Just bought an Energi ...

[Jeremy B.]

... and have been dismayed at the displayed fuel mileage, showing only 30 mpg on average in hybrid only mode, that is, the high voltage battery was not charged from the plug-in so it was operating like a normal hybrid. Is this expected gas mileage without the assistance of the battery? Or is there something amiss with the car, a software glitch governing the flow of power from the batteries or a miscalculation in gas mileage? I honestly was expecting decent gas mileage right around the 40 mpg mark, which is what I need for city fuel mileage.

 

The large rear battery is a nice bonus. I'm primarily focused on its performance in hybrid only mode because I far exceed the 20-mile range for the battery while driving for Uber each day.

 

Information about the car:

2016 C-max Energi SEL, loaded with options.

Spotless history of regular maintenance and is in excellent shape.

 

Maybe I should go with the regular hybrid and not the Energi? Thoughts?

Edited November 21, 2022 by Jeremy B.
grammar

[cr08]

Neither the Energi or Hybrid models will get you much higher than mid 30s or so in hybrid operation in my experience unfortunately unless you take care to do some serious hypermiling techniques. The Fusion might work out better eking out some more MPGs due to the sleeker body but I don't own one so can't say for certain there. Probably the one time you'll see good numbers is cruising at 45-50mph at a steady speed. You can get it up to 40s/50s easy. But outside of scenarios like that you're probably not going to reach your desired 40 minimum mark with the C-Max.

[Jeremy B.]

I drove a 2014 Cmax hybrid rental for a few weeks as a Uber driver in a mid-sized city to test the market, fair amount of stop-and-go driving mixed with highway driving, and was impressed with its fuel mileage. I was averaging 41-43 mpg and I wasn’t even trying. Just regular city driving with an occasional dash of speeding and aggressive driving. I suppose the Energi isn’t the answer and I’ll need to just buy the regular hybrid. 

Edited November 21, 2022 by Jeremy B.
add more details

[David McC]

I have the regular Hybrid (2015) as I wanted the rear space that the Energi battery takes up. I'm getting about 36mpg for average driving (mostly local with a few miles of highway) and 1/3 to 1/2 of my trip is on battery according to the trip report when I turn the car off. I would probably be running 80% to 90% of my driving distance on electric if I had the Energi but I have no good place to charge at home and as I said, the rear cargo space is a LOT smaller.

[homestead]

The weather is a big factor in mpg's, too cold and the engine runs to supply the heater, too warm and you run the AC to keep cool.

When the temps are in the high 60's and we are not running the heater or AC our mpg's can go up to 65mpg.  So we usually avg. about 50 mpg  in the summer

and avg. about 40 in the winter.  Our lifetime is 44.7mpg.

 

Learning the best way to drive the c-max certainly helps.

Take a look at this video from Paul

[METROMAN]

We're on our second CMax hybrid model. First a 2013 SEL, and now a 2018 Titanium.  We have never gotten under 40 mpg. Just filled up today and got a little under 45. I've hit 50 mpg twice, and usually get 45-46 consistently. It will drop to lower 40's in winter. We don't try to hyper mile, I might do a little pulse and glide on occasion, but normally just drive regular. I don't understand why some people would get such bad mileage. I've never seen it.

 

 

Edited December 5 by METROMAN

[oldbeyondmeasure]

A couple of thoughts from a 2017 C-Max Energi owner: 
1. I am suspicious of the mileage per gallon that the car calculates because it overestimates the EV (battery only) range: claims 27 to 28 miles and I don't think I have ever achieved that; in optimal conditions, perhaps I can get 24 miles.
2. On the other hand, the brake coach is very helpful and learning how to coast and brake properly does help the range and gas mileage.
3. I think that 40 mpg in hybrid mode is the maximum that I can achieve across all driving conditions.

4. I have not checked, but the Energi must be heavier than the hybrid because of the large battery and that probably reduces mileage in hybrid mode.

[cr08]

On 11/27/2022 at 12:37 AM, oldbeyondmeasure said:

1. I am suspicious of the mileage per gallon that the car calculates because it overestimates the EV (battery only) range: claims 27 to 28 miles and I don't think I have ever achieved that; in optimal conditions, perhaps I can get 24 miles.

