A Stangish Year with Myles

[Richard in Charlotte]

As of July 5th, I have had my 2025 Mustang Mach E Premium extended range RWD for a year. The short story is that it has been a wonderful year and this is a wonderfully enjoyable car.

Now for the long story. (I have some stats near the end if you want to skip the story)

First of all, this car is fun. No, it is not a McLaren. But it is a very attractive car and it is quicker than anything I have ever owned. It is the first car I’ve owned that people notice. We were driving down the main street in Sunset Beach, NC. I stopped to let a family cross the road to get from the beach to their cottage. They get half-way across and I notice the mom is staring at my car. They all get across and she looks at me and gives me this ‘rev it up’ kind of motion with her hand. So, I punched it and we took off. The smile on her face was priceless. I’ve just never owned a car where this kind of encounter would have ever happened.

Any loved car deserves a name. My entire family loves cars and we give them names. For example: My wife’s metallic white RAV4 hybrid is Elsa (from Frozen). My son-in-law’s Bronco is Benny. I needed a name and just could not come up with one that I really liked. A co-worker one day made the never ever heard remark “but it’s not a mustang”. And I replied, “you have to admit, it is stang-‘ish’”. Right then it occurred to me that this would be a great vanity plate for the car. “Stangish”. I was wondering if anyone else had used it so I googled ‘Stangish’ and the first thing returned was “Myles Standish”. So, I decided to name my car “Myles Stangish”. My wife and I refer to it as ‘Myles’. I got the STANGISH plate a few weeks later from the DMV and people have been smiling at it ever since.

I found Myles on July 4th 2025 at a local Ford dealer and bought it the next day. It was the sales person’s first day working for that dealership and he had never ever sold an electric car before. But, he was a good salesperson and pleasant to deal with. So we worked through the deal and I taught him what I had learned about the car while doing my research.

I usually drive cars for at least 200,000 miles and I plan to do so with this one. So, I was planning on buying the car rather than leasing. But I effectively got an extra $5000 off the price by leasing, so I have a two-year lease. I plan to buy it at the end of the lease.

I did buy an extended warranty. I usually don’t, but since this was totally new territory for me, I decided to do it. I did not buy it from the dealership. The Finance guy quoted me $3000 and I just had to laugh. I bought it from Grainger Ford online for less than half of that. And mine covers 5 years and 150,000 miles.

My wife and I did look at other cars before buying the Mach E. But when we test drove this car, we immediately fell in love with it. We just loved the way it drove. It rode nice. It was very quiet. It was definitely faster than any car I’d ever owned. The seats were comfortable. The cooled seats worked great. The B&O sound system was nice. I thought the displays were easy to read and easy to use. I didn’t have to look at the middle of the dashboard to see how fast I was going. In short, it drove like a really nice car that happened to be electric. Some of the other cars we tested drove like electric golf carts. Ford was a ‘coach builder’ learning how to do tech. Other brands were tech companies learning to make cars. Some cars had absolutely no feel in the steering and the brakes. And their interiors often looked cheap. To us, the Mach E just seemed right.

We’ve had frustrations with technology in other cars. We have had two fully loaded RAV4 Hybrids. My phone often just does not connect to the cars. They like iPhones better, but they are still problematic. But both my wife’s iPhone and my Android phone connect to the Mach E just fine.

Toyota also does stupid stuff like not remembering settings per driver (or at all). Brake hold has to be turned on every time you start the car. Following distance has to be set every time you use cruise control. Ford got this car right. It remembers all of our settings per driver. And the technology just works right. An example: I love one pedal driving. My wife does not. When I start the car, I have one pedal driving. When she starts it, she does not. This is how things should work.

The result of this is that our Mach E gets driven a lot. The Hybrid RAV4 that my wife drives is now only driven by her to work and back. Any other trip happens in the Mach E. Our fully loaded RAV4 Limited Hybrid is a nice car. And it does drive well. But almost everything about the Mach E just trounces it.

My work is 30 miles from home. I put 72.6 miles on this car every workday. And it is almost all interstate highway. I pay for and use BlueCruise and I absolutely love it. My car drives on the interstate and I supervise. After a long drive, I'm not nearly as tired as I used to get. With all of my driving to work and a few road trips I’ve racked up over 30,000 miles in this first year of ownership.

One of my road trips with the car was an 8 day, 2700 mile trip from Charlotte, NC through the upper peninsula in Michigan to St. Louis and then back to Charlotte. While it would be nice if the car DC charged faster, I haven’t really found it to be a problem. We were driving a lot of miles each day and we averaged a little over one hour a day waiting for the car to charge. If we could have found hotels with overnight charging available, that would have been at most 30 minutes a day. Hotels need to step up.

For charging at home, I bought an Emporia Pro charger and had it wired into my panel. My home service is 200 amps. When the house was built, it was a Duke Energy all electric home. At this point, the heat, stove and water heater are all moved to gas so I have plenty of extra capacity in the panel. I put in a 60 amp breaker, so I can charge at the full 48 amps. I also hooked in the Vue3 energy monitor that came with the charger and am watching the energy usage on the full panel, the charger and a few select appliances. The charger works perfectly. I also like the Vue3.

