SanDiegoDP

Kostby, Thanks, that explains the lack of the hatch release on mine. It is a base package 200A.

I've had My C-Max for just over four months now, and since I relied on this forum to find real opinions and mileage results of real users, and in the process allay my fears about the dead 12V battery issue that plagued the vehicle in the early release phase (i.e. 2013), I want to contribute my two cents and say that after these four months, I think this is pretty darn close to the perfect vehicle for me. Let me first say that I have been driving Civic Hatchbacks since 1984 (and I'm 6'3" tall). I've had four of them, and loved the first three. The first three would get 45 MPG on the highway and 35 around town. Number four got more like 27/35 MPG. They were peppy, nimble and handled well. Their hatchback designs held a good deal of cargo. So overall I liked them, and was with great reluctance that I decided it was time to let go of Honda#4. Gas mileage and family set my search constraints. My criteria in the search for my next vehicle was that it had to be a four door, and average at least 40MPG. I also started by looking only at certain manufacturers just from a default assumption about reliability and quality. Since I found very few vehicles with those two criteria, I eventually opened the search up to all manufactures, and lo and behold, here is this thing called a C-Max by Ford. The spec's for the C-Max do very well on almost all parameters of importance to me when compared to other cars I know well and was considering. MPG: it's listed in the 40-42 range. So, check. It meets that criterion. Horsepower to weight ratio: right up there with my hatchbacks and my wife's Accord. Check again. Torque to weight ratio: again, right up there with the Accord. Check. Headroom: check-plus. C-Max has 2" more headroom than any other vehicle I was considering. (Recall I'm 6'3".) Cargo room behind the seats and with seats folded down (flat even): better than my hatchbacks! So, the C-Max is coming out very well when compared to all the other vehicles I was considering. Then I found that there were bad reviews by one major rating agency, but couldn't find the specific points on which they based those bad reviews. So, hmmm. Then I found this forum and a lot of discussion about the dead 12 V battery, which I read carefully and concluded had been a serious issue early on, but which was now coming under control. …and I found a lot of very enthusiastic reviews by the users. So I held my breath and took the plunge and bought what may be the last car I'll ever own…. (..the 2015 ruby SE) So now I have to repeat that this is an amazing vehicle! Even though it weighs 50% more than my old hatchback, it still gets better MPG! I'm getting 46 MPG steady on each tank fill (5 fills now), and I'm getting over 550 miles per tank (vs. 320 miles on the old hatchback). The Dashboard readout claims that I'm getting 48 MPG, but based on the tank fill volume, it's 46 MPG. That "heavier vehicle getting better mileage" reality has taken me a while to get used to. It's simply a testimony to the systems engineering that's been put into this hybrid vehicle. Things I like about this vehicle: MPG (goes without saying) - I expected that I would have to get a much smaller, lighter, less comfortable, less versatile vehicle to achieve the 46 MPG that this gets, but not so! This vehicle is consistently giving me 46 MPG. I do not understand how it gets rated at 42/37. This MPG rating number has been a big (and costly) issue for Ford. So I get it that they can't and don't want to over-rate it, but those low numbers were one of the main reasons I did not spot the C-Max in my initial searches for suitable vehicles. It shows up in position 72 out of 78 at one of the main automotive websites when searching for cars over 40 mpg. Power when you need it - there is no compromise on power for the very good MPG performance. When you need to move quickly on the highway, this will move. (…and I have only pushed the pedal about 2/3 to 3/4 of way down!) Also the torque at startup from a dead stop is very very nice. That's the benefit from the electric motor, and is common to the hybrid and electric designs. Smooth and quiet ride - It has a nice smooth and very quiet ride. It's not a sloshy suspension that makes me seasick like some big American cars, and it's not a "water on a hot skillet" tight ride like my Civic hatchback. It's just very stable and smooth. I drove it on some winding mountain roads on one trip, and I could swear it handled better and rolled less than my little Civic hatchback. Spacious comfortable Interior - I never felt bad in my hatchback, but after being in the C-Max for a while, I feel like I'm in a submarine when I get into my hatchback again. C-Max has great headroom. For me that's a welcome relief after years bending my neck sideways. Cargo room seats up and seats down - roomy enough because it has more volume than my hatchback, but I have a comment on this later as well. Fold down flat rear seats - 60/40 split provides even more cargo room even while daughter is in the back. I can fold one seat down next to her. Safety systems - taken a bit for granted these days, but I appreciate the potential of the safety improvements of this vehicle as I'm getting older, and this vehicle seems to be well rated. Simple Systems - I bought the SE level vehicle because I'm a "keep it simple" kind