HotPotato

Cool, man, well done! I wish we had "angel eyes" or LED strips in the headlight housings, like the new Audis. Maybe when the Titanium arrives...

Installed a subwoofer and amp --- sounds AMAZING. My long, painful, expensive car audio odyssey draws to a long-awaited and finally-satisfying close. http://fordcmaxhybridforum.com/topic/1570-has-anyone-installed-an-amplifier-in-their-c-max/page-2 (my final posts at bottom of page)

Here are pics of the new installation.

The underseat sub wasn't cutting it for me... it was more of a midwoofer than a subwoofer. I returned it and replaced it with an amp and boxed sub. The amp went under the seat where the underseat sub was before. The boxed sub went in the cargo area. Both are special for different reasons. For an amp, you want something with enough power to run the sub but not enough to run down our puny battery. The smart move here would be another Class D digital amp -- that ensures smallest size and most efficient energy use, and for about $255 you can get a Kicker or MTX amp that does the job. Instead, for just $55 (yes, $200 less) I got a Boss R1100M amp. It's not digital (class AB instead of class D), so it's not as efficient, but with just a 30-amp fuse it's not going to kill the battery, and with 110-watt real-world output it's plenty to drive a relatively efficient sub. This amp is cheap, durable, nice-sounding and well-reviewed -- and comes with a remote bass level control for on-the-fly tweaking, just like the underseat sub did. For a sub, you want something that's not going to kill our limited cargo space. A tube is out because you can't stack cargo on it. A big box is out because it uses up your cargo space. For me, a vertical side-mount box like a JL Audio MicroSub or Alpine's 8" Type R boxed ported sub was a possibility, but was still going to be pretty obvious to thieves walking by if the cargo cover was off -- and I have a dog, so mine often is off. So instead I went with a Pioneer TS-SWX251 10" flat subwoofer, which comes in a down-firing sealed enclosure. Pioneer's trick new technology eliminates most of the depth of the sub, giving you a low flat box that virtually disappears from view in the cargo area, and you can stack cargo on it. The box's height is just shy of the height of the side cubby; its depth is just shy of the depth from the hatch to the plastic jut-out behind the rear seats; its width is just shy of the width of the smaller rear seat. In other words, it may as well have been custom-designed for this car. So how does this setup sound? In a word, amazing. This sub is warm, full, smooth, not peaky. It plays beautifully right down to 20Hz. I have it crossed over at 80 Hz, with a touch of boost at 20 and 25 Hz so I can hear the very lowest frequencies without having to goose the volume. The amp's gain came from the factory set to about 2/3, and hearing no distortion there I just left it there. Setting on the bass remote ranges from 1/4 to 1/3 depending on source before you risk whump-whump from the factory noise cancellation system. So. If you have the dough to do as I did, go for it -- the system finally sounds as amazing as I always knew it could.

I used to live on the road as a consultant, and brought my dog with me. He stayed in the hotel with me at night, and in the car at the job site during the day. My C-Max has the optional digital keypad. If the weather isn't nice enough to leave the windows down for the dog, one can simply put the windows up, leave the car running with the climate control set to a comfy temp, lock the car and walk away. On break and lunch, unlock the car with the keypad, walk the pooch, and repeat. Between that, the fold-flat seats, and bowls of food and water, a climate-controlled C-Max it's not a bad place for the doggie to spend some time. Just remember to fuel up on the way home.

I read a Tire Rack LRR tire comparo and our stock tires were the best overall: dry grip and tread life are high, and road noise is low. The Ecopias were second, but with significantly better wet grip, so maybe they're the way to go if you live in the wet. They're both top-quality name-brand tires so they don't come cheap, but both are available at the Tire Rack and Costco, which eliminates the price problem!

37.5. Briefly rose to 37.6 after FE update but has regressed to normal. About 10k mi. on the car. It has never been reset, so that is from mile 0, including miles from test drives, delivery and break-in; Ford advises you not start tracking until mile 2000, so I should probably reset it and see what I get.

Here are pix, with the floormat on and off. Not quite as stealthy as one might like -- pretty sure there's more space under the passenger seat, but I was already using that space for the full-range amp etc.

Beautiful piece, perfect fit.

