MikeB

Hiya Brent. I've got the Energi, which is the plug-in version of the C-Max. I assume that's what you mean by the Electric/Hybrid combo. Technically, the Hybrid is already a combination of gas and electric, but it doesn't let you fill the battery from the electric grid. I love the Energi, and up front cost is really the strongest reason not to get it. Performance is excellent, surprisingly good for a vehicle focused on fuel economy. The gas engine isn't awesomely powerful, nor is the electric motor, but the combination of the two is very strong. The Energi's battery is 7.6kWh, but you never really use all of that. A full charge costs me less than $0.75, and with that I can easily get 22-25 miles of all-electric driving. So your electricity bill does go up, but your gasoline bill goes down by a significantly more. While driving electric, and with current prices, it's like you're suddenly getting 100mpg instead of 40. You'll have to figure out how much electricity you'd use per month in order to figure out the final cost, but anyone who can charge daily and can do a significant number of electric miles will end up saving money. And when the battery is drained, the car still drives like a hybrid, so you'll see mpg numbers in the low 40s when doing long road trips. As for maintenance, the electric side of the drivetrain has almost no maintenance. The gas side gets much less wear and tear, so it also needs less maintenance. For example, our oil change interval can be as high as 20,000 miles, since so many of those miles happen without the gas engine even starting. The batteries are expected to last the life of the car, and have a 100,000 mile warranty. And both the Hybrid and Energi put very little wear on the disk brakes, so brake dust on the wheels is almost non-existent. The Energi is about 300lbs heavier than the Hybrid, but that type of weight is hard to notice with normal driving, even when passing. You'll quickly spot the space taken up by the larger battery in the cargo area, my cargo floor is raised about 9" compared to the Hybrid. There's still plenty of space overall, but not quite as much of it is below the privacy screen in the cargo area.

If the battery is toast, you pretty much can't open the lift gate. However, you can open the hood, and there's jump connections in the engine bay. Also, the 12v accessory power plug in the cargo area doesn't shut off, so if you fold the seats down, you can reach back and plug in a jumper battery. Once you have any external juice at all, the computer can boot and the high voltage relays can be closed, and you will have full power off the big battery as needed.

This is a scam. They take electricity out of your battery, use that to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then push the hydrogen back into your fuel system to burn with the gasoline. As long as the laws of thermodynamics are not repealed, there's no way this can work.

Because the Energi was never incorrectly rated at 47/47. Actually, to be more specific, the C-Max Hybrid was given the same numbers as the Fusion Hybrid because the Fusion was considered the larger volume product, so that's the one they tested. On the Energi side, the C-Max Energi is considered the higher volume product, so the Fusion Energi was given the numbers from the C-Max Energi tests. Ford used an EPA rule that allowd different vehicles with the same drivetrain to get the same rating, using test numbers from whatever was the larger volume product, rather than testing each model separately. Unfortunately, Ford abused this rule by allowing it to apply to vehicles with significantly different aerodynamics.

Well, it's very much an all-or-nothing thing for me. Either I'm 100% EV in town, or I'm on a highway trip going fast and running mostly on gas. You're getting your great numbers by sticking to slower speeds and avoiding the high speed stuff entirely, which means you alternate between gas and EV on a minute by minute basis. But I think what that really means is that we both chose a good vehicle for our driving needs.

So, if you just ignore that little 174kWh bit, I'm well over 1,000 miles on this last tank.

I won't argue with the premise of keeping the wife happy (though I don't have one). However, I'm also in Atlanta, and grew up in Illinois, so you'd expect me to prefer cooler temps. But comfort is mostly what you get used to, and I'm very comfortable in the car with the AC set around 76. Once the humidity is gone, anything in the mid-70s is pretty easy to adjust to.

I keep a really good coat of wax on my car's paint, and that has the occasional advantage of making it easy to remove paint from dings like this. Start with a very mild polish and work your way up to the more aggressive stuff, and you'll probably be ok. Having a newer clearcoat is going to save you on that. After that, bypass the body shop and look for a paintless dent remover. (Actually, the body shop and local dealership will both know a guy who does this.) They can pull out dings using a bit of heat and a nice suction cup mechanism, and it'll be almost invisible. I got a sizable dent removed for about $150, and it would have been over $500 if a body shop had done it. The difference is that the dent remover will be almost invisible, the body shop will be completely invisible. So there is some difference in quality of repair, but I think it's probably not worth the cost.

Youch Valk, sorry to hear that. I too am very surprised that the drivetrain continues to be the least troublesome part of the car. On the other hand, my previous VW diesel had a potential problem with the high pressure fuel pump failing, causing about a $12k repair (usually out of warranty). So it seems that most automakers have issues of some sort or another, and dealers are universally poor places to get repairs. Tesla might be a good choice for you, I'm hoping their 3rd major project will fit my needs as well. And the new BMW i3 looks very interesting, I really like the use of a 600cc motorcycle engine as a range extender.

Glad you managed it, Carpe. I think it took me a few weeks before I wggled my out, so I'd forgotten about this thread by then. One little helpful bit: there's two painted 10mm bolts that hold the side body panel in place, near the hood hinge. If you remove those bolts, you can flex the body panel just a little bit outward, and the back part of the light assembly will come out and up.

