ev – Radical RC Workbench

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.

A full week on the ticker. Remember the very important point presented in part 1. That point was Ford says to wait at least 1000miles before making any mileage calculations. This implies there may be some break in mixture settings that prevent it from reaching it’s potential for a while. That being said, here are my shots of the data thus far.

Over 20 miles of driving on engergy generated from braking. 200 miles exactly in pure electric driving. The brakes are interesting. When you lightly press on the peddle, you get a braking action, however it’s really the generator robbing your inertia for energy to charge the battery. As you move down on the peddle you can feel there are about 3 steps in this level of braking (or level of power generation) which each step increasing in rate of power generation and braking force. If you don’t move your foot at all, you’ll come to a complete stop. Obviously, when you are barely moving (moment before you stop) there can be no electronic braking (or little) yet it feels just like the brake pads are stopping you. Some super-brain programming must be managing this and it works perfectly!

Shown here are total miles, state of battery charge and what remains of our first tank of fuel given to us by the dealer. Not bad, close to 500 miles and we have about a 1/4 tank left. Notice, I have changed the mileage calculation. It was at first combined with with electric power. I wasn’t interested in that figure. I wanted to know what we were getting per gallon of gasoline. So, that is now represented. It’s continued to climb all week and as you can see, it’s over 40mpg at this time.

Overall my impression of this car is a “fine ride”. Really enjoying the gizmo factor of playing around with an electric car. It’s as fine a ride as any luxury automobile I’ve ever driven. Comfortable, handles nice, great on the highway. Can’t wait for an excuse to take a long trip in it.

I did run into a couple of irritations this past week. When it comes to any kind of product manual or help file, it seems not to include “my” answer. While switching it from MPGe to MPG I encountered a wrench icon. A retangular yellow light with a wrench in it. Going to the bible like (thin pages and thick!) manual to look over the two pages full of warning icons, I could not find a wrench. Going to the glossary and looking up words like “icon”, “wrench” and “symbol” produced a big fat zero. I’ve come to expect that when I look into any kind of help file or manual. Is a black cloud following me? Probably not. Once I got the setting to what I wanted, the wrench never appeared again. Not sure what it was trying to communicate to me.

The second item is the foot actuated lift gate. It seemed to work iratically, opening partially then stopping at times. I discovered we were using it wrong, wiggling your foot back and forth under the bumper can start it opening and also toggle it to stop. Just sticking your foot under the bumper and pulling it out gets a reliable full open every time.

More to learn: You’ll notice in one photo, a full battery stating it has 12 miles range. We had read this car has about 20-22 miles on battery alone. I’ve still to figure out if this is part of a break in or what the reality is on final full electric range.

Tag: ev

Ford C-Max Energi Part 5

Ford C-Max Energi Part 2