of person who appreciates the added reliability of manual this and that. As a driver, I don’t want a touch screen, so I liked the simple buttons and knobs of the radio system. Having said that, my wife loves the Blue-Tooth interface to her cell phone and the hands free sound quality in the car. It's quite good. I also appreciate the 1/8" audio input jack in the center arm rest for those old fashioned sound devices. Comfortable Seats - I don't want motorized seat adjustments, thanks. The SE comes with manual seat adjustments, quick and simple, but lacks a lumbar adjustment. The seat as is was a bit too curved in the lower and mid-back regions for a tall guy like me, but I fixed this easily by having a local seamstress make a 1" thick cushion which hangs from the headrests to fill in that space, and it's very comfy in every respect now. What could be better? In a nutshell, not much. I really consider this vehicle to be as close to perfect for me as I could reasonably ask for. Having said that though, Here are a couple of relatively minor picky things on my wish list: More cargo space width: The cargo volume is fairly large, but what I've come to realize is that's because the space is tall, but it is not as wide or quite deep as my old Civic. Functionally to me, what matters most is the cargo floor area, i.e. square feet. Not so much the volume, i.e. cubic feet. I understand the C-Max is constrained because there are some air chimneys on the sides of the cargo area that bring cooling air to the battery pack under the cargo floor. If the cooling air could come in some other way that left that cargo width useable, that would be an improvement. My criteria for a great cargo area is that you can fit a 4' wide sheet of plywood in at some level - may be not right at the floor, but in some workable way. My 1980 Honda Hatchback could do that, but I haven't seen many cars that still meet that challenge. Tighter turn radius: It doesn’t' seem like a big difference on paper, but the turning radius is functionally not as nice as my old hatchback or my wife's Accord. It's very workable, but I really liked the tight radius on my Civic. (I'm guessing it is constrained by the fancy vectored torque differential transmission driving the front wheels.) Zig-Zag shifter: I've driven manual transmissions all my life. So these automatic shifters are a new thing for me. On a recent vacation I drove a rental car with an automatic transmission that had what I would describe as a zig-zag shifter mechanism, and I have to say that I prefer that over the straight-path shifter of the C-Max. With the straight path shifter of the C-Max, I have to feel each detent and look carefully to be sure I didn't overshoot the desired position, (and I almost always overshoot the desired position). With the "zig-zag" shifter, I found that hitting the channel stops at R and D provided excellent physical feedback telling me that I had positively engaged the desired transmission position. Interior release button for the rear hatch: I would like to see a button or pull lever somewhere that releases the rear hatch. I understand that the designers don't want to make it too easy for the hatch to go flying up by mistake while you're tooling down the highway, but it seems unnecessary to have to put it in park and find the trunk release button on the key that is in the ignition. I would think that if the car is not moving, then the hatch should be able to be released. Backup camera as standard: Maybe it will become that way, but the 2015 SE didn't start with a backup camera. It would be nice. I'll get calibrated eventually, but for now I'm still winding up with about 3 feet of clearance in back when I think I'm close to something behind me. (I'm torn on the ultrasonic distance sensors - I like the function, but they seem like something that will certainly break and be a pain to fix…) Quieter Cabin Air System: The C-Max is much quieter than my Civics. It's strikingly nice. However, if the cabin air fans are set above two-bars (out of 8?), then the white noise of the air from the vents noticeably overpowers that quietness. Above four bars, and it's just loud. It would be nice if the airflow capacity could be maintained, but the noise reduced. Smaller gas tank: I understand that Ford probably has one gas tank that goes into several car models to reduce costs. However, I don't really need to go 550-600 miles per fill-up. I was used to doing 300-320 miles per fill-up. So, if the gas tank were say 7 gallons instead of 13.5 or 14, and that extra space could show up as usable trunk space in the form of a lower floor, I would be fine with that tradeoff. Seat position indicator: I'm a keep it simple kind of person, but it would be nice if there were a simple indicator showing the seat settings, particularly the seat height. Every time my wife uses my C-Max, I have to re-adjust the seat slide, height, and tilt. It would be nice if there were some mechanical scale or readout that would let me unambiguously put the seat back to where it was. This is most important on the seat height adjustment. The slide and tilt settings are easy enough to find by feeling the notches from one end of the travel limit. But the height adjust a much harder and slower to adjust and would most benefit from some scale indicator. So overall, I am very impressed with this vehicle. I'm sorry that I'm not seeing more of them on the road!

