az-paco
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
- Threads
- 1
- Messages
- 68
- Reaction score
- 94
- Location
- Phoenix
- Vehicles
- '05 Prius, '21 MME Premium SR RWD
- Thread starter
- #1
[Mach E Premium SR RWD]
This past week my family took a trip from Phoenix to northern California (Bay Area). It’s approximately 745 miles each way, so around 1800 miles with all the stops factored in. Here are my observations:
Driving the Car
I really enjoy driving the MME, especially around town. I prefer 1-pedal driving and have adapted to it very quickly. I’ve found that on highway driving with cruise control, the transition back to 1-pedal driving when cancelling cruise control is not particularly smooth, so I switched off 1-pedal mode for the first day of the trip. The problem was when we departed the highway, I did not like the coasting or the feel of the brakes, so I turned 1-pedal mode back on for the rest of the trip.
BlueCruise on the highways was great and worked on nearly all the highway driving. It actively engaged most of the time, usually within a second of activating cruise control or changing lanes. On straight sections of road, it holds the car further to the right side of the lane than I normally would, but it seemed to be safe. Nonetheless, I tended to steer the car a bit to the left when passing trucks and trailers. I got pretty good at the transition on and off BlueCruise for lane changes, though I did let go of the steering wheel a little early sometimes. Curves are not handled as smoothly as I would like, and the car tended to take them a little wide, but not crossing lane-lines. While I got pretty comfortable with it, my wife was more skeptical and kept telling me to put my hands on the wheel.
Charging
I was worried about using Plug and Charge based on the many threads of complaints. It turned out to work as designed. On the first day, we stopped at 4 different EA charging locations. I had to wait for a working charger at one of them, but when I plugged in, it recognized the car and started charging. I was a bit disappointed that every time the charging speed seemed to settle in the 75-85 kWh range, so it took a bit longer to charge than anticipated. At one EA charger, after plugging in, it started charging but showed an error on the screen that it was not connected to the car. I wasn't sure until the next day, but we did get charged on our Ford Pass account for the 25 kWh of charging.
As others have mentioned, the time spent at charging stations can be very interesting. We met many friendly people from the EV-driving community and chatted about our cars. At our first EA stop, we met a Lucid employee bringing a Lucid Air to a testing facility in Arizona. At the next EA stop there was a Porche Taycan and a brand-new Audi e-Tron, both being charged for the first time at a public charger. At a stop later that day there was a Mercedes EQS sharing a charger with me. (We each plugged in one of the CCS cables. He charged first, while I had dinner, then I went back, disconnected, reconnected, and charged mine.) It was also his first charging experience. I used two Chargepoint locations along the way when there was no EA nearby. Only one hotel of our three hotels had charging available, which was a level 2 charger, and filled my battery for free overnight.
Ford Sync Navigation and FordPass App
As many others have posted, the built-in navigation was not great. I guess we were lucky that on the first day of the trip, it automatically selected the same charging stops I had planned in advance, so I was able to use it to get us there according to the schedule. The second day, I was disappointed that the built-in nav took us out of the way for a charging stop (which was free, but very slow). I knew there was a better place around 27 miles further, right by the highway, so we moved on after a brief (10-minute) charge. On the return trip, we had to employ nav apps on our phones to get us home because the built-in nav was routing us via I-40 which adds over 4 hours to the drive. Beyond that, it would be nice if it was easier to view the entire planned route and make adjustments to the overall route or individual stops, but I could not find a way to do those things besides just passing a turn or exit and waiting for the nav to recalculate. Oddly, if I wanted to bypass a charging stop added by the built-in nav, it would keep trying to get me to return to it even once it was well behind me rather than finding another charging station along the route. I ended up cancelling the route a number of times and then starting it over with the same destination in order to force a recalculation of the route. I did like that there was an override button so that a passenger can use the screen to make these changes while I was driving. My other cars lock those buttons when the car is moving.
I did not try planning the route in FordPass but used it primarily for PaaK and to occasionally track charging. The alerts from the app were really quite annoying and the charge-time estimates were way off (by hours or days) because they calculate based on the rate of charge in the first few seconds after connecting rather than when the rate of charge stabilizes. Also, there were just too many alerts and you have to open each one in the app in order to mark them read or delete them.
Summary
The overall experience was very good. The car was comfortable, reliable, and fun to drive. The sound quality on the radio was excellent. My family used the WiFi hotspot and consumed most of the free trial data. We got fun reactions when people saw us, especially at charging stations, and we got to see some other cool EVs too! The crazy thing is that we did not see another Mach E the entire trip. In fact, I’ve only seen one other Mach E in the six weeks since I brought mine home. I did not spend much time looking at efficiency, so I’m not posting any of those details here. I’ll just say that I used approximately 350 kWh of the 500 kWh credit from Ford on EA, plus charged at three non-EA chargers along the way.