OK, I went for it...got the Crutchfield Sound Ordnance B-8PTD underseat amplified subwoofer and put it under the driver's seat. This is the new digitally amplified version of the sub mentioned by kidonedatone, and it is currently on sale for the very low price of $160. It is also unbeliveably small. There is less volume in the enclosure than in a home computer's bogus "subwoofer." The enclosure is so small that it fits sideways and barely sticks out -- and if you remove the underseat air duct so that you can push it against the ridge at the back edge of the in-floor storage compartment cover, it sticks out even less. That said, either way, this unit will cost your rear passenger all of their underseat toe room. We attached it to the storage compartment cover with Velcro and left enough slack in the wires that you can simply slide the cover back, with the sub still attached, for easy access to tweak the controls. Which is good, because that's the first thing I had to do. Despite the fact the Bit Ten has a dedicated subwoofer RCA-out, the sub sounded awful: very loud boomy midbass, but no deep bass. So I made sure the amp gain wasn't set too high, and that the crossover point was turned down as low as it would go. I also looked at the phase control sideways, but since the sound wasn't thin (just lumpy), I left it alone (for now). That's all the controls one has on the unit, and it still sounded not so good, so if you don't have a sound processor, this is the point at which you'd be boxing it up and sending it back. However, I do have a processor (the Bit Ten). So I fired up my laptop, connected it to the Bit Ten, opened the software, and got cracking. First I activated a high-pass filter at 80Hz to the full-range speakers. Then I activated a low-pass filter at 80Hz to the sub. Then I popped my Bit Ten white noise CD, popped my iphone in its mount and fired up the free JL Audio iphone app's spectrum analyzer, and, with the sub remote turned to minimum, tweaked the equalizer to get more response at 60, 50 and 40Hz (anything below that is out of range of this sub). I then turned up the sub remote one detent at a time to find the point at which the active noise cancellation causes a whomp-whomp (it's a quarter-turn up from minimum in my case) and backed it off a little from there. Finalized the settings and took a long drive with some of my favorite music (Hooverphonic, Silversun PIckups) to see how it sounded. Quite nice, to my shock. I think I'll go in again and kick 100Hz and 80Hz up just a hair -- the Bit Ten's Linkwitz filters seem to give more of a rolloff than a cutoff -- but yeah, thus configured, this little unit actually works to provide a nice warm bass fill. You wouldn't use it for rap or anything, but it can ensure that a fairly low bass line doesn't disappear in the mix. And does so WITHOUT using up cargo space, having a box visible to thieves (I kinda live in the hood, and I usually have the cargo cover off and rear seats down due to my dog), or endangering our very fragile 12 volt system by sucking a ton of juice (the fuse is just 15 amps). I'm still debating if I'll keep this puppy though. For the same money, I could have a standalone amp and a Pioneer flat down-firing sub in the cargo area. For a little more, I could swap the Pioneer for a side-firing JL Audio MicroSub (a small ported box with a 6.5" or 8" driver) or Alpine's Type R knockoff of it. Any of those three options involve giving up some cargo space and risking equipment visibility (a little less so with the Pioneer), but they would surely play louder and deeper. Thing is, if even an incredibly small sealed underseat sub can trigger noise cancellation interference turned up less than a quarter of the way, I'm not sure how much extra oomph I could really take advantage of anyhow...

The Focus fuel econ pkg also adds active grill shutters, which our car already has. Not sure how much those wheels contribute...yeah they have aero covers, but as steelies they're also heavier, no?

Oferpetesake, Search is your friend. Found it in under 2 minutes: http://fordcmaxenergiforum.com/topic/981-hid-retrofit-from-europe/ Having toyed with it a while, the guy who did it is now selling his setup: http://fordcmaxenergiforum.com/topic/1658-selling-oem-hid-headlight-setup/ You can pick it up for little over half his cost...but you'll be finishing the guinea pig process of getting it just so.

Check the C-Max Energi forum - someone has already done this. It was expensive and tricky. Your car also loses its amber side reflector/lamps (which is technically illegal, although maybe you could add some ugly non-flush ones like on 80s BMWs).

I assume that you have planned some kind of pass-thru arrangement rather than terminating in the LOC and losing your rear speakers, and that you've verified that the fuse rating on that rear 12V line can handle the draw of your amp. If so, sounds reasonable to me!...but I'm not a car audio professional. All this sub talk has me thinking, I'm wondering if I should try an underseat sub, or a low-profile down-firing sub in the cargo area, or leave well enough alone. There are a bunch of disadvantages to an underseat sub but one big advantage: there's probably no potential time alignment problem. (The Bit Ten can compensate for that using manual settings, but again I'm no professional.)

The signal going into the Bit Ten is analog (at least in my case). Doing a straight LOC doesn't offer you the ability to change the equalization curves; the Bit Ten does. But if you stick with your factory speakers, which your system is factory-EQ'd for, you might be OK without EQ.

I don't have a pic of the Sync module; I think the shop ended up pulling the signal from the speaker wires downstream of it. But I can show you the BitTen and Alpine amp. Under the passenger seat is a hidden storage well, into which is tucked a black bag containing the tire inflator and repair goo that Ford gives us in lieu of a spare tire. Move that bag to the hidden storage well under the rear cargo floor. The BitTen, with connectors installed, is almost exactly the size of that underseat well, so you can install it there. The Alpine amp, a tiny digital amp designed to fit behind the dash of a car, is small enough that it can simply Velcro-mount on top of the BitTen. The total height of processor and amp thus installed is flush with the car's floor height. Chuck the floormat back on, and no one can tell you have gear installed. Note also that there are Aux-In RCA jacks on the BitTen. If you really hate the processing and EQ of the Sync module, and are willing to give up Sync control of your iPod or other external audio source, you can simply plug your iPod directly into the Bit Ten. However, if the Bit Ten is set up to compensate for all the other sources, this would presumably screw up the sound of your aux-in which needs no such compensation...and I don't recall but I think you might have to buy the external controller to switch to that input...so I just run everything through Sync. When I pulled out the factory midwoofers, it was interesting to give them a good look. They may be paper, but they appear to have rubber surrounds, oversize cones, 25-watt power ratings, and rock-solid mounts. And the tweeters appear to be identical between the base and Sony systems. The upshot of all this, is that your best value might be to get a high-quality low-size digital 25Wx4 amp, turn the factory radio's treble all the way up, and call it a day. With sufficient power driving those factory oversize speakers in their airtight mounts, you might not even want a sub anymore (unless you're playing rap). That was essentially my shop's advice in the first place, and I should have followed it. I love the detail of my JL Audio speakers and the control of the BitTen, but the improvement doesn't even remotely justify the cost (unless you're rolling in dough).