Something I think I saw from other posts here: in the Hybrid, when you drive over 62mph, the engine keeps spinning. You can't run EV mode since the battery isn't set up for that amount of power output, but even on a downhill your ICE keeps spinning. Is that right? Because in my Energi I see a pure EV mode, without the ICE spinning, at speeds up to 80-something. I suspect that's one of the software changes they are making for the Hybrid, allowing the ICE to cut off entirely at high speed, just like it does at lower speeds, as long as you don't put too much demand on the batteries. They aren't changing the max output of your electric motor or battery pack in terms of power, but they will allow it to be used at higher speeds. But most of the other software changes seem like they would apply to the Energi, like better management of the grill slats, and climate control changes. I do hope we get those changes, even if the first one isn't applicable for us.

My one piece of advice is to reset the Lifetime trip data before you drive off the dealer lot. Probably want to reset Trip 1 and 2 as well, and pick one of those to be reset with every fillup.

Not strictly true. I do local drives (pure EV) all week, and then 200+ mile trips on the weekend (regular hybrid driving). Even with the Energi's reduced MPG compared to the Hybrid, my lifetime average is still much higher than the Hybrid would ever reach. My fuelly signature is showing just under 60 right now, probably go over 60 on my next fill. You really have to have lots of non-EV driving before the Hybrid starts to pull ahead. Yes, you should evaluate your personal diving patterns and see which one is better, but the Energi does quite well in mixed (EV/hybrid) driving, not just short range only.

There's a setting for automatic vehicle health report reminders, I seem to recall 3 different mileage options, and 5,000 was one of them.

Given the amount of time it takes to design and build a car, I'm almost certain we don't have USB 3. It's too new on the market, the hardware would need to have been spec'd out about 2-3 years ago, at least. And there's little benefit to the added cost, the increased transfer rate is massive overkill when streaming music, which is the biggest demand we expect to put on the usb port.

The banner is still up on the Energi side, but maybe we just haven't gotten the same update yet. The forums seem to get changes on a slightly different schedule from each other.

The car's computer already knows the BSFC graph, it should be easy to display it. But more importantly, the car should be able to keep your engine in the optimal BSFC range without driver intervention. If you are accelerating slowly, the car should just use the electric motor and leave the ICE off. And if you are accelerating hard, it should push the load up just a bit to get into the optimum BSFC range, and then use the extra load to recharge the battery. Oh wait, I think that's exactly what the computer is doing already! Maybe the computer isn't being aggressive enough about keeping the engine in the optimal BSFC range? Or maybe the computer would be more aggressive if it had a larger battery, so it had more opportunity to alternate between EV drive and high-load BSFC optimal running of the ICE?

It would be an interesting attempt, and we Energi owners clearly have road trips where we're unable to plug in, and might qualify. Remember that our EPA number is quite a bit lower than yours, but we've got a full 14 gallon gas tank to work with. But the real trick is that I'm unlikely to attempt a long road trip where I'm not moving fast on the interstate, so getting the extra high mpg numbers becomes less likely.

Husker, the outside temp is displayed top-center, right next to the time. Tap the clock and you should be able to turn it on. The EV screen is available from a button on the bottom-center, between the home icon and the settings. If you don't have both of these, then you aren't upgraded. There have been several reports of owners departing the dealership after an upgrade and discovering that they are still running the old software, so it's fair to be a little suspicious.

The reflection seemed to get a little better on my car after the tint was installed, but didn't eliminate the problem. I've just tried an experiment with black electrical tape on the chrome, and it seems to be quite a bit better. Obviously, with a sun angle like the one shown in the picture above, there's still some reflection from the vent itself, but for the most part blackening the chrome takes out the worst of it.

I have two different driving modes. Since I have an Energi, when I'm driving locally and know I have plenty of battery range for the trip, I drive softly but don't pay attention to the MPG. I watch my brake scores but generally just keep up with traffic on acceleration. But when I'm outside my EV range, driving on gas, I pay more attention to everything. Unfortunately, that's also when I'm most likely to be on the highway, so there's little more I can do other than set ecoCruise and do some light drafting.

The battery is almost never going to die while the car is running, or just after you stop. As long as the car is on, the 12v battery is getting charged from the HV battery, and has almost no load on it. You aren't going to lose running lights, power steering, or door locks while the car is in motion or while stopped on the side of the road, at least not for a basic 12v battery death. In fact, once the car is turned on, you could probably remove the 12v battery entirely and operate normally all day (just don't turn it off). The problem we have is that something slowly drains the battery over many hours, and the battery just doesn't have enough juice to handle that overnight. Do this repeatedly, and the battery capacity drops, making it more vulnerable over a shorter time, so you might see issues after being parked for 4 hours instead of 8. That said, it's always a pain to find your car electrically dead in the morning when you need to get to work, and Ford does need to find/fix whatever is draining the battery. If they can't figure that out, then invoking lemon laws is not unreasonable.

Very nice, Jus. I just posted on the Energi forum, congratulating fwroberts on passing the 2,500 mark on the way to a 3,000 mile tank. And now I come over here and see you've broken 800 without a plug. Good driving all around.