I'd love to be able to send video from my phone to the screen, but currently the only way would be if your phone had an HDMI output, then you'd have to use an HDMI to composite video adapter, into the yellow RCA jack. Those adapters need power too. It's just too much equipment and expense to be worth it IMHO. And then it only works when in Park, and the screen is 640x480.

Of course as they say, what goes up, must come down, so you'd make up for a lot of the climb on the return trip. I'm seeing that the C-Max MPG is all about averages. For every 58 MPG trip, I seem to have a 23 to balance it out.

I also don't have Nav, and just checked Where Am I at my house... It has the Latitude correct, but the Longitude is 1.35 degrees off, which is about 75 miles east. But the one time I tried voice navigation, it seemed to be working. I guess it's just a reporting bug in the Where Am I display.

So that works out to about 7 ounces of gas to run the AC for an hour. Sounds like a bargain to me.

I mounted ours left of center, just below and left of the mesh area. I would have preferred to put it up higher, but sticking it over the mesh seemed like a bad idea.

Hmm. I wonder if it uses the hybrid battery and the DC-DC converter to charge the 12V battery while it is sleeping. Previously I had heard that relays disconnect the HV battery when the car is off, but maybe that's not the case (or no longer the case with the newer 12V battery charging firmware).

Since the air conditioner runs off the HV battery not the engine, you could probably get a long time on the AC if you started with a high battery charge, before the engine would start to recharge the battery. It would be interesting to find out what the max AC duration would be on a full charge. But then it would depend on the temperature too.

Driving around town, and even on twisty roads, I love the steering. It's when you're doing 70 on a long fairly straight stretch of highway, with some crosswind, slight curves, or anything that needs occasional minor steering corrections, that it jumps a bit, requiring another correction back the other way, etc.

<Devil's Advocate> I've always heard that calling it "Premium" was somewhere between a misnomer and a scam, because all that higher octane gets you is knock-reduction. The idea being that if your engine isn't knocking under acceleration, higher octane is just a waste of money. I've even seen it said that if an engine isn't optimized for higher compression, you'd actually get less bang for your buck out of premium. Then there are the arguments about how old the premium gas is compared to the regular, because it sells in such lower volume. But now I'm reading about how the knock-sensors in today's engines have changed the picture, and it might help after all... I'd be wary of placebo syndrome and the notion that if you paid more it must be better... But if under the exact-same conditions, repeatably, you get better MPG, that'd be interesting to know. (Not just better than you got in February when it was colder.) </Devil's Advocate>

It seems fine to me at low speed though. I'm thinking it has to do with the electric assist not kicking in until some fraction of a degree change in the wheel position. Or some interaction of that with the variable ratio steering at highway speed. With hydraulic power steering, it's an analog continuous process, not a digital one. Don't get me wrong though, most of the time I love the steering, and wouldn't trade back to having power steering pumps, fluid, hoses, belts, etc.

Looks like a pretty ambitious project. I'd like to do the same sort of thing, but have the anchor points even with the back of the rear seats rather than all the way back at the hatch. That way I could stack things up in the back and not have them spill over onto passengers in the back seat.

Look into the base SEL, which is the same as the 300A package. It got me all the things I wanted and none of the ones I thought weren't worth it. Of course that's just my personal preference. But I haven't seen any dealer stock one this way - they seem to want to load them up. Had to order mine.

Must have been some other car - there's no compass in the mirror. That's probably the sensor for auto-dimming when there are bright lights behind you.

One thing with the C-Max cargo space numbers - a lot of that is height - a lot more available height than in a Prius. When we have 4 people on a road-trip, the plan is to use fairly wide flat suitcases, but stand them on edge. We also bought a cargo organizer so we can pile things high and not have them spill over into the back seat - haven't used that one on a trip yet though.

Ah! It was so hard to see on the blue that I looked right at it and missed it at first. I've removed the stickers on ours.

That sounds like what I'm experiencing. At highway speed, a slight pressure doesn't do much if anything. A slight pressure more over-does it a bit. I just have to make more small steering adjustments than I'm used to, rather than just a constant slight pressure being sufficient. Maybe it is more prevalent in cross-winds or on slight curves. I'll see if I can pin it down more.

If it's a B class, it should be a little smaller. I thought that one was built on a Fiesta frame, like ours is built on a Focus frame.