Hi Adrian, I'll put forth a hypothesis as to why the SE is more susceptible to these failures than the higher end models... The SE does not have the Ford My Touch Electronics system, correct? So with that missing, and maybe a few other less fancy power consuming options, it probably has a significantly _smaller_ current load on the 12 V system. Am I correct in assuming that most of the electrical equipment in the vehicle runs off the 12 V system regardless of whether the vehicle is on or off? Restated, everything runs off the 12 V system, and the 12V is fed by the DC/DC converter from the HV battery as required. Right? That's a lot of current to supply. So the DC/DC is a pretty high current output device. Right? (Anyone know it's output current rating and/or architecture, i.e. PWM or zero-crossing type?) I will assume that Ford hasn't done anything fancy with the systems design of that device, and used a single converter (although the converters are getting pretty sophisticated these days). Most DC/DC converters require a minimum load to operate nicely, and are not designed to handle a really wide range of load currents. They may be optimized to handle the heavy current load well, but at some compromise to the low current end of performance. I'll assume that Ford chose (logically) to optimize the performance at the high-current end of operation. The voltage output, the voltage ripple, and the switching noise (in the case of a PWM system) all vary as a function of load current. I'm going to speculate that the SE current draw is frequently low enough that when the vehicle is trying to charge the battery, the DC/DC converter is only marginally nice about some aspect of it's output; maybe it's output voltage is not well regulated, either a bit too high or low, or the voltage noise and ripple on it is too large. All of these deviations would be bad for a lead acid battery over time. Too high a voltage will corrode the positive plate of the battery and lead to premature capacity failure (and also electrolyte loss). Too low a voltage will undercharge the battery, lead to sulfation of the negative plates, and again premature capacity failure of the battery. Too much voltage ripple, and you might get both symptoms. My speculation is the the extra current draw of the systems in the SEL and fancier models puts a heavier load on the DC/DC converter, and thereby puts that converter into a more favorable portion of its design window (higher current output) where it operates more efficiently and with better tolerances on its output voltage, voltage ripple and noise. The lighter load of the SE vehicle may put the DC/DC converter close to its lower current limit on decent operation where it fails in some way to keep the battery properly charged. This hypothesis might be tested by putting an oscilloscope on the 12 V system and recording not only the DC value of voltage, but also the ripple and switching noise on it as well. Just a hypothesis.... (Note that this issue is independent of the other issue that kaptnk228 experienced which may be the unwanted resistance in some cable connector or fuse somewhere in the charging system which probably also lead to the prolonged undercharging and capacity loss of his battery.) I'll also take a stab at why the failures occur primarily overnight, and not after just a couple hours in the parking lot at work... If the vehicle is not charging the battery properly, and the battery is progressively losing capacity over time, then the normal drains on the battery as the vehicle periodically uses current in the off state (as people have seen) become a more serious challenge for the battery. Now assuming the vehicle experiences more total "wakeup and use some current" events over an 8 hour night than a 2 hour stop at the shopping mall, then the first time the battery will fail to hold sufficient voltage to boot the vehicle is naturally going to occur after the longer overnight string of drains rather than just a 2 hour string of drains (regardless of whether these drains are normal or otherwise). It's simply a consequence of the slowly diminishing capacity of the (12V) battery. Regards....

