jmckinley

"It's my understanding the car cannot be driven if someone were to get/break in while it's running, without having the key fob." I think you're wrong. I think there have been instances where Husband and Wife drove somewhere, he got out with fob in pocket, she hopped in and drove somewhere else. When she came back to car, she had no fob and could not start car. This happened to my neighbor with his Prius. Somewhere in the owner's manual it mentions that there is a feature that lets you restart within 15 seconds or so without fob just for these instances - if you remember in time. At any rate, the car can be driven without fob if it is already running.

Thanks armoredsaint, LED puddle lights is a good find. I just ordered the bulbs you recommened.

Just use your Stanley Simple Start to start the other car. Every C Max should be carrying some sort of emergency jumper battery.

Yeah, that's the ticket -- it's a safety feature. Like the bad batteries and the flaky GPS. Those things keep you from driving it and having wrecks.

Can't wait to see the responses on this one. First, check Fuelly.com and see what a fairly large sample is reporting. Don't know about everyone else, but if I set the cruise at 70 mph, no AC, I get about 38 mpg on a good day with minimal wind.

213 miles in 9 hours, 23 minutes at 50 mpg. That's a 22 mph average speed.

I was afraid of weird electrical interactions between the Motorhome and the C Max so I made sure my tail light wiring was completely separate including the ground wire. Problem is the ground wire is the same size as the other three wires but has to carry three times the current so is a bit undersized when all lights are on. Hopefully the LEDs will solve the problem without me having to string a new ground wire. For the same reason, I did not run a charge wire to the C Max battery to keep it charged and suffered dead car battery every day I towed. Thanks to another forum member, I now use the manual Shift Brake Interlock override so I can get it into neutral without leaving the car in the accessory position which leaves way too many electrical gizmos running.

Your dealer may have been mistaken.

I'm pretty sure weak ground is my problem too. Each turn signal looks ok, but if running lights are on and you hit the turn signal or brakes, everything dims some. Ground wire is apparently adequate for one or two filaments at a time, but not three or four. LEDs should cure the problem due to their lower current draw. Guess I should have run a bigger ground wire. Live and learn, I guess.

Seems to be a wide variation in quality of LED bulbs out there. Pick any supplier and the reviews run from "Burned out in 5 minutes" to "no problems". Some have had problems with polarity on trailers and motor home interior and exterior lights. Since incandescent bulbs don't care about polarity, on some fixtures both wires are the same color and the RV manufacturers don't worry about it. Then when you put in an LED, you have a 50/50 chance of reverse polarity and the LED won't work and people think they have a bad bulb. I just bought a pair of 3157's for the extra sockets I installed in my taillights for towing the C Max. Only $8 for two bulbs. It'll be interesting to see if and or how long they work

Somebody on this forum tried LED tailights and they wouldn't work. Probably need the special LEDs with built in resistors to simulate incandescent bulbs.

It would have been interesting, I think. Snopes.com reported this as false a long time ago, but it's still fun to read.

This was funny a few years ago when I first saw it. Maybe not so funny now. At a recent computer exposition, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If General Motors had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, GM issued a press release stating: "If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics: For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but would run on only five percent of the roads. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

Hopefully your battery is OK. Mine was built in November and it has never run down just sitting around. When towing it, however, it ran the battery down every time after about an hour. The Owner's Manual says just put it in neutral with engine running, then hit the Start/Stop button which leaves it in an Accessory state with too many things still on. This eventually trashed the battery which was replaced on warranty. In the future I will put it in neutral with the ignition off using the Brake Shift Interlock override procedure that another forum member discovered on his own, no thanks to the crappy Owner's Manual.

Temp on the MFT screen is a feature of the 3.5.1 update which newer cars have, but 2012 build dates don't have. Much needed feature since the old version with temp next to speedometer is nearly unreadable most of the time. Console and dash outlets eventually time out, but no one knows exactly when. The outlet in the rear area stays on all the time and can be used to plug in your Stanley Simple Start when the battery runs down. This happens a lot to some people with older vehicles. Ford says they have fixed it.

armoredsaint, Sorry if you were offended by my post. The Owner's Manual is pretty bad and in many places just plain inaccurate. And the index sucks. As someone else said it is better to use the online version where you can search for words or phrases. In some instances, like the Brake Shift Interlock manual override, it appears to be a cut and paste from the British manual and refers to a panel on the passenger side of the console which isn't there. This override, by the way, is a useful thing to know because you may need it if your battery runs down. Using the override, you can put the car in neutral and roll it out of a tight spot so you can get jumper cables on it.

Matt, On my thread about towing with a motor home, one poster reported that when he did the removal the second time to make some revisions, it only took him 15 minutes. I suspect that would be possible, now that I've done it once. It's still scary, though. That is one big piece of expensive plastic. Fairly flexible however, so probably not a huge risk of breaking it. I only had two plastic fasteners left over when I did mine. Not bad for these types of things.

My guess is, this won't hurt your Max. Some of the Prius guys use their cars for emergency power for their homes. They use a big inverter hooked to the 12v battery and just leave the car on. It starts up from time to time and recharges the 12v battery. One guy reported doing this for a couple of days. Not good for your lifetime average but better than melting all the stuff in the fridge. Another example: I have driven a chase vehicle for the bicycle Race Across America. To guarantee that we don't get let down by a dead battery, we never turn the support vehicles off. So for 6-8 days, depending on how fast our rider is, the car is never shut off. No problems reported with any of our vehicles.

You need to read your manual. Funnel is used if you need to put gas in the car from a can. Needs a special funnel to get by the capless gas tank filler tube.

Just for kicks, I looked at the Shop Manual to see if their instructions were better than Roadmaster's. Wow! Those are the worst illustrations ever. Very difficult to figure out what's going on. Stick with the Raodmaster pdf. It's a lot easier to follow. Speaking of the Shop Manual. Does anyone know how to save the whole thing as a pdf? I tried printing to pdf and it will only do the current page.

I think the sensor is in the area around the rear view mirror.

I think you have to remove the whole front cap. Not particularly difficult, only takes about 30 minutes once you figure it out. I had to do that to install the mounting bracket so I could hook up a tow bar for towing my C Max behind our motorhome. This is a link to the instructions for installing the bracket which starts with removing the front cap. Just be careful, it's a big piece of plastic and it would be financially painful if you broke it. http://www.roadmasterinc.com/pdfinst/524432-1.pdf

1) Larger 12V battery 2) Nav System that actually works and is easy to use 3) Combined Fuel Economy 47mpg 4) My Ford Synch that is stable and doesn't randomly reboot just when you need it 5) Driver's side dash vent that can be oriented so that it doesn't blow cold air on driver's left hand 6) Six way power seat on passenger side

Per the owner's manual, not everything will work plugged into this outlet. My guess is it's a "Modified Sine Wave" which is mostly a square wave and some electronics just won't run on it. Chargers should be OK but you never know.

Central Ohio, almost perfectly flat with little change in elevation. But, I got the same results in Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia on our recent trip. No matter what I do, where I drive it or what the ambient temperature is, every fill up is in the 35 mpg range except for the occasional overfill or under fill. My lifetime average (19 fillups, 6,500 miles) based on actual consumption and corrected mileage is 35.7 mpg. My average after the first five fillups was 34.9 and the last five average was 35.5 so not much has changed with the break in and warmer weather.