Clearly the electric powered functionality of this car is a most appealing gizmo factor for me. I like driving it in pure EV mode whenever possible. It has 3 modes, EV Now, EV-Later and Auto. We made a short drive to our regular Sunday morning breakfast stop from there to Menards then back home. All on electric. Puts a twinkle in my eye not to have purchased any fuel (or it’s embedded taxes) for that trip.
Speaking of taxes, I looked up my tax on fuel in Ohio on OhioGasPrices.com which seems to be part of a site called GasBuddy.com. This site provides fuel prices, tax and other related information for every state. Look up your own state. Ohio fuel tax is 28 cents per gallon. The lowest states are Georgia at 7.5 cents and Alaska at 8 cents. The big tax offenders are Washington and Pennsylvania at 37.5 cents. So, I ask, how is it that Alaska and Georgia build and maintain roads for less than 1/5th of Washington and Pennsylvania? Are the roads in WA and PA 5x better? I’m not going to dig, but my suspicions are there is probably a strong relationship to how much of that money gets vacuumed off by non-free market road maintenance contractors. Oh, lets don’t forget, the federal government adds 18.4 cents to the price of every gallon of fuel which should be added to the numbers you find at the links above.
So, where do we stand this week?
Above is the display we like to keep up while driving. You can see we are sitting at 859.7 miles, 52.1 Ave MPG. It’s a warmer day here so the total available miles for EV power is 15 miles. We are told the warmer it is, the bigger this number will be, possibly as high as 21 miles this summer. It increases with temperature and also considers your heat/ac settings impact on range. You’ll notice she still has a bit over 1/2 a tank of fuel. This is our second tank since purchase and the first tank we’ve paid for. Note fuel mileage is calculated at 52.1 mpg. I am certainly hoping to do better than this but waiting patiently for the minimum 1000 miles Ford says to wait before judging the fuel economy. The little yellow plug symbol on the bottom line is indicating the car is plugged in. It won’t allow you to drive away while it’s plugged in. I am wondering where the engineer sits whom presumes I don’t have a cord long enough for my trip?
Above we see the Lifetime Summary. This screen comes up every time you power the car down. 373.1 EV miles, 35.7 miles powered by reclaimed braking energy. It’s scoring us at 41.9mpg in equivalent MPG on electric. Not exactly sure how that last number of calculated. I can think of a few different ways.
Notice that even though the range of this car on pure electric in the cold of winter has been about 14 miles most of the time. Yet, 373.1 EV miles of the total of 859.7 miles traveled. That means even though the electric only range is comparably short, it accounts for 43.4% of all miles traveled.
Also note, the fuel powered miles would be 486.6. Subtract the 59 miles the card had when we got it, this leaves 437.6 miles. To this point, we’ve consumed approximately 18 gallons (12.45 first fill up, about 5.5 thus far in this tank). This would imply the ICE (internal combustion engine) is delivering 24.31mpg. YIKES! I do hope this begins to improve as we cross 1000-3000 miles range where Ford says you should wait to collect MPG info.
That’s all till next Sunday.