I'm a bit new here. Are there many cable junctions between the DC/DC converter and the 12V battery? If there is no charging-system voltage monitor _at_ the battery, and the output of the DC/DC converter runs at a fixed voltage output of say at 14.4 V, and that voltage encounters any significant resistance on the way to the battery, then the DC/DC converter can run all it wants to, but it won't succeed in pulling the battery all the way up to full charge in a normal length of time if at all. Ideally, there would be a remote voltage sense _at_ the battery, and the DC/DC output would servo its output voltage to the value required to put 14.4V _at_ the battery. That remote sensing is a standard practice in delivering high current to voltage sensitive loads for exactly the reason kaptnk228 experienced. If you get even 0.1 Ohms at a cruddy connector or fuse junction, then your 10-20 amps of charging current yanks 1 to 2 volts off the applied voltage and the battery would see only 13.4 to 12.4 V during charging, and that won't keep the battery strong for long. From the sound of it, having a voltage monitor in one of the 12V ports is a simple and effective way to detect the problem before the 12V battery dies from repeated insufficient charging.

Hi SnowStorm. Nicely done. I wouldn't have guessed that you could get such a nice clean measurement of the current draw by looking across that short ground cable as a shunt sense resistor, but there you have shown it. (If you put a battery powered instrumentation amp on that, then you could read the output with any common meter. You might not even need an instrumentation amp, but a simple op amp gain stage since the source impedance is so low.) I would think that a lot of users would appreciate and use your voltage alarm design, but many are probably not as handy with a soldering iron as you are. If it were packaged up neatly and could just plug in to a 12V port in the cabin like an old fashioned lighter, I bet you would get some takers. I have another question/suggestion: has anyone done a post mortem on one (or more) of the failed 12V batteries? (It's a bit messy, so I would hope that Ford would be doing this.) If the battery lost capacity due to persistent undercharging and/or excessively deep or frequent draw-downs, then it would show sulfation of the negative plates. If the battery has been damaged by excessive _rate_ of charging, then corrosion of the positive plate should be evident. If the battery were damaged due to persistent excessive overcharging, then loss of electrolyte should be evident. (If the issue is just the rare parasitic load draining the battery once, then the batteries should be dinged but more or less ok ... and it sounds like Ford is onto this case as they test the battery capacity now before giving out a new battery after a DOA event. ... but the batteries that test dead/low-capacity contain valuable information.) I'm just guessing that the battery has sustained multiple draw-downs (due to these various quirky loads) that have gone undetected until the battery capacity has dropped so much that it can't hold up under the load that results in the DOA event. That's where your current monitor would be great to have in place at all times. It would be showing the draw-downs that go undetected. Even just a voltage logger would show when the battery was being drawn upon and when and for how long it was getting charged. That said, I still wonder if the battery isn't also compromised by being charged too fast. From what I've read here, it doesn't sound like the vehicle spends long periods charging the 12V battery. I get the feeling that the DC/DC kicks in and jams a lot of current in for a short time and kicks out, and that could lead to corrosion and loss of electrolyte. Against that idea though is the reality that a lot of vehicles seem to be doing just fine with whatever methods are being used to recharge the 12V.