I charge the car daily. I plug it in at the end of the day and unplug when I head to work. I mostly charge to 70%. After 70 miles of driving, it is usually in the range of 40 to 45% remaining charge depending on the temperature that time of the year. It usually takes it 2 to 2.5 hours to charge each day. But, who cares! I'm sleeping! I don’t use DC fast charging unless I am on a road trip.

The car has been very reliable. Early on, I think it just needed some modules updated. That took care of some BlueCruise problems I was having initially. After the updates, everything worked great.

My car was manufactured in February 2025, so it was around 5 months old when I bought it. I have been getting over-the-air updates from time to time and I am pleased. Early this year an update really cleaned up the animation on the instrument panel. I’m pretty sure when I bought the car, the heated/cooled seats control let you pick either heating or cooling. They added an ‘Automatic’ setting. Using that setting has worked well for me. Getting new features over the air is great.

I have added things to the car. I installed a FitCamX dashcam. The front camera comes in a bezel that replaces the bezel around the rearview mirror. I bought a kit that includes a rear camera. I was able to wire everything neatly into the car. It looks very professional. And the camera works well. I will say though, don’t use the memory card they ship with the kit. It writes too slow and you end up with gaps in the video. A quality high speed card fixes that.

I added the EV Vida handsfree liftgate module. It works better than the one that came from teh factory in our RAV4.

Note, if you want to run wires through the rubber tubing in the liftgate hinge area so they are hidden, it is not at all easy. But it can be done if you are patient.

I also bought the 'Modern Spare' kit for the car. We were taking a 2700 mile road trip and I wanted a spare tire.

I purchased a Lectron Level 1/ Level 2 portable charger to carry on the road. It does not get much use.

The car came with the Ford NACS adapter for high-speed charging. I bought a second Lectron Level 1 / Level 2 NACS adapter to use if I charge at someone’s house that has a Tesla charger.

I bought a OBDLink MX+ OBD2 Bluetooth Scanner and I use it for getting data from the car. I use Forscan Lite on my Android phone. When I first bought the car, Ford had just changed the OBD port behavior and nothing could read the car. Near the end of last year, I was finally able to get data from it using Forscan Lite.

The car is quite spoiled. It gets a good cleaning at least every other week. With the water restrictions we currently have in Charlotte NC, I have had to resort to using rinseless wash.

I have had my last 3 cars ceramic coated and I think it is very worthwhile. I just find it so much easier to keep a car clean if it has a ceramic coating. Just the 3 or 4 times a year I don’t have to wax my cars makes it very much worth the expense. With this car, I went further and had the front of the car covered in paint protection film. The entire front of the Mach E is paint. Remember, almost all of my driving is on the highway. Every car I have owned ended up with paint chips missing on the front. The PPF is working. I have no marks in the paint on the front of the car. Would I do it again? I’m not sure. Coleton on the ‘Out of Spec Detailing’ Youtube channel has a good video where he basically discourages the average person from doing it. And now having done it, I will say that I agree with him.

What do I really like about the car?

• The Looks
• How it Drives
• How it rides
• Interior comfort
• Interior room
• How cheap it is to operate
• The range
• How fast it accelerates
• Braking is good
• It is fun
• BlueCruise works very well
• Collision Avoidance technology works well
• Phone integration works well
• How well Carplay and Android Auto work
• Driver profiles work well.
• Sound quality of the B&O stereo is great
• Ability to schedule charging window
• Ability to schedule departure times
• Ability to turn on climate control remotely
• It has an instrument display in front of the driver
• What’s a gas station?
• What’s an oil change?
• Brakes last a really long time.

What could use improvement

• I wish I could get more data out of the car.
• Why can’t I see the charging curve in a chart
• Why can’t I see data from every charging session in the car or on the Ford web site? It is only held in the Ford app on your phone and not for very long. And if you reinstall the app, the data is gone.
• Why can’t I see the car’s entire service history in the car? Even on the Ford web site, you don’t see all of the details of a service visit.
• If it could DC fast charge faster, that would be nice. With a low state of charge and a preconditioned battery I think I have seen it get to 160 kWh. But it never stays high long. About halfway through the charge it is below 100 kWh and towards the end it is maybe 60 kWh. Here is a pretty typical curve

• Every electric car should have ‘pet mode’.
• Every car should at the very least have a place to store an optional spare tire and a tire changing kit.
• Every electric car should have an option to manually turn on or off preconditioning
• I’d love to see BlueCruise catch up with Tesla full self driving. I don’t expect that to happen with this car.
• The frunk is small. But a small one is better than none. I use it all the time to store charging accessories.
• The Ford phone app can be buggy. Recently it has been stopping and I’ve had to restart it. I assume a future update will address this. I don't change charging settings and departure settings using the app. I always do it in the car.

And now, some numbers.

I log all of my charges.

