Tdefny

I love my Energi, but I doubt I would trade in a perfectly good C-Max prematurely for an Energi. Better to get your money's worth from the hybrid. You would take a bath on the trade and it would be difficult to recover the difference, at least in NY, where gas miles and EV miles cost similar due to high electric rates.

Having said that, i love making my daily drive on one charge. I especially love doing a local trip without lighting up the ICE. That always drove me crazy on my Prius.

Nevertheless, I think I will have to pay more attention to that mode.

I couldn't resist

Thanks. I havent played much with downhill assist except on the rare hills around here and it seems to help there.

Say it again?

Sounds like somebody has a sweet tooth.

How much battery reserve do you have available? That is all it is. The NRG will perform exactly the same as (or maybe slightly less than) the hybrid once its reserve is used up. There are some differences in the battery other than size, but they perform similarly once the Energi is in Hybrid mode.

All C-Max models have a GPS built in, but only some have the optional NAV system. You need to activate EV+ or it won't come on. Yours must be off or you should have seen it by now. Mine has always worked fine, so I don't remember how to activate it, but it is definitely in the manual.

There are limits to how low the battery can go or how high for that matter. They deliberately avoid these extremes to protect the battery. EV+ works by running the ICE a little extra before you reach a familiar destination to top off the HV battery. It then allows that battery to go slightly lower than normal because it knows that the car will either get charged there in the NRG or the ICE will run as soon as the car is used next. It allows you to complete the final leg of your trip in EV but it is not magic and there is no free lunch.

As for Hybrid vs. Energi, Ford appears to be devoting far more attention to the Hybrid as that has the bigger potential market. This is evidenced by all of the aerodynamic mods in the '14 Hybrid, while the Energi appears to be unchanged.

Maybe they are thinking of the Energi as a compliance car so they aren't worrying about it if there aren't any complaints. The Hybrid is supposed to challenge the Prius and they need to have their act together for that. The C-Max is a better car but the mileage is not in the same class and Prius reliability has set a very high mark.

Or let the dealer fix it on your next visit if you don't need the belt right now.

I think we have a good balance of controls between screen buttons, and speech. Whatever you want without it being too complicated.

Also don't forget that you can use Sync Services in a pinch. They draw from a larger and fresher database.

There will be support for our version, but that doesn't mean that they will be updating it on a regular basis or at all. I wouldn't mind seeing one more major update to make things work that much more reliably, but perhaps we have already seen the pinnacle of what our Sync can do. It basically does what they said it would do without crashing every time we use it. That is all they absolutely owe us and they may feel that is enough.

I am with Laurel on this one. I didn't have a strong feeling on color other than no black or white. The red looks really sweet and you could be driving the car for a long enough time for it to matter to you.

They probably could port it to whatever they have in the field, but there is probably not sufficient reason to justify the expense. We will probably have to wait for our next Ford. The best we can reasonably hope for is another reliability update if it is even necessary. Sync is wonky, but it basically gets the job done.

It could still stand to be more dependable, but I suspect that some of that is factors beyond Ford's control, like the great variety of devices it has to hook up to. It is amazing though that it has scheduled its maintenance to happen immediately AFTER it crashes rather than to prevent a crash.

It happened to me last week. I had a great morning commute for this time of year and got to work with 53%, but found 47% when it was time to leave and about 12 degrees colder. I barely made it home without the ICE.

Wow!

Thanks, good to know. Now I hope I never need it.

Glad to hear that you are back to the sport you love so much. Go out and enjoy.

I would think that the trailer hitch option would be limited in weight bearing capacity due to the extra battery weight in the Energi as well, so the roof rack may be the best option.

I can't wait to ditch Sprint. No 4G in my area, Very poor signal where I work, and my current phone works all the time except when I want to use it.

No trouble here,but I noticed my battery is on the low side ~12V. I heard somewhere that the 12V battery on the Energi gets a trickle charge when charging the main battery, but I haven't verified it.

I had the same problem with the Prius. Most of the people at the dealership didn't get it. They do now because hybrids are such a cash cow for them.