As I read through some of the later posts in this thread (that I had not yet read as of my first post above last night), I see there has been some very good work done in diagnosing the problem back around pages 10-14. Since the cable connector and water penetration issues do not seem to account for all the events, I would offer the suggsetion that the voltage logger I referenced above (see also Measurment Computing USB-503) link: http://www.mccdaq.com/usb-data-acquisition/USB-503.aspx?t=1#revhash could be used to help locate offending intermittent parasitic load that kills people's batteries in the middle of the night. The problem in locating this offending current draw seems to be in large part knowing when the rare offense is happening. The voltage logger has the ability to register an alarm condition if the monitored voltage drops below a user-selectable value. Unfortunately, this particular (affordable) logger just flashes an LED when the alarm condition is met. However, it is a pretty simple matter to add a phototransistor could be taped over the alarm LED which can then activate an audible alarm when the alarm LED flashes. So when the beeper goes off (at say 4AM when we're all at our very best to start debugging stuff) because the logger detects voltage below say 9 to 10V, you can come down and start snooping for the offending device. If we're lucky it's a pump or fan that you'll hear that's drawing the multi-amp load needed to kill the battery in a few hours. If we're unlucky, one might have to resort to pulling fuses to isloate the offending circuit branch as someone previously suggested. With an Amp-clamp in place durnig the failure, one could record the load current at the time of drain, and capture that valuable bit of data. (That might give Ford a clue as to which modules are suspect because they can figure out which modules would be nominally drawing that much current when active.) With the amp-clamp _and_ the voltage log, one could watch how fast the battery voltage goes down. This would provide a clear indication of the state of the battery capacity. If the battery has been compromised by too many deep draw-down cycles, or perhaps too much overcharging, or possibly even to many rapid charging events, then the voltage will drop faster than expected for a given load current. (Side note for those interested... There are some good articles e.g. BU-201, BU-201a and BU-806a at This is a very good site with many technical details about many kinds of batteries. ) At the very least, if you can't get any debug info at that moment, the alarm might just let you rescue your vehicle by turning it on and recharging the battery before it falls below critical system startup voltage. If someone would like to cobble together such an alarm and needs help, feel free to let me know and I will gladly help you. Regards.

I'd like to make a suggestion (and I see it is mentioned to some extent in another thread)... .After reading many of these posts, I am struck by the direction of focus regarding this problem as being caused by a "bad battery", or a problematic drain on the battery. Perhaps there _have_ been unintended problematic drains on the battery in some cases, but in other cases possibly not. So I would like to ask if any of the Ford technical people, or service technicians, or any of the posting public here has considered the possibility that the 12V battery is not getting charged properly while the vehicle is operating. If this were the case, then over time, a perfectly good battery would be drawn down to failure. Vehicle operations could appear be fine one day as "12V" voltage and current supply was just enough to operate the startup systems, then the next day, (still not getting charged) it's below threshold, and no go. You would then think that you "suddenly" had a problem. This scenario would lead to an easy jump start because it would not take much input current to pull the weak 12V battery up enough to operate the startup systems. ...and I see that in many cases this "easy jump" is reported. (This is probably why a small jump start power pack is able to pull the voltage up enough to restore system startup. If the 12V battery were solidly dead, one of those little power packs wouldn't stand a chance of budging the dead 12V battery into the lifelike state suficient to rouse the vehicle.) Once re-started, if the 12V battery continued to receive little or no charge during vehicle operation, another failure would be soon to follow. .. and in some cases this is the case. Also, as low voltage was setting in, other auxiliary systems might start acting flakey (like the windows not going up all the way, or the auto-up button not working, or clock not behaving properly, etc... as has been mentioned throughout these posts...) So I would like to suggest that someone look into whether the 12V battery _charging_ functions are operating correclty. A simple diagnostic would be to put a voltage logger on the 12V system and plot the 12V level as a function of time between these persistent failures. For example a logger which can be set up to record 32,000 data points at 10 second to 12 hr sample intervals) (http://www.amazon.com/Measurement-Computing-Voltage-Data-Logger/dp/B001ELC6H4/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1425274405&sr=8-10&keywords=voltage+logger) Connect this to one of the 12V ports, and let it record voltage readings until the next "dead battery" failure. At 10 minutes between samples, you could record for 7 months before filling the recorder record. The record of how long the voltage took to fall form nominal 12V to failure levels will give a huge clue as to the nature of the problem. A voltage drop-off over a few hours would suggest an unintentional high current drain (several amps or more). A fall-off of several days suggests an unintentional drain of many 10's of mA. A fall-off over a week to month, including some driving along the way, suggests the battery is not getting any, or enough, charge during vehicle use, and this would conclusively direct attention to the charging systems. Those of you with the most problematic vehicles have the most valuable test subject available. If you get failures every month, it would not take long to obtain this telling voltage vs. time record. Forgive me if this has alrady been discussed. I'm seriously considering buying a C-Max, but found this battery issue while doing my pre-purchase "homework" on the vehicle. So I'm a bit concerned by it. I'm very glad to see all of you sharing your experiences and working to remedy the situation. Regards to all.