 

This is well known to have the EV miles be way off like that when you futz around with the EV modes under certain scenarios. A particular member here who goes way out of there way to piecemeal their EV usage to an extreme often posts these high numbers as a result of that. I know I've seen it personally when I took it cross country and up in the mountains of Colorado driving I-70. Regen'd a large amount of juice back into the battery and cycled the EV modes to get the save % bumped up. After that drive cycle I saw something like 30-35 miles of range reported as I recall which is REALLY inaccurate given the remaining 3.5-4kwh capacity remaining on my 2013. As it is, we all know the 'guess-o-meter' is far from accurate for battery capacity readings anyway. Should come as no surprise to see something like this occur.

 

That said, this does not seem to in any way affect the actual MPG readings. I've yet to see any egregious examples of MPG ratings being way off and I follow most of the C-Max related communities around (two known FB groups, C-Max subreddit, here, etc..).

Edited November 27, 2022 by cr08

[stolenmoment]

The guess-o-meter bases its numbers on recent driving, so if you've just rolled 10 mi downhill, it might expect that you're going to keep that up.

 

I have no idea how deep its history goes, though.

[Wheatridger]

On 11/20/2022 at 5:45 PM, Jeremy B. said:

I drove a 2014 Cmax hybrid rental for a few weeks as a Uber driver in a mid-sized city to test the market, fair amount of stop-and-go driving mixed with highway driving, and was impressed with its fuel mileage. I was averaging 41-43 mpg and I wasn’t even trying. Just regular city driving with an occasional dash of speeding and aggressive driving. I suppose the Energi isn’t the answer and I’ll need to just buy the regular hybrid. 

As a "chauffeur," you want the Hybrid. You'll need the trunk space for passengers' luggage. 

[Wheatridger]

Let me settle this question conclusively- You can't judge a efficiency of a PHEV like the Energi on instant MPG reports, EPA numbers or even trip logs. It's the lifetime MPG record that tells all. We own two C-Maxes, bought in 2017.

 

-The 2014 Hybrid, driven 40k miles, has recorded 38 mpg consistently since we bought it used.

-The 2017 Energi at 40K miles had a 70 MPG average. Changing to run flats for 20k miles dropped that to 61 MPG.

So it's averaged about 65 MPG over its lifetime. 

 

That's what matters to me, because it represents the amount of gas used, CO2 created, etc. Wasn't that the goal? That's gas I didn't have to pay for, the week I didn't have to stop for gas and pay the associated "Twinkie tax." 

 

Why does the Energi use so much less gas? Because my use of the car isn't commuting or all-day driving, but a mix of a few long drives and a lot of puttering around. Most of my car trips are within EV range, and those are the kind of short trips with cold engines that kill otherwise-efficient ICE cars, and their fuel mileage. But it's all in how you drive it: blazing up to Loveland Pass, I get gas mileage in the teens, but on the ten-mile run down the backside I can regenerate  eight EV miles. I met an Energi owner who claimed 200 mpg lifetime, because he drove his Excursion on every trip over 20 miles. (I call that gaming the system...")

 

When the Energi's plug-in miles are depleted, it still spends much more time in in EV mode than the Hybrid, for its own mysterious reasons. It's a smoother drive, but watch out. One pro tip is to switch to "EV Later" mode when you approach a highway on-ramp. If you need quick power to merge into traffic, it takes more time to call down to the Energi Room for more power! 

[jestevens]

I have a 2013 Hybrid SEL with 126K mi and routinely get about 40MPG driving around town.  I specifically take back roads with this car because it has an opportunity to drive more EV miles that way.  Highway will prompt the engine to run simply because it needs both the engine and battery for highway driving any reasonable amount of time.  I have Goodyear Assurance Fuel Max tires on mine. 

 

The heater will drain the battery and require use of the engine more in the winter.  In very cold winter days I typically get like 34MPG.  From what I understand the Energi has PTC heater so your setup might be a bit different.  When you consider majority of gas crossovers get 25MPG max 40MPG is pretty good. 