This past week my family took a trip from Phoenix to northern California (Bay Area). It’s approximately 745 miles each way, so around 1800 miles with all the stops factored in. Here are my observations:
Driving the Car
I really enjoy driving the MME, especially around town. I prefer 1-pedal driving and have adapted to it very quickly. I’ve found that on highway driving with cruise control, the transition back to 1-pedal driving when cancelling cruise control is not particularly smooth, so I switched off 1-pedal mode for the first day of the trip. The problem was when we departed the highway, I did not like the coasting or the feel of the brakes, so I turned 1-pedal mode back on for the rest of the trip.
BlueCruise on the highways was great and worked on nearly all the highway driving. It actively engaged most of the time, usually within a second of activating cruise control or changing lanes. On straight sections of road, it holds the car further to the right side of the lane than I normally would, but it seemed to be safe. Nonetheless, I tended to steer the car a bit to the left when passing trucks and trailers. I got pretty good at the transition on and off BlueCruise for lane changes, though I did let go of the steering wheel a little early sometimes. Curves are not handled as smoothly as I would like, and the car tended to take them a little wide, but not crossing lane-lines. While I got pretty comfortable with it, my wife was more skeptical and kept telling me to put my hands on the wheel.
Charging
I was worried about using Plug and Charge based on the many threads of complaints. It turned out to work as designed. On the first day, we stopped at 4 different EA charging locations. I had to wait for a working charger at one of them, but when I plugged in, it recognized the car and started charging. I was a bit disappointed that every time the charging speed seemed to settle in the 75-85 kWh range, so it took a bit longer to charge than anticipated. At one EA charger, after plugging in, it started charging but showed an error on the screen that it was not connected to the car. I wasn't sure until the next day, but we did get charged on our Ford Pass account for the 25 kWh of charging.
As others have mentioned, the time spent at charging stations can be very interesting. We met many friendly people from the EV-driving community and chatted about our cars. At our first EA stop, we met a Lucid employee bringing a Lucid Air to a testing facility in Arizona. At the next EA stop there was a Porche Taycan and a brand-new Audi e-Tron, both being charged for the first time at a public charger. At a stop later that day there was a Mercedes EQS sharing a charger with me. (We each plugged in one of the CCS cables. He charged first, while I had dinner, then I went back, disconnected, reconnected, and charged mine.) It was also his first charging experience. I used two Chargepoint locations along the way when there was no EA nearby. Only one hotel of our three hotels had charging available, which was a level 2 charger, and filled my battery for free overnight.
Ford Sync Navigation and FordPass App
As many others have posted, the built-in navigation was not great. I guess we were lucky that on the first day of the trip, it automatically selected the same charging stops I had planned in advance, so I was able to use it to get us there according to the schedule. The second day, I was disappointed that the built-in nav took us out of the way for a charging stop (which was free, but very slow). I knew there was a better place around 27 miles further, right by the highway, so we moved on after a brief (10-minute) charge. On the return trip, we had to employ nav apps on our phones to get us home because the built-in nav was routing us via I-40 which adds over 4 hours to the drive. Beyond that, it would be nice if it was easier to view the entire planned route and make adjustments to the overall route or individual stops, but I could not find a way to do those things besides just passing a turn or exit and waiting for the nav to recalculate. Oddly, if I wanted to bypass a charging stop added by the built-in nav, it would keep trying to get me to return to it even once it was well behind me rather than finding another charging station along the route. I ended up cancelling the route a number of times and then starting it over with the same destination in order to force a recalculation of the route. I did like that there was an override button so that a passenger can use the screen to make these changes while I was driving. My other cars lock those buttons when the car is moving.
I did not try planning the route in FordPass but used it primarily for PaaK and to occasionally track charging. The alerts from the app were really quite annoying and the charge-time estimates were way off (by hours or days) because they calculate based on the rate of charge in the first few seconds after connecting rather than when the rate of charge stabilizes. Also, there were just too many alerts and you have to open each one in the app in order to mark them read or delete them.
Summary
The overall experience was very good. The car was comfortable, reliable, and fun to drive. The sound quality on the radio was excellent. My family used the WiFi hotspot and consumed most of the free trial data. We got fun reactions when people saw us, especially at charging stations, and we got to see some other cool EVs too! The crazy thing is that we did not see another Mach E the entire trip. In fact, I’ve only seen one other Mach E in the six weeks since I brought mine home. I did not spend much time looking at efficiency, so I’m not posting any of those details here. I’ll just say that I used approximately 350 kWh of the 500 kWh credit from Ford on EA, plus charged at three non-EA chargers along the way.
Sponsored
. One of these days I'll pay a visit to the local Lucid Store in Scottsdale for a better look.
