viajero

This would happen occasionally on my 2013 Energi. I found that switching between floor vents, dash vents, or both a couple times would get the air blowing again. The problem didn’t occur frequently enough for me to bother trying to really fix it.

After a year I still feel heat on 1, but it doesn't seem unbearably hot like it did a year ago when the car was new. I haven't measured it with a thermometer, so maybe I'm just getting more desensitized to it.

This happened to me, too. Turn off the parking sonar to quickly verify if that's what's happening.

It's not standard. You have to enter the special X-Gauge codes. Some of them are listed here on the Energi forum: http://fordcmaxenergiforum.com/topic/1293-scangauge-x-gauges-programming-c-max-ffh/ The only three I ever got to work are the HVB SoC, HVB temperature, and interior temperature, but those are the most interesting ones to me.

I found this graph on power consumption vs. speed. I'm assuming it's for a Model S, since that's what car they're talking about in the text. C-Max would have an even greater percentage of power going into aero drag because it's lighter and less streamlined. http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric/efficiency

Looks like he has a lot more than 16 data points. I think the OP is graphing the dash computer results for each day, not for each fill up.

The trouble is there may be more than one problem, and they may not be electrical problems per se, but rather firmware problems. When you have enough lines of code, software becomes so complex that for practical purposes, problems magically come and go with the tide. I have a smartphone app that logs battery voltage and temperature, and my phone went for 11 months with very little background power consumption. Then a few weeks ago I saw the battery was almost dead and something had been pulling a lot of current. The battery usage screen just said "Android System". I restarted the phone and it hasn't happened since - it came and went with the tide. Some app got in a bad state where it was trying to phone home and load ads or something, but to figure out which app would require some debug tools to log what had been accessing the system. Even if I'd found the app, it would be difficult or impossible to figure out what made that app go wrong without the people who wrote it. For a more C-Max specific example, on another thread drdiesel found that it was accessing the USB drive while the car was off. But why was it doing that? Does it always do that on all cars? Might it not do it on some cars, and then, like my phone, suddenly decide to start doing it for some reason? What else does it do periodically while the car's not running? That's a firmware problem which would require the people who wrote it to debug all the way back to root cause. The firmware in the computer decides how to charge the 12V battery, and is awake and doing things even when the car is turned off. It has many opportunities to kill the battery even if there's nothing wrong with the wiring or hardware in the car. In theory any software problem can be debugged but sometimes you need the developers and access to the source code and time to run experiments. That's no fun when your car has to stay in the shop.

The cargo space can certainly be a deal breaker, but you don't need a home charger. The 120V charger included with the car will charge it overnight.

Most of the Scangauge codes didn't work for me. The three that did were State of Charge, Battery Temperature, and Inside Temperature. My best guess as to the inside temperature is that it's a sensor somewhere in the back near the battery fans. If you're using A/C to cool the cabin the temperature in the back will lag the temperature in the driver's seat for quite some time. That's how mine behaves.

On the Energi forum someone just posted the results of an online chat with Ford engineers. They said the Energi does indeed have a lower final drive ratio than the hybrid, so it will probably not have much slower acceleration (when using ICE). Of course I haven't seen a drag race between the two yet, so that all theorizing.

The Energi (plug-in) is 7% heavier than the hybrid, so that's roughly how much slower it's acceleration will be. I don't have any trouble with accelerating or passing with mine. The trunk space is considerably smaller with the Energi. I posted some photos on the Energi forum showing how the cargo space is affected and what you might be able to fit in it. http://fordcmaxenergiforum.com/gallery/album/11-viajero/ As for the cost, I find I get about 3 miles per kWh (from the wall). Electric rates vary widely from place to place, by how much you use, and by time of day. You'll have to look at your electric bill and find your specific cost per kWh, then divide by 3 to get cost per mile.

If you have an Energi and are using MyFordMobile, you can go to the web site under My Account->Notifications and tell it to text and/or email you to warn of a low 12V battery.

I've seen different web sites list different results per gallon. It may actually be different from place to place and batch to batch for all I know. Gasoline and diesel are blends of hydrocarbon chains of various lengths. It wouldn't surprise me if the mix was somewhat different from refinery to refinery.

MyFordMobile does this all the time. I can log in to their website and see where my car is on a map, or even start it remotely over the internet. People on these forums have reported using it to track where their car went while in for service at the dealership. When you start driving, it pops up a message on the dashboard screen telling you to warn your passengers they're being tracked. If I can log in and tell their servers to get this information from the car, then their system administrators could certainly do the same without me initiating anything. I have no evidence to say that Ford or the police or the feds or whoever your favorite bogeyman is are actually doing this, but they definitely have the ability to do so. Well, at least as long as you're in range of the cell network it's using.

Depending on which web site you read, diesel fuel gives 11-15% more heat per gallon than gasoline when burned. Plus most gasoline has about 10% ethanol which knocks off another 3% heat content. So, diesel engines are burning (roughly) 14-18% more energy-rich fuel to start with. Then they're a bit more efficient at converting heat to mechanical energy as well. Of course diesels and hybrids are both more expensive than plain old gas cars, so a diesel hybrid would be even more pricey. I think that Volvo's around $60,000 U.S.

I think there's another thread on this somewhere, but an important thing to remember with the non-Energi hybrid is that all the energy to run the car comes from gas. So, while the ICE is running it's getting very low mileage because it's often charging the battery as well. But that energy comes back out of the battey to help during the EV miles. In the end the only thing that matters is your overall mpg*. The Energi is a different story, because some of its EV energy came from the electric grid, not from burning gas. So for a trip you need to look at the total gallons and total kWh used. * For short trips the battery state of charge at the beginning and end of the trip will matter quite a bit as well. If your battery ends up with less charge than when it started, you've essentially "borrowed" some energy from your next trip, and the ICE will have to work a bit harder to recharge the battery next time. Vice versa if the charge ends up higher than when you started. The longer the trip, the smaller this will be, relatively speaking.