(This car is RWD, so only one motor)

Total miles on Odometer: 30,754

Number of Charging Sessions: 383

Total kWh added: 9190

Average miles/kWh: 3.35

Electricity Expenses: $1491.63

Cents/Mile (just electricity): 4.85

Cents/Mile with Maintenance: 6.90

My RAV4 Hybrid Cents/Mile (just gas, 40 MPG): 7.5

RAV4 Cents/Mile with Maintenance: 11.53 (almost double the Mach E)

Average electricity cost in cents/kWh: 16.23 (home is about 11 cents)

And now, the battery

I have the extended range battery. It originally had a usable capacity of 88 kWh

Current Battery State of Health Reads: 98.5%

Mine has basically gone down about a half a percent every 6 months. The curve should flatten out. One person has a 2022 with 350,000 miles on it and he has lost 8 percent.

The guess-o-meter reading at full charge has been as high as 324 miles. Now it is reading 317 miles.

I just did a calibration and at the end of the charging session the kWh to empty was 86.82.

I’m pleased with how the battery is holding up so far.

How temperature affects efficiency

Here are some average mi/kWh numbers by month (Charlotte, NC):

Oct: 3.68 mi/kWh

Nov: 3.36 mi/kWh

Dec: 2.90 mi/kWh

Jan: 3.00 mi/kWh

Feb: 2.98 mi/kWh

Mar: 3.32 mi/kWh

Apr: 3.07 mi/kWh (includes our trip through Michigan with 20 deg F temperatures)

May: 3.52 mi/kWh

Jun 3.55 mi/kWh

If you are considering a Mach E

The Mach E Premium trim is a very nice car. It is not perfect. A new one is not cheap. But there is a whole lot to like about the car. I have never seen a car that wasn’t a compromise in some way. Other cars may have more tech. But I have found that the tech on this car actually works. That is a big deal. I see quite a few videos showing EVs with tech that is absolutely infuriating. A Polestar 4 review showed a touch steering wheel that didn't sense your hands at many places on the wheel. The driver got locked out of assisted driving for not having his hands on the wheel when he did. The driver had to stop, turn off the car and restart it to get driver assistance back. The Mach E does not do this kind of stuff. Generally, when it nags me, I deserved it. Yes, I have to wiggle the wheel occasionally if I’m using lane centering on a back road. But, I don’t think I’ve ever had it disable it completely because it thought I wasn’t paying attention.

A good friend of mine has a car that is hyper sensitive about whether he is watching the road. The display will chime some kind of alert (like the GPS recalculating the route). He looks over at the center display to see what it was, and then the car immediately complains that he isn’t watching the road. Again, the Mach E does not do this kind of stuff. If it nags me about not watching the road, I deserved it. I was looking away too long. It is tuned very well. I think it makes me a better driver.

BlueCruise is wonderful and I use it every day. On our 2700 mile road trip, BlueCruise probably drove two thirds of the miles. On most controlled access highways the car will drive itself. You don’t have to have your hands on the wheel. You do have to pay attention though. If someone went on a bender the day before they painted the lines on a road, it really can mess with BlueCruise.

There were a series of bridges on 485 in South Charlotte that were horrible. The lines on the bridge were not at all aligned with those on the road. I’m not talking ‘a little off’. They were way off. The car would move over half a lane sometimes on the bridge. I just had to grab the wheel when I got to those places. Then they took the lines off the bridges completely before they repainted them. BlueCruise didn’t like that either. It would sometimes disable itself in that situation. Then they got the lines painted correctly, and there has been no problem since. These kinds of problems are very rare in my experience. Most of the time, BlueCruise works very well. I can’t imagine not having something like it on any future car I buy.

Here is an example of why I love BlueCruise. I almost never change lanes unassisted now. I hit the turn signal. The car looks beside me and when the lane is open, it moves over (yes, I still look too). No more changing lanes into someone because I missed seeing them in my blind spot. The car has eyes all around. It is fabulous.

I saw a video on a Porsche Macan EV. I think the person owned it 3 years and it had never received an over-the-air update. The car can do it. But they never received one. My Mach E periodically gets over the air updates. It is great. (To be fair: Some owners of older Mach E’s say they don’t get updates).

I think Ford did a great job with this car. And they keep making it better for the most part. I really do love this car and I think it would make a great car for most people. If you are travelling long distances on the interstate every day, you may want to look at something that charges faster. But for a typical daily driver, this car is fabulous. Occasional long road trips are very doable and I find them fun. With the big battery, this thing has some range. I can make a three hour, 200 mile drive to the beach and still have about 30% of a charge left.

To Ford

Thank you for making such a great car. I absolutely love mine. I do wish you would market this car harder. Everyone I've met who has a Mach E really likes it.

I wish you the best with your new UEV platform. I can’t wait to see the new pickup you will release in 2027.

When the time comes for me to buy a new vehicle, it will be a battery electric vehicle. And I will look at what Ford is offering. But I must say that I do wonder how many future owners you might be passing up because you don’t really seem to be promoting what is a great car right now.

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