One of my You Tube subscriptions put up a great aviation video. Enjoy….
Refueling The A10 In Theater
Ford C-Max Energi Part 5
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.
Ford C-Max Energi Part 4
A few thoughts come to mind:
1. The car says 230 miles have been driven on electricity, the balance of 344 miles driven on fuel. I’m a little confused here. Did we only go 344 miles on our 12.45 gallons of fuel. Yikes, that would be terrible mileage?? I need to dig in to the displays to see make sure the 574 is overall mileage as I am presuming and not just the fuel driven miles. Is my presumption wrong here?
2. Remember, midway through the tank, I changed the calculation from MPGe to MPG. It would be interesting to know if that effected anything or if there was a recalculation of the entire fuel/electric consumption so it reflected accurately at the time of the change.
3. I have not reset anything as of yet. I will perhaps do that when we get to 1, 2 or 3k so as not to have the break in miles figured into our average. Many cars don’t really give you a “since reset” average but rather a rolling average of only the last 300 miles or so. I’ll be interested to see how this car calculates that.
4. It’s notable the MPG calculator @ 40.7mpg is very close to my calculation of 41.36.
5. I hope I am not boring any readers. Writing along as I learn about the car. I’ll try to keep it down to 1 post a week on this subject. Expect them on Sunday’s. From here up was written on Jan 7th.
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01/08/13 Notes: Bev actually reset the mileage computer when we filled it up, her habit with the Civic Hybrid. I discovered this when she returned from work today and I noticed the reading slightly over 50mpg.
Capitolist Buys a Plug In Hybrid? Ford C-Max Energi Part 3
You might wonder why a couple of proud capitalists would purchase a plug in hybrid car? The vast majority of media outlets never pass a chance to describe lovers of liberty and free markets as people who want dirty air and water. We reject their racist analysis. Racist? Ok, I’m taking lingual liberty. They certainly are drawing a circle around a huge group of people and saying “They are all bad like thus and thus….”. And, the statement is completely untrue. Perhaps racist isn’t the right word, however is it “news” if it’s delivered with a slant? No, it’s propaganda or opinion, not news. 😉
Anyway, we are to one degree or another technology nerds. Also, I’ve always had an interest in electric transportation. I’ve built some hot rod electric scooters that I use at shows. At the moment, I have some projects underway to electrify a classic mini bike. So, as a family, we have operational 3 forms of electric transportation.
A few reasons. I don’t like giving money to people that hate us. As an American, I consider it a matter of patriotic pride to limit my consumption of products imported from the Middle East. I like electric powered transportation and have always dreamed of building electric bikes, scooters, motorcycles and cars. My wife and I are technology nerds. It’s a cool car and technology is just fun to play with.
Not a reason: Man Caused Global Warming Hoax. This is a huge scam religion perpetrated by those wishing to weaken America (anti-capitalists), those wishing to take American pride down a few notches (can you name a few American Apologist Politicians?) and those in academia (scientists) who survive on money for government studies that seems to pour into any public panic. If you hate me for stating these things, don’t look up any data on rise of CO2 following global temperature rise, it will disappoint you in the so called scientists that signed the original report and Al Gore. CO2 does not drive global temps, it follows it. What warms the earth is (do you remember grade school?) is that gigantic ball of intense fire we call the sun.
I don’t need to make up lies or silly make-believe theory’s to justify being clean, thrifty or patriotic (my personal expression of one aspect of patriotism). Others may need a Santa Claus, I’ll stick to facts and logic. Hokey religions and Three-card Monte are no match for a good logic at your side, kid.*
*Hans Solo adaptation.
Ford C-Max Energi Purchased Part 1
The C-Max comes in several varieties, we choose the “Energi” version. The Energi is a plug in Hybrid It has an EPA rating of 100 miles per gallon. The car contains a lithium ion battery and can go 10-20 miles on battery alone.
I plan to write in this forum about the C-Max and out experience with it.
When we picked up the car, the avergage fuel economy guage was reading 13.5mpg and it had 59 miles on it. (YIKES!)
One of the things that concerned us was the lack of people reporting fuel economy for the C-Max, both Hybrid and the Energi Plug In. The few that did report all reported less than EPA sticker mileage. Typical for the C-Max Hybrid (sticker 47mpg city, 47mpg highway and 47mph combined) was from 32 to 36mpg. That is alarming. However, these reports all seem to come from reviewers who have cars on loan for a day to film and make reports. Also, for photogenic reasons the driving almost always was in the hills and canyons of California or similar. Test speeds always seem to be 70mph plus. We don’t drive like that. Also, what does any reviewer or test driver do? They stand on that throttle to feel the power, they film passing, they film jack-rabbit starts, the test the handling. All things your likely to get tired of doing after owning a car for a 1000miles or so. What am I saying? You can’t trust the media here (like you can’t trust them anywhere). In this case, they don’t have an axe to grind, they have a report to finish. There is no axe to grind, just human nature. So, I’m anxious to see if I am correct or in error. Will the car do much better than previously reported?
Also, not reported by any report is the Ford’s manual which warns not to measure fuel economy during the first 1000 miles. The most accurate time will be between 2000-3000 miles. Having mechanical and racing experience (and a dose of healthy logic), I can assure you with todays computer controlled ignition and fuel delivery systems could easily be programmed to run a little richer for a better break in. The manual does not state it in that way and no research indicates they’ve done that. However, there is no research that indicates they did not either. So, we’ll follow the directions and give it the miles before we get too critical.
I wonder if any of the online reviewers of the C-Max Hybrid bothered to read the manual? Remember, these are humans.
1905 Wright Flyer Kit Wins Award
Sunday included an award for the Radical RC 1905 Wright Flyer kit “1st Place CD’s Choice” award. All of us at Radical RC appreciate the award and recognition. It’s such a fun airplane to fly. Several people at the event flew the model including Keith Shaw who is now the proud owner of a kit. He reports to me this is only the 8th kit he’s purchased in his lifetime. Keith normally makes his own plans or occasionally builds from plans scratch building nearly all of his models. We consider it a high compliment that our 1905 Wright Flyer kit will cross the same workbench as a lifetime of award winning and hobby expanding projects Keith Shaw has completed.
The EFO group’s newsleter, the longest running journal for electrick flight. In this issue, coverage of the 28th edition of the Mid-America Electric Flies event. The Ampeer August 2012
SEFF 2012
What a great time it was! I’m always quite exhausted with show responsibilities having to go to SEFF only 1 week after returning from Toledo. I have to say however, the salve of SEFF hath soothed my fatigue. A few days into it I was feeling more rested and looking forward to flying. We arrived Monday evening. It was quite windy with substantial flying only in the evening with night flyers, By Thursday it was much better and improving hour by hour. The last 2 days were perfect flying weather. Got to fly the 1905 Wright Flyer in a big space for the first time. I really enjoyed it and look forward to another opportunity. We met and renewed friendships with many. The field now has a lake for float flying and it was active. A large portion of the field was off limits due to containing all the soil removed from the lake being used to bring it up to grade improving the runway. By next year the grass will be in and it will all be usable. Even with this project in mid stream, there was plenty of room for 5 flight lines. Can’t wait to see it and attend again next year. If your thinking of attending SEFF let me warn you up front. It will become a yearly trip for you. It’s nothing but fun from sunrise until you give up each evening night flying. thanks to Mac Hodges for hosting SEFF again at his phenominal flying sight again this year. Thanks to all the Feyetteville Flyers and other volunteers that make the event possible. See you there next year!