 

The problem FORD had was they got greedy and originally stated the car would get 60MPG -- which it does -- but only in perfect laboratory conditions for the stock model - not typical.  I've gotten 55-57MPG in very rare conditions riding around town.  A lot of people became disgruntled about that.  The other significant problem was a parasitic drain on the 12V battery -- if your car has all the recalls hopefully this shouldn't be a problem, but you'll still need to replace the 12V about once every 7 years or so just like any other car.

 

Apparently several of them also had transmission shaft bearing problems, I've been lucky so far that I haven't had that problem -- I had my transmission fluid drain and fill at 120K per the owner's manual specifications and no problem so far.  The transmission is more like a manual transmission -- there are no bands, etc. like you would have in a traditional automatic so I guess they are able to get away with long service interval.

 

How about the tires?  They must be low rolling resistance tires in order to "coast" effectively.  If someone put regular tires on your car they will be too "sticky" and won't coast effectively -- you'll need to be constantly applying gas to keep speed. 

 

The idea when driving hybrid is to accelerate efficiently/swiftly to the traveling speed you want to travel and then sort of "coast" around .. gently ease off the accelerator, then apply a little back pressure to the pedal and the thing should kick into EV mode around town -- as long as you aren't going up a hill or pulling a load. 

 

The regular C-MAX can travel max 2mi in EV mode before it MUST use the engine to recharge.  The Energi can go further -- up to 7 miles I think - and I guess you can plug it in, but I still consider it a hybrid, just with a bigger battery pack.  If you drive the car on the highway it WILL kick in the engine, but the idea is that it uses the battery pack to even out the RPMs.  The specs say 20 miles on a charge, I'm not sure if that's realistic or not.

 

If you press the leaves near the bottom of the touchscreen it will display a picture of the car showing you where the energy is coming from and where it is going to, and the potential reason for the engine being on.  In addition until you get used to driving it you can set the driving coach display in the left hand gauge display -- this display can be configured using the arrows and OK on the left hand side of the steering wheel to display a range of information using the "MyView" setting including the driving coach.

 

Honestly, you don't want to hypermile your car, that just drives people nuts --  but there are a few things you can do to help extend the range, driving even reasonably well you should be able to get at least mid 30s and my car routinely gets around 40MPG -- higher if I'm just coasting around to the grocery store in town on a particularly nice day outside.  You may have noticed how sensitive the brakes are, if you use them correctly you'll probably seldom have to use the actual brake pads, the regenerative brakes will slow you down and put energy back into the battery at the same time. 

 

You can get pretty good at timing red lights so you can get there when they turn green.  Now that gas is more expensive a few other drivers don't seem to mind, but again I only really hypermile whenever traffic is light, most people just want to get where they are going and you'll only be aggravating the other drivers if you drive excessively slow.

Edited February 26, 2023 by jestevens

[homestead]

The original MPG's for the C-max were 47mpg.  Ford gave owners money back in 2013 and 2014 I believe when they lowered the mpg's

Edited February 26, 2023 by homestead

[Greenbay]

After each trip a graph displays a score of things affecting mileage. Driving style is always green as is climate control. But outside temp/ other is always way in the red no matter the outside temp. Does anyone know what the “other “ might be?

[METROMAN]

On 11/23/2022 at 9:15 PM, METROMAN said:

We're on our second CMax hybrid model. First a 2013 SEL, and now a 2018 Titanium.  We have never gotten under 40 mpg. Just filled up today and got a little under 45. I've hit 50 mpg twice, and usually get 45-46 consistently. It will drop to lower 40's in winter. We don't try to hyper mile, I might do a little pulse and glide on occasion, but normally just drive regular. I don't understand why some people would get such bad mileage. I've never seen it.

 

 

Update 12/05/2024  Been awhile since I've been here. Life...  Just wanted to include some info. I don't even pay attention to the lifetime mpg that's constantly displayed. It's always about 2-3 mpg better than reality. I hand log and calculate every fill up.