I get 10-15% better mileage at 75 mph on the interstate in Colorado than in Texas, in this and my previous non-hybrid car. Altitude definitely makes a difference. Here's a nifty air density calculator: http://www.altitude.org/air_pressure.php At 6000 feet the air is 81% the density of air at sea level, so the drag due to air resistance is also 81%. Of course there are other losses besides air drag, but that's one of the big ones, especially at highway speeds. The effect of going up and down hills is hard to prove conclusively, but it makes sense as an enforced pulse and glide. Even on my non-hybrid car, going up and down a really steep mountain (Beartooth Pass) gave me very good overall mileage because on the downhill the fuel cut off completely and I used almost no gas the whole way down. I suppose on the way up I was in the sweet spot of that BSFC graph.

As hybridbear said, you shouldn't subtract any EV miles, because all the miles are powered by gas burning in the ICE. One exception would be if the state of charge were different at the start and end of the trip. In that case you've borrowed some gas from or loaned some gas to your next trip. For a long trip it shouldn't make much difference.

A coworker took me for a brief ride in his Tesla. 60 mph and I hardly noticed we were moving. Then he demonstrated the passing ability by stomping on it! If I had one of those I would probably lose my license for too many speeding tickets. Of more practical import, the CEO of the company I work for got a Tesla, prompting the installation of a bank of chargers in our parking garage. Woohoo! Then again, about a month ago I saw one blow by me on the freeway, and five minutes later found it in my favorite charging spot downtown. Doh!

The battery temperature depends a lot on the recent history. It stays roughly constant while charging or while driving on low-speed city streets with stoplights. When just sitting there it cools down very slowly. When driving on the highway it increases rapidly, 10-15 F in the course of using a full charge. As an example, my car sat in the garage last night. When I got in, the garage temperature was in the low 80s and the battery temperature was about 94. I drove 15 miles to downtown, mostly freeway but with about 400 feet of downhill, and the battery was at 102. I plugged in to a public charger in a garage, went running for a couple hours, and came back to find the battery full and its temperature at 102. Then I drove back on the freeway, uphill this time. I took a side trip to get some lunch, and after about 15 miles of driving the battery temperature hit 113, at which threshold the ICE started running even though the battery still had charge. While driving I had the A/C at 72, and had pre-cooled the car. I've found that the cabin temperature doesn't affect the battery temperature as much as I thought it would. The battery temperature at the end of a trip mainly depends on the temperature at the start of the trip and how hard you drive it. The result is that in the summer in Texas you will not be able to drive as many pure EV miles as a fast charger could give you, because the battery hits its temperature limit and the ICE comes on. Once it's in hybrid mode, the battery temperature doesn't increase much, if any. If the ICE comes on due to overtemperature and there's still charge left in the "big battery" the Energi will go into an ICE running, charge depleting mode where it gets more EV power and less ICE power than regular hybrid mode, yielding about 80 mpg.

I had the Scangauge from 2 cars ago; on previous cars I experimented with the effect various driving styles have on fuel consumption. I was surprised at how little effect gentle vs. rapid driving had on the mpg of an ICE car. Since the C-max has multiple trip computers and instantaneous mpg, I actually didn't install it until someone posted some codes on the Energi forum. Now I use it to monitor battery temperature and state of charge, as well as the dreaded 12V battery voltage.

Instant mpg is highly variable and can be misleading. A little bit of wind, acceleration, or slope change can make a big difference. It's surprisingly hard to judge whether the road is really level. This summer I had some time on some empty roads to pay more attention to the instruments. Sometimes I'd see mileage that I thought was surprisingly high or low. I have a GPS with barometric altimeter and sure enough, I was going uphill or downhill and didn't notice it. Also, the slightest difference in how hard you're pushing the gas pedal can make a big difference in instantaneous mpg. 45 mph and decelerating ever so slightly will give a very different mpg than 45 mpg and accelerating ever so slightly. It's hard to control precisely.

Ah, Minitab. I remember it from college statistics class. Another interesting result of that analysis, besides which car to buy, is the variation in price due to mileage and age. This gives you some idea how much it costs in depreciation to run your car a given distance, or how much to keep it in the garage for a year when you're not driving it. A less sophisticated but simpler thing I've done in the past is just get the estimated blue book value for my car, and one identical except for 10,000 more miles, and one identical except for one year older. Not a lot of data out for C-Max yet but this is of special interest to me because with the Energi and yearly fee charge card my incremental fuel cost is zero, but it obviously isn't free to put miles on my car.

You could choose the drive ratios to optimize for 70 mph, and probably improve mileage at at that speed by using a more powerful engine (Prius did this one one of their major model changes). But, then you would suffer on the city mpg. I'm not arguing that the constant speed test should be the only number; I'm just saying it should be the highway number, because it would be a more accurate estimate of how much gas you'd use for a cross-country road trip. The combined rating should cover the urban freeways case, and the city should cover surface street driving. The manufacturer could make design choices to trade off those numbers against each other as they saw fit, and buyers could make the choice on which kind of driving they do the most of.

The reduced cargo space of the Energi almost scared me away, but I did get the Energi and am happy with it. I posted some pictures on the Energi forum to give some idea of how much space is available with some everyday items. http://fordcmaxenergiforum.com/gallery/image/53-cargo-space/ The Energi is only available in the higher trim level, which adds to the cost. If you want the higher trim level, the federal tax credit makes it not that much more than the hybrid (incentives/discounts vary on each from place to place and month to month). The electric/gas cost difference you'll have to calculate yourself because electric rates and gas prices vary